383: Chapter 383 Remote Clash

Zhou Wannian's punch, carrying the absolute mass of the Great Perfection Space Law, forcibly shattered the disguised space of the Ascension Gate and followed the clues to seize the transparent fishing line connecting to a higher dimension.

The terrifying giant monster, covered in dark-gold scales and sprouting countless tentacles, was originally being dragged down roughly along the silk thread. But at the very instant it was about to penetrate the dimensional rift and fall into the Qingping Realm, a will far more massive, profound, and indescribable than itself suddenly severed its connection with the thread.

The dark-gold giant monster let out a desperate roar in mid-air, its massive body like a piece of fine porcelain struck by a heavy hammer, instantly disintegrating under the friction of the dimensional barrier. Those indestructible scales turned into golden powder that filled the sky, and its tentacles broke into segments of lifeless, rotten meat, burning away under the sweep of the astral winds.

This seemingly world-destroying giant monster was not the true body of the Extraterrestrial Angler at all. At most, it was merely a glove worn by the Angler to keep its hand away from the muddy water.

Now, the glove was torn.

The fishing line was firmly gripped in the hands of a prey within a low-dimensional mud pit.

That high-and-mighty existence beyond the heavens finally tore off all its disguises, abandoning those clumsy tricks of boiling a frog in lukewarm water. It intended to lean down personally to see exactly what kind of thing had dirtied its fish pond.

"Screeech—"

An indescribable tearing sound boomed deep within the eardrums of every living being in the Qingping Realm. This sound was not like thunder, but more like a pair of invisible giant hands forcefully tearing a billion bolts of the toughest silk in half at the same time.

The originally azure, lofty sky of the Qingping Realm completely split open at this moment.

It wasn't just a single crack; the entire canopy of heaven was like a layer of fragile wall paint, peeling and curling away frantically from the center in all directions. The sunlight vanished, and the clouds disappeared.

Replacing this familiar sky was a bizarre starry sky that absolutely did not belong to this dimension.

This starry sky had no profound, charming darkness, nor any brilliant, soft rivers of stars. Its base color was a nauseating, grayish decay, like stagnant water that had been left for countless eons and was covered in mold.

The stars suspended against that grayish background were not spheres, but sharp polyhedrons emitting a cold, metallic luster. These polyhedral stars did not follow any known galactic trajectories; they were arranged in rigid, mechanical, and perfectly symmetrical geometric matrices.

The light projected from these stars held not a hint of warmth. When that light fell upon one's skin, it felt like countless fine steel needles quenched in ice water, stabbing ruthlessly into the pores and freezing everything all the way to the bone marrow along the blood vessels.

The wind stopped.

The clouds dispersed.

The entire Qingping Realm fell into a suffocating stagnation.

Next, deep within that hair-raisingly strange starry sky, a face slowly revealed itself, pressing down toward the shattered canopy of the Qingping Realm.

It was a face so massive that it simply could not be calculated with numbers. It occupied the entirety of everyone's field of vision, even exceeding the limits of what the eye could see.

On this face, there was no bridge of a nose like rising mountains, no lips, and no brow ridges. It was just a vast, smooth, deathly silent plain, pale enough to drive one mad.

Right in the center of this featureless, pale plain...

Slowly...

A rift split open.

A vertical pupil opened.

The pupil of that vertical eye was a deathly gray color. Inside the iris, billions of streams of code representing high-dimensional truths and absolute logic poured and swirled frantically like a waterfall. There was no anger in this eye, no pity, and no arrogance of looking down upon all living things.

It held only a kind of absolute indifference. It was like a human holding a magnifying glass, observing a nest of ants in a petri dish that were biting each other due to mutation.

With the slow pressure of this face and this vertical pupil...

The Qingping Realm ushered in a world-ending disaster in the truest sense.

This was no longer a clash of Spells between Cultivators, nor the rampage of mutated Yao Beasts. This was the purest, most unreasonable physical crushing of low-dimensional space by high-dimensional mass.

"Crack... crack crack..."

Under this invisible pressure, the continuous mountain ranges around the Qingyun Valley did not explode. Those thousand-fathom-high peaks were like tofu placed in a millstone; starting from the summits, they silently turned into fine dust, collapsing outward in all directions.

The rivers at the foot of the mountains evaporated in an instant, the riverbeds drying and cracking to reveal the bleached white fish bones beneath. The soil on the surface lost the constraints of gravity, drifting into mid-air in large chunks, only to be annihilated into nothingness under the illumination of that cold starlight.

"Wooo—"

A high-pitched, shrill wail that threatened to tear one's Divine Soul apart echoed between heaven and earth.

This sound came from deep underground and from the vibrations in the air. It was the Heavenly Dao Laws of the Qingping Realm letting out a mournful cry.

The Five Elements Laws and the Yin and Yang order that constituted the operation of this Major Thousand World began to break and collapse on a large scale under the gaze of that vertical pupil. The Heavenly Dao's self-repair capability was as fragile as using spider silk to mend a bursting dam in the face of such dimensional crushing.

The spatial barriers were covered in dense black cracks, and the chaotic Void Realm storms poured in through these fissures, grinding any matter they touched into powder.

On the ruins of the Ascension Platform.

Sect Master Tianshuzi and those old monsters who were lucky enough to survive the previous shockwave were slumped on the ground like piles of mud.

They did not scream, nor did they run.

Their eyes were wide open, and black blood continuously seeped from the corners of their eyes, nostrils, and mouths.

When facing enemies at the Nascent Soul Stage or Soul Transformation Stage, they would be angry, they would fight for their lives, and they would feel deep despair when they couldn't win. Because they could understand that power; they knew how they lost.

But at this moment.

Facing this pale face that crushed the entire sky, facing that giant vertical pupil emitting streams of high-dimensional code.

The logical thinking in the brains of these old monsters, who had called the shots in the Qingping Realm for their entire lives, had completely short-circuited.

This was a mighty power that completely exceeded their cognitive dimensions. It was like characters on a piece of paper suddenly seeing the artist holding an eraser, prepared to wipe them out.

Fear needs to be built on the foundation of cognition. When a power is so great that even the qualification to understand it is stripped away, biological instinct only leaves the mind in a state of shutdown.

They didn't even have the right to feel despair.

They could only lie quietly on the collapsing jade slabs like bleeding statues, waiting for their fate of being erased.

Shitou knelt behind Zhou Wannian. The youth buried his head tightly between his knees and covered his ears with his hands, trying to block out that mournful cry of the Heavenly Dao that pierced the Soul. The green Origin of Heaven-Opening within him, upon sensing this high-dimensional pressure, was like encountering a natural enemy; it curled up tightly in the deepest part of his heart, not daring to emit even a sliver of light.

Amidst this apocalyptic scene of heaven and earth collapsing and all things returning to nothingness.

Zhou Wannian still stood steadily in place.

His washed-out green cotton robe didn't even have a corner flutter in the frantic Void Realm storm. Within a three-foot radius around him, there seemed to exist an absolutely static Universe, isolating all the external collapse, wailing, and pressure.

The giant vertical pupil above the firmament stopped its downward pressure.

Its death-gray pupil turned slightly, withdrawing all its attention from this collapsing, broken world and locking it completely and firmly onto Zhou Wannian.

In its high-dimensional calculation model, everything in this low-dimensional world could be erased at will, except for this individual in the green robe, who was an unanalyzable black hole.

"Buzz—"

A grayish-white light pillar as thick as a water vat shot straight out from that vertical pupil, instantly crossing the spatial distance and enveloping Zhou Wannian within it.

This light pillar carried no destructive temperature or impact force.

It was a "gaze" composed purely of high-dimensional logic code and analysis programs.

The vertical pupil attempted to use this gaze to forcibly penetrate Zhou Wannian's Physical Body defenses, analyze his energy composition, read his past Karma, and find the source code of this "abnormal variable."

The grayish-white streams of code flowed over Zhou Wannian's body surface, trying to find even the slightest crack to drill into.

At the instant this high-dimensional gaze touched the edge of Zhou Wannian's Divine Soul.

Deep within Zhou Wannian's profound and boundless Divine Soul.

Ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Law chains, emitting an ancient, vast, and flawless aura, lay quietly across the void. These chains were interwoven from the Great Perfection Five Elements Law, each link connected end-to-end to form an impregnable, absolute closed loop, firmly sealing his inner universe which was capable of returning endless dimensions to Chaos.

The grayish-white high-dimensional code gaze, like greedy little snakes, struck the outermost Law chain.

There was no intense clash.

Nor was there any earth-shattering roar.

When the analytical code representing the highest crystallization of the Extraterrestrial Angler's wisdom touched the sealing chains.

It was like a drop of water falling onto a red-hot iron plate.

"Sizzle."

The moment the grayish-white code stream touched the chain, it instantly turned into a mass of disorganized, invalid gibberish before completely dissipating.

The pupil of the vertical eye suddenly contracted.

It did not believe there was matter it could not analyze. The grayish-white light pillar enveloping Zhou Wannian suddenly doubled in thickness, and the speed of the code flow within the pillar increased to the limit, producing an ear-grating friction sound. It mobilized all its computing power, frantically battering the Seal at the edge of Zhou Wannian's Divine Soul.

Again and again.

Layer upon layer.

However, those ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Law chains were like a Wall of Sighs standing at the end of the long river of time. No matter how this high-dimensional gaze washed over or tried to penetrate them, the chains didn't even emit a single tremor, let alone have any valid data analyzed from them.

In the vertical eye's perception, the existence of this green-robed man was like a perfect logical infinite loop. No matter what command it input, the feedback received was always the void representing no solution.

On that massive face in the sky, although there were no features, the starlight of the entire strange starry sky flickered frantically at this moment, revealing a frenzy born of the unknown.

The grayish-white light pillar gradually retracted.

The analysis had failed.

Zhou Wannian stood quietly in place, allowing that grayish-white light pillar to scan back and forth over him.

He looked at the giant vertical pupil in the sky, whose corner was twitching slightly due to computing overload.

On that handsome and easygoing face, there wasn't the slightest bit of self-satisfaction for having blocked the high-dimensional analysis, only a sense of boredom after watching a dull magic trick for a long time.

Zhou Wannian turned his head and looked around.

On the ruins of the Ascension Platform, even the better white jade slabs had turned to powder. He walked to a relatively intact broken stone pillar, lifted the back hem of his green robe, and sat down steadily.

He crossed his right leg over his left, leaned back slightly, and found the most comfortable posture.

Then.

Zhou Wannian reached his right hand into his wide left sleeve.

His fingers fumbled inside the cuff for a moment and touched a hard-skinned, cold fruit. This was something he had picked from an unknown wild fruit tree outside the city when he left Chunyu City with Shitou this morning.

He pulled out this green-skinned wild fruit.

He tossed it casually in his hand a couple of times.

Then, right in front of that massive face and that angry vertical eye in the firmament.

Zhou Wannian opened his mouth and bit down into the green-skinned wild fruit without any hesitation.

"Crunch."

A crisp biting sound.

Against the apocalyptic backdrop of collapsing space and the Heavenly Dao's mournful wail, this sound seemed extremely abrupt.

The fruit's juice was not abundant, and it even had a strong, sour, and astringent taste. Yet Zhou Wannian chewed it slowly and methodically, as if he were savoring some rare delicacy.

While chewing the sour fruit pulp in his mouth, he slightly raised his chin.

His eyes, as deep as an ancient well, pierced through that strange starry sky and looked directly into that giant vertical pupil emitting cold fire.

Zhou Wannian swallowed the fruit pulp and casually wiped away a trace of juice from the corner of his mouth with his thumb.

He looked at that eye.

His tone was still that same lazy and steady manner as if he were ordering a waiter to serve tea in an inn.

"Have you seen enough?"

Zhou Wannian's voice wasn't loud, yet it clearly drowned out the roar of the entire Qingping Realm's collapse, echoing directly deep within the logic core of that high-dimensional existence.

He sat on the broken stone pillar, holding the remaining half of the green-skinned wild fruit in his hand.

A smile slowly curled at the corners of his mouth, one that carried a bit of casualness yet also revealed absolute arrogance.

"Seen enough."

"Then prepare for a beating."}],