284: Chapter 284 The soul is in disarray

At this moment, the Soul-Taming Daoist's Nascent Soul was fleeing at extreme speed away from that hellish explosion area.

Without the burden of the Physical Body, the Nascent Soul's perception became even sharper.

He could "see" that three mushroom clouds hundreds of kilometers behind him had merged into one, dyeing the entire skyline dark red.

He could "hear" the muffled sound of the shockwave propagating through the atmosphere, like someone beating a huge drum in the distance.

Fear.

He hadn't felt this kind of emotion in many years.

When was the last time he felt fear?

It was probably a hundred years ago in the Upper Realm, when he was fighting those three people in the Void Realm fissure.

In that battle, four Soul Transformation Stage Cultivators plotted against each other, ambushed each other, and detonated each other's Magic Treasures, fighting until all four of them were heavily injured and fell into different Small Worlds.

That was a clash with opponents of the same level.

Losing was not shameful.

But what about now?

He had actually lost to a group of Mortals.

A group of ants that couldn't even be considered to be in the Qi Refinement Stage.

A Nascent Soul Cultivator — the most humiliating defeat in history.

But staying alive was more important than Face.

As long as the Nascent Soul was still around, everything could start over.

Find a suitable Physical Body for Possession, spend decades recovering his cultivation, refine Puppets again, and accumulate strength once more — —

His Divine Sense suddenly caught movement behind him.

Two iron boxes.

It was those iron boxes from before again.

They were originally flying toward the original position of his Physical Body — when his Nascent Soul underwent Soul Emergence, he had scanned with his Divine Sense, and those two things were falling toward the direction of the protective shield.

But now their trajectory had changed.

They turned.

They drew an arc in mid-air, reversed direction, and flew toward him.

The Soul-Taming Daoist's Nascent Soul paused for a split second in mid-air.

These ants' iron boxes — could change direction?

And their speed was much faster than his.

A nearly distorted expression appeared on the Face of the Soul-Taming Daoist's Nascent Soul — that was pure, unadulterated fear.

He accelerated crazily.

The remaining Qi in the Nascent Soul was squeezed to the limit, and the golden light drew a long trail in high-speed flight, like a falling meteor.

But the distance was still shortening.

He could perceive that those two things were getting closer and closer.

Getting closer every second.

He couldn't run away.

The Soul-Taming Daoist's Nascent Soul suddenly turned in mid-air and dive-bombed toward the ground.

If those things exploded at high altitude like before, he would burrow underground and use hundreds of meters thick rock layers as a shield — but it was already too late.

The fourth pangu nuclear bomb exploded four kilometers behind him.

The Nascent Soul had no protection from a Physical Body, no protective shield, and no barriers of any kind.

A pure fusion explosion of 75 million tons of TNT equivalent exploded four kilometers away.

The expansion speed of the fireball was faster than his flight speed.

The light arrived first.

A streak of white light chased up from behind, piercing through his golden Nascent Soul light and illuminating everything into pure white.

Then came the heat.

The surface of the Nascent Soul began to crack in the high temperature.

The golden light bubbled, peeled off, and shattered like paint burned by fire.

The Nascent Soul shrieked.

That was a scream on the Soul level, without sound, but if there was any Cultivator within a radius of a thousand miles, they would feel that throbbing from the depths of the Soul.

The shockwave arrived.

The Nascent Soul was swept up by the shockwave, like a fallen leaf falling into a hurricane, rolling, tearing, and squeezing.

He desperately condensed the remaining Qi in the shockwave, trying to maintain the integrity of the Nascent Soul — —

A crack appeared on the Nascent Soul.

From the forehead to the chin, a clear crack.

Golden light overflowed from the crack, like a leaking container.

Qi was draining away.

The Nascent Soul was shattering.

No — —

The Soul-Taming Daoist tried all his strength to mend that crack.

Several hundred years of cultivation.

Several hundred years of painstaking effort.

From Qi Refining to Foundation Establishment, from Foundation Establishment to Golden Core, from Golden Core to Nascent Soul, from Nascent Soul to Soul Transformation — — then a great battle dropped him back to Nascent Soul, and it took another hundred years to climb back to the Nascent Soul Middle Stage.

Several hundred years.

It couldn't just vanish like this.

The crack was expanding.

The second, third, fourth — —

The surface of the Nascent Soul was covered with cracks, and golden light gushed out from every crack, like a light bulb about to shatter.

The fifth pangu nuclear bomb arrived.

It detonated at the edge of the fourth one's explosion, two fireballs overlapping together, energy superimposing, temperature superimposing, shockwaves superimposing.

The Soul-Taming Daoist's Nascent Soul was submerged in the white light in that instant.

The golden light struggled in the white light for less than a second.

Then it shattered.

The Nascent Soul split into two halves from the middle, and the two halves each shattered into countless fragments. The fragments evaporated in the high temperature, turning into invisible Qi particles, dissipating in the nuclear explosion's fireball.

Not even slag was left.

Soul Flying Away and Spirit Scattering.

A Nascent Soul Cultivator who had lived for hundreds of years, in this gray world, had the traces of his existence completely erased by five weapons manufactured by Mortals.

In the backup command post, no one spoke.

Everyone was waiting for a result.

One minute.

The backup camera of the high-altitude drone switched successfully, and the picture came back.

The hit area.

The mushroom cloud still hung in the sky, the gray pillar at the bottom slowly dispersing, and the cloud group at the top blown into a flat shape by high-altitude airflow, like an inverted giant umbrella.

"Full-band scan." Su Mingyuan's voice was half a tone lower than usual.

The technician began to operate.

Infrared scan — no high-energy signals.

Electromagnetic spectrum scan — background radiation normal, no abnormal fluctuations.

Biological signal detection — zero.

Energy spectrum analysis — Tao Zhe scanned synchronously from the Yaowu World side for more than ten seconds, and then said a sentence.

"We won."

"What about that moving signal? The thirty-centimeter one?" Su Mingyuan asked.

"Disappeared." Tao Zhe's voice rarely carried a trace of trembling, "The coverage of the fourth and fifth ones completely enveloped its last known position. From the moment the fourth one hit, the signal source itself ceased to exist."

Su Mingyuan didn't speak immediately.

He looked at the black crater on the screen for about ten seconds.

"Continue monitoring. Uninterrupted full-band scan, lasting twenty-four hours. If no abnormal signals appear within twenty-four hours — —"

He paused for a moment.

"Then he is truly dead."

Zhang Wei stood aside and let out a long breath.

Zhang Dabiao sat in the corner, leaning his body back against the chair back, and closed his eyes.

There were no cheers, no high-fives, and no celebratory actions in the command post.

Everyone was too tired.

And no one could be sure whether this matter was truly over — at least within twenty-four hours, no one dared to be sure.

Su Mingyuan stood up, walked to the door, and pushed open the iron door.

The wind outside poured in, icy cold, carrying a charred smell.

On the distant skyline, in the northeast direction, a dark red halo could be seen hanging above the horizon, which were the embers left by the five pangu nuclear bombs.

The outline of the mushroom cloud was already blurred, merging with the gray canopy of heaven, leaving only a bit of dark red light at the bottom that had not yet dispersed.

Su Mingyuan stood at the doorway and exhaled a puff of white breath.

"Cultivators are actually real." He muttered, his voice torn intermittently by the wind, "Then what about longevity... is that real too?"