393: Chapter 393 Abandoned World as Bricks

Stepping through the bone city gates, which were dilapidated and washed by blood, the dim and oppressive sight of the Inner City fully revealed itself before Zhou Wannian's eyes.

The air here was as thick as a pot of burnt glue; with every breath, one could feel a sour, rotting stench crawling down the windpipe. The sky was smothered by a thick, impenetrable dark purple haze, with no starlight, sun, or moon. Only the massive buildings floating in mid-air emitted eerie lights of deathly white or ghostly green, barely illuminating the road beneath his feet.

The Inner City of the Immortal-Demon Great World was vast beyond measure.

Twisted palaces rose from the ground; some were like inverted sharp swords piercing the firmament, while others resembled piles of giant skulls stacked together. The luxury favored by the Immortals, using white jade and colored glass, was crudely patched together with the gloom favored by the Demons, who loved obsidian and white bones. To the east lay a Jade Pool Pavilion shrouded in Immortal Qi, while directly adjacent to the west was a Demonic Path blood pool bubbling with venom.

With his hands behind his back, Zhou Wannian stepped onto the main street of the Inner City in his spotless green cloth shoes, his gait steady.

"Tap."

The sole of his cloth shoe made a slight sound as it contacted the street surface.

The sound reached Zhou Wannian's ears, causing his footsteps to come to a sudden halt.

This sound was wrong.

Ordinary bluestone slabs sounded crisp when stepped on; even the Ten Thousand Bone Long Staircase of the outer gate produced a dry sound of bone friction.

But the sound of stepping on this wide, smooth street was like stepping on a sealed leather bag stuffed with living things—dull, oppressive, and carrying a somewhat slimy vibration.

Zhou Wannian lowered his head, his eyes as deep as an ancient well falling upon the road surface.

The main street was a hundred zhang wide, extending into the layers of palace complexes at the edge of his vision. The ground was covered with dark gray floor tiles, three feet square and perfectly fitted together. The surfaces of these tiles were polished to a mirror-like shine, but looking closely, one could see that the dark gray material was filled with countless chaotic textures as fine as hair.

There were dark red flocculent substances, ghostly blue spots, and faint glimmers similar to gold leaf. These colors were tangled together in the gray base without order, like a pot of paint that had been violently stirred and then forcibly solidified.

Zhou Wannian did not bend over; he simply sent a thread of Divine Sense through the cloth shoe on his foot, gently probing into the dark gray floor tile.

The moment of contact.

There was no hard stony texture, nor any obstruction from Formation runes.

"Wooo—ah—"

A shrill, grand, yet extremely weak wail followed that thread of Divine Sense, crashing into Zhou Wannian's Sea of Consciousness like a flood breaking through a dam!

This was not a stone at all.

This wail contained far too many things.

Zhou Wannian heard the howl of great winds blowing across dried riverbeds, the roar of countless mountains collapsing, the desperate cries of thousands of households in Mortal cities at the same moment, and the terrified wails of birds and beasts as doomsday arrived.

All sorts of sounds and all sorts of despair were forcibly crushed and compressed by an irresistible, mighty power, and finally sealed tightly within this three-foot square space.

Zhou Wannian's vision expanded infinitely under the probe of his Divine Sense.

He pierced through the layer of gray material on the tile's surface and saw the scalp-numbing truth inside.

Inside this floor tile, there was no silt, no Ore.

There was only a ruin of space that had been completely flattened and drained of all Origin matter!

Those dark red flocculent substances were dried-up rivers, lakes, and seas after their Spiritual Qi had been drained; those ghostly blue spots were shattered canopies and stars; and those gold-leaf-like glimmers were the unwillingness and resentment that erupted from billions of living beings of a world before their death.

This was a world!

A Low-dimensional world that once possessed mountains and rivers, nurtured countless vibrant lives, and had a complete Heavenly Dao Reincarnation!

The anglers from beyond the heavens, using that transparent silk thread, had not only drained the Spiritual Qi, blood Qi, and world Origin used to nourish life in this world. They hadn't even spared the world's remaining physical husk.

Using the cold and rigid space-folding technology of the Absolute Truth Realm, coupled with the malicious Formations of the Immortal and Demonic Paths that refine all things, they had forcibly compressed and forged this shriveled world—which had lost all moisture and vitality—along with that already dilapidated low-dimensional Heavenly Dao that was emitting silent wails.

A vast territory of billions of miles, the remains of the flesh and blood of trillions of living beings.

Ultimately, they were fired into a three-foot square foot-stepping brick used for paving roads!

The faint wailing from the floor tile was precisely the low-dimensional Heavenly Dao of that dead world, emitting cries of blood-weeping grievance for its unfair treatment amidst endless trampling and torture.

Zhou Wannian stood silently in place.

He withdrew that thread of Divine Sense.

The floor tile beneath his feet became cold, dead, and dark gray again; the shrill wailing was also isolated inside the brick and stone, unable to transmit even a sliver ever again.

Zhou Wannian slowly raised his head.

His gaze followed this hundred-zhang-wide main street, extending all the way forward.

Millions, hundreds of millions of such dark gray floor tiles were laid out neatly on this long street, all the way to the foot of the throne in the deepest part of the Inner City.

It wasn't just the street.

Zhou Wannian turned his head and looked at the towering buildings on both sides of the street.

Those black city walls soaring into the clouds, those incredibly thick sky-propping stone pillars, those massive palace bases emitting pressure.

All were made of this dark gray material.

All were built from these 'bricks' that compressed the ruins of entire worlds!

Ten, a hundred, ten thousand, a hundred million...

It was simply impossible to calculate how many vibrant Major Thousand Worlds like the Qingping Realm this vast, boundless Immortal-Demon Inner City—this center of power representing the supreme majesty of high-dimensional rulers—had actually consumed.

It was one thing for them to treat Low-dimensional worlds as fish ponds to drain blood.

They actually uprooted those drained fish ponds, kneaded the mud and dead fish together, fired them into bricks, and built palaces for their own enjoyment.

This could no longer be described as cruel.

This was an absolute arrogance that regarded life, dimensions, and all Laws of reproduction in the Universe as mere grass.

On Zhou Wannian's face, which usually maintained a lazy and casual expression, all emotion vanished cleanly at this moment.

There were no angry roars, no teeth-gritting curses.

In their place was a calm as bone-chilling as ten-thousand-year-old profound ice.

Those deep eyes of his, which always carried a bit of interest as if watching a play, were now so deep that even light could not escape. A killing intent so cold it had become substantial spread silently in the depths of his eyes.

Zhou Wannian was no Saint who cared for all under heaven. He had strolled through endless dimensions, seen the fall of too many stars, and seen too many civilizations vanish in the blink of an eye. The Law of the cosmic jungle was that the big fish eat the small fish, natural selection; he rarely intervened in those naturally occurring cycles of birth and death.

But.

Everything has a bottom line.

Treating the billions of lives of a world as slag for firing floor tiles, stepping on the will of a world as a stone slab for paving roads, and yet calling it an Immortal-Demon Holy Land.

This behavior had touched Zhou Wannian's most basic bottom line regarding the word 'existence'.

"A bunch of vermin fattened by eating swill."

Zhou Wannian stood on the street full of world ruins, his voice level, yet carrying a biting cold that instantly froze the surrounding dark purple mist.

"After eating everything clean, you still use others' ashes as footstools just to show off how high you stand."

As his words fell.

An indescribable, terrifying chill swept out in all directions with Zhou Wannian as the center.

This was not a decrease in temperature, but a pure pressure of physical mass.

Under the faint fluctuations of mass drawn out by this killing intent, the perennial dark purple haze of the Immortal-Demon Inner City seemed to have met its nemesis, instantly solidifying and shattering, turning into flakes of purple ice crystals that fell with a rustle onto the gray street.

Several Immortal-Demon sentries, who had been hiding in the tall buildings lining the streets waiting for a chance to ambush the intruder, were caught off guard.

The moment that chilling sweep passed through, they didn't even have time to scream before their Divine Souls were crushed by the invisible ripples of mass. Their Physical Bodies tumbled stiffly from the high towers, hitting the ground and turning into a mess of pulped flesh.

Zhou Wannian didn't bother with those dead flies.

He took a step forward and continued walking.

This time, his pace was no longer as leisurely and light as before.

With every step, the contact between his soles and the dark gray bricks of that world produced a dull boom. This was Zhou Wannian using the Absolute Mass of his Physical Body to respond to the deathly silent Heavenly Dao trapped inside the masonry.

He couldn't break these bricks, because once they shattered, the spatial ruins forcibly compressed within would completely collapse. The remaining wails and resentment would vanish into ash along with them, leaving not even the slightest trace of their existence.

He could only use this method to tell the remains beneath his feet that someone had heard their blood-weeping pleas.

The long street stretched on, and the palaces on either side were deathly silent.

The previous collapse of the Star Ring and the backflow of the Blood River had caused too much commotion. The guards on the outskirts of the Inner City had already been wiped out, and the remaining high-level combatants were all huddled near the Creation Hub at the heart of the Inner City, waiting in full battle array.

Zhou Wannian walked alone on this avenue of death paved with billions of worlds.

Turning a wide crossroad, a massive, mostly collapsed Archway appeared ahead. This Archway seemed to have been affected by the shockwave of the Star Ring's collapse; its thick stone pillars were broken, and the plaque had smashed onto the ground into several pieces.

Zhou Wannian walked to the ruins of the Archway, his pace involuntarily slowing down.

His gaze was drawn to a dark gray floor tile in the middle of the road that was cracked in half.

Unlike the other tiles, the fracture of this one didn't reveal deathly gray powder; instead, it faintly seeped a thread of an extremely weak, ethereal fragrance.

This scent was very faint, almost masked by the thick, pungent stench of the Immortal-Demons surrounding it.

But how sharp were Zhou Wannian's five senses?

He smelled it.

It was a special wine fragrance, carrying a hint of mundane life and the sweetness of spring bamboo shoots after rain.

Zhou Wannian's eyes, cold as an icy pond, contracted slightly the moment he caught the scent.

He stopped where he was, his gaze fixed firmly on that broken remnant of a brick.

The floodgates of memory, within the endless river of time, were gently pried open a crack by this faint scent of wine.

He didn't know how many eons ago it had been.

At that time, he had just finished a boring slumber and casually picked a Low-dimensional world to take a stroll in.

That world had no great Cultivators capable of destroying heaven and earth, nor any earth-shattering longevity Cultivation Techniques. The lifespan of the Human Race there was a mere hundred years; they worked at sunrise and rested at sunset.

Zhou Wannian remembered that the world had many continuous seas of bamboo. When the spring rains came, the mountains were filled with emerald-green tender shoots.

In a Mortal town of that world, he had rented a bamboo house by the river and lived there for a full hundred years.

At the east end of the town, there was a winery run by a blind old man missing his front teeth. The wine he brewed wasn't strong, but it was made with water boiled from freshly picked bamboo leaves and spring shoots, carrying a sweetness unique to the Mortal world.

Every day, Zhou Wannian would carry a gourd to the old man's shop to buy a pot of wine. Then he would sit by the river, listening to the blind old man sing out-of-tune folk songs in his raspy voice while staring blankly at the black-awning boats passing by on the river.

The Heavenly Dao of that world was very gentle, just like the breeze in that town—neither noisy nor disruptive.

A hundred years later, the blind old man died. Zhou Wannian felt he had drunk enough of that wine, so he dusted himself off and left that world to continue his endless journey.

He hadn't even bothered to remember the name of that world.

But that fragrance of wine brewed from bamboo leaves and spring shoots had become one of the few memories in his long years that he considered comfortable.

And now.

This fragrance from his memories had appeared in the Inner City of the Immortal-Demon Great World, inside a broken floor tile being trampled underfoot.

Zhou Wannian slowly lowered his head, looking at that incomplete, dark gray brick.

The Great Perfection Space Law spread out silently, completely isolating the Immortal-Demon stench around the broken brick.

Zhou Wannian clearly saw the scene inside the tile.

Within that mass of chaotic ruins compressed to the extreme, there was a faint green light that was almost extinguished.

That was the gentle, low-dimensional Heavenly Dao. After having all its vitality drained and being forged by exotic fires for countless years, this was the last remaining bit of its instinctive consciousness.

The moment Zhou Wannian approached, that faint green light seemed to sense the familiar aura of the person who had once lived in the bamboo house for a hundred years.

The light flickered slightly.

"Dong... Dong..."

In Zhou Wannian's Sea of Consciousness, he heard no desperate screams or shrill curses.

He only heard an extremely faint, dull sound, like a bamboo clapper striking an empty wooden bucket.

This was the Heavenly Dao of that world, letting out one last faint sigh to this former guest before completely dissipating.

It was like the blind old man with the missing teeth using his last ounce of strength to strike the bamboo clapper in his hand before falling into eternal silence.

After this single flicker, the faint green light was completely extinguished.

The weak fragrance of wine drifted away with the wind, leaving no trace behind.

The broken brick became a completely dead object, no longer possessing any special fluctuations.

That Mortal world, once filled with seas of bamboo, sweet rice wine, and out-of-tune songs, was truly and completely erased from the dimensions of this Universe.

It had become an insignificant stepping stone under an Archway in the Immortal-Demon Great World.

Zhou Wannian stood silently before the broken brick.

He didn't bend down to pick it up, because he knew it was meaningless. Dead things cannot be resurrected, and drained worlds cannot be reshaped.

He just stood there.

His eyes were downcast.

A cold wind blew through the long street, fluttering his green cloth robe.

The surroundings were deathly silent. Even the terrified breathing of the Immortal-Demon Cultivators deep in the Inner City seemed frozen at this moment.

After a long time.

Zhou Wannian slowly raised his head.

On that handsome and easygoing face, all expressions receded like the ebbing tide, leaving only a cold mask devoid of any human touch.

In those deep eyes, there was no longer the casualness of a spectator or the lethargy of boredom.

There was only the purest, most extreme will to destroy, unadulterated by any other thoughts.

"Since you don't follow the rules and take the living worlds of others to burn into bricks for your houses."

"Since you've taken the place where I once rested and drank tea and trampled it into the mud as a stepping stone."

Zhou Wannian's hands remained behind his back, but at this moment, his spine straightened like a spear piercing the heavens.

"Fine."

Zhou Wannian looked toward the magnificent Central Hall ahead, shrouded in dark purple mist, which represented the core creation of the Immortal-Demon Great World.

He nodded gently, his tone flat without a single ripple.

"I will remember this brick."

He took a step, striding over the broken remnant of the brick.

His cloth shoe landed on the dark gray tile ahead with a dull boom.

"How many palaces have you built with these things? How many long roads have you paved?"

Zhou Wannian walked forward unhurriedly, his voice drifting along the cold street into the depths of the Inner City, one word at a time.

"I will peel back this ground inch by inch, and pull out your bones one by one."

"I'll smash them all into powder and scatter them on this street."

His killing intent was no longer hidden, spreading outward frantically like a physical weight with every step he took.

His green robes whipped loudly as he walked toward the cluster of Immortal-Demon palaces that were now trembling in terror.