408: Chapter 408 The old fisherman turns to ashes, and the Immortal and Demon Realms face collapse.

A pair of green cloth shoes stepped onto the edge of the hard, scorching glass pit, making a crisp, light sound.

With his hands clasped behind his back, Zhou Wannian steadily stepped onto this wasteland that had long been completely razed to the ground.

Heat waves continued to roll at the bottom of the deep pit, where the massive mechanical remains of the Extraterrestrial Angler had now fallen into complete silence. The dark gold engine oil had stopped flowing, and the last glimmer of light in the optical sensors had completely extinguished.

With the complete fall of this supreme ruler and the shattering of the core Formation eye of the Great Furnace of Creation deep underground, an indescribable Death Qi began to spread throughout the vast Immortal-Demon Great World.

The wind began to blow.

This was not the usual sinister wind mixed with embalming fluid and the scent of blood, but a turbulent void current pouring in from spatial rifts in all directions. The wind scraped against the face with a sharp, tearing sensation capable of shredding all things, and the air was filled with a sour, acrid scent similar to that of aged, decaying wood being forcibly snapped.

Zhou Wannian was in no hurry to leave; he stood at the edge of the deep pit and slightly tilted his head back.

In those eyes, deep as ancient wells, the upheaval occurring across the heavens was reflected.

The sky of the Immortal-Demon Great World had always been tightly shrouded in a thick, dark purple haze. This was because pure immortal clear Qi and violent Nine Nether Devilish Qi had been crudely kneaded together under the rigid and cold constraints of the Truth Realm's underlying code, forming a deformed and foul balance.

But now, the Truth Code network that served as the "glue" had gone completely offline following the death of The Angler and the collapse of the main control hub.

"Zheng—Crack!"

A snapping sound, which ordinary Cultivators could not hear at all but exploded directly within the depths of the Divine Soul, echoed continuously between heaven and earth.

Those were the underlying lines of code used to maintain the balance of Laws; having lost the support of computing power, they could not withstand the repulsive force of the two diametrically opposed energies of Immortal and Demon, and were snapped by force.

The sky had changed.

That thick, oppressive dark purple haze was like a pot of boiling, turbid paint, suddenly beginning a frenzied churning and separation.

"Rumble!"

A blinding white light tore through the purple clouds, and pure, cold Immortal Qi, imbued with a high and holy aura, roared toward the sky like a wild Dragon breaking free from its shackles. Everywhere it passed, the temperature in the air plummeted, condensing into vast swathes of ice crystals as sharp as knives.

On the other side of the white light, Nine Nether Devilish Qi, black as ink and churning with endless malice and greed, transformed into a sea of black fire that devoured everything as it sank frantically toward the earth below. This black fire had no temperature, yet it carried a viscous heat wave capable of corroding the Divine Soul to nothingness.

Clear Qi rises, turbid Qi descends.

This is the most fundamental Law of the Universe. Immortals and Demons, life and death, are two parallel lines that should never intersect. The resentment that had been forcibly stitched together now met its most violent and frenzied backlash.

The sky was completely torn into two distinct halves. One half was a vast expanse of white snowy Sword Qi, and the other was a pitch-black sea of corrosive demonic flames.

When these two massive energies, having completely lost their constraints after accumulating for countless eons, collided once more in the void...

It was no longer Fusion, but a destruction where both jade and stone were burned together.

"Boom—Boom—Boom!"

Deafening chain explosions thundered in every corner of the Immortal-Demon Great World.

The sky seemed to turn into a giant shattered mirror, with countless massive spatial rifts spreading out like a spiderweb. The blinding glare made it impossible to open one's eyes, and accompanying the light was a destructive shockwave capable of grinding all matter into powder.

Zhou Wannian stood silently in place as the violent shockwave swept over him like a tsunami, yet the moment it touched the invisible Domain within three feet of his body, it instantly turned into a gentle breeze, failing to ruffle even a single fold of his washed-out green cloth robe.

He watched this world-ending scene, a bone-chillingly cold sneer curling at the corners of his mouth.

"Tying water and fire together with a few broken threads, they truly thought they could control Yin and Yang."

Zhou Wannian's voice was calm, yet it sounded exceptionally clear amidst the earth-shattering explosions.

"Once the threads snap, this pot of hodgepodge will blow itself sky-high."

With the total rampage of Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi, the physical architecture of the Immortal-Demon Great World, which had been forcibly pieced together from the remains of discarded worlds, also met its final disintegration.

In mid-air, those floating islands and palaces that originally hung high, symbolizing the supreme majesty of the Immortal and Demon rulers, lost the support of their Formations and began to fall toward the ground like dumplings into a pot.

Hundreds of miles away from Zhou Wannian, a vast immortal sword peak, carved entirely from white marble, plunged down from the clouds. The massive mountain body rubbed against the air, creating dazzling sparks and a shrill whistling sound.

Directly below the falling sword peak happened to be a massive Demonic Path altar built from countless Demonic Beast skeletons and churning with blood.

"Bang!!!"

The two behemoths collided violently in mid-air.

Hard white marble and bleached demonic bones shattered simultaneously, while pure white Sword Qi and foul-smelling blood intertwined, triggering an even more brilliant energy explosion. A massive mushroom cloud rose into the sky, and countless fragments of stone and bone weighing tens of thousands of tons splashed in all directions like a meteor shower.

A huge piece of wreckage, burning with both black and white flames, came spinning down from the sky, heading straight for Zhou Wannian's head.

Zhou Wannian didn't even lift an eyelid.

The moment that wreckage entered the three-foot space around him, the physical crushing force of Absolute Mass erupted silently. That hard giant stone was like it had hit an invisible super-shredder, instantly turning into fine gray dust that was blown away by the wind without a trace.

The collapse was intensifying.

The earth began to tremble and crack violently. The dark gray floor tiles paved on the streets of the Inner City, fired from the ruins of low-dimensional worlds, turned into flying ash amidst a series of dull cracking sounds.

Abyssal rifts, tens of thousands of feet wide, crisscrossed the land; deep within the rifts, there was no longer soil or magma, but a violent, rampaging void turbulence that devoured everything.

The Immortal-Demon Great World, this high-dimensional tumor that had poisoned countless low-dimensional worlds and drained tens of billions of heavenly dao origins, was finally being reclaimed and devoured by the vast and ruthless cosmic void after losing all its support.

Those Immortal and Demon Cultivators who once acted with overbearing pride on this land, and those half-immortal, half-demon guards who had luckily survived outside the Great Furnace of Creation, now faced their true doomsday.

They fled in terror through the collapsing ruins, trying to find a flying ship to escape across worlds or attempting to tear through space to flee to other dimensions.

However, the spatial coordinates of the entire Major Thousand Worlds had fallen into absolute Chaos.

A demonic Cultivator at the Nascent Soul Stage Perfection had just summoned a defensive Magic Treasure and before he could fly into the air, the ground beneath his feet collapsed. He fell into that pitch-black spatial rift with a scream and was instantly shredded into a mist of blood by countless void wind blades.

Another Fairy with pure white wings attempted to fly high into the sky against the energy storm. As a result, before she had flown even a thousand feet, a lightning bolt of annihilation, produced by the collision of Immortal Qi and Devilish Qi, struck from the heavens, directly charring her proud demigod body into a piece of coal.

No one could be spared in this world-scale collapse.

High-dimensional arrogance was pathetically fragile in the face of the Universe's most primitive destructive forces.

With his hands behind his back, Zhou Wannian walked through this constantly disintegrating world as if taking a leisurely stroll in a courtyard.

The land around him was peeling away in large chunks and falling into the abyss. The path beneath his feet grew narrower and narrower, but every step he took was steady and firm; the Great Perfection Space Law allowed him to walk as if on level ground in this chaotic environment.

He looked at those Immortal and Demon Cultivators wailing in the flames and the void, without a hint of pity in the depths of his eyes.

"Having eaten the flesh and blood of others, sooner or later, you must spit it out, skin and bones included."

Amidst this apocalyptic tableau of universal destruction and all things returning to nothingness,

Zhou Wannian's leisurely pace suddenly paused slightly.

He stopped on a solitary rock that was about to shatter and fall, his deep gaze piercing through layers of dust and violent energy turbulence to look toward the core ruins ahead that had been completely reduced to powder.

That was precisely where the bone altar deep beneath the Immortal-Demon Great World had once been located, and the place where the Extraterrestrial Angler kept the core secrets of the entire world.

At the center of that chaotic storm, where even the void was thoroughly shredded and no matter could survive,

There was actually a dark, ancient shadow, exuding an aura of endless desolation and deathly silence, standing quietly there.

It did not collapse, nor did it shatter.

No matter how the Immortal Qi washed over it, no matter how the demonic flames forged it, or even how the incomparably violent void turbulence cut into it, not a single trace could be left upon that shadow.

Zhou Wannian's eyes narrowed slightly, a glimmer of light flashing in his gaze.

He set off, his spotless green cloth shoes stepping directly onto the churning void turbulence, walking toward the center of the storm as if on level ground.

The surrounding destructive energies, capable of tearing stars apart, behaved like waves hitting a reef the moment they contacted the three-foot space around him, obediently parting to the sides to clear a straight and smooth path for him.

The closer he got to that shadow, the more intense that familiar and loathsome aura of deathly silence became.

This aura contained no spiritual power, nor any logic of mechanical code; it was only a pure desolation that returned all things to nothingness.

As Zhou Wannian entered the very center of the storm, the howling winds abruptly ceased.

Presented before him was a Stone Tablet about three zhang high, its entire body a dark gray color.

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The material of this Stone Tablet was neither gold nor jade, and it was certainly not any Ore known in the Universe.

Its surface was pitted and scarred, covered in traces of weathering and erosion, as if it had endured the birth and death cycles of countless cosmic eras, only to be left as this incomplete shell.

Around the Stone Tablet, a layer of faint gray mist lingered.

This mist seemed to possess a certain absolute exclusivity, isolating all the energy and Law generated by the collapse of the Immortal-Demon Great World, forming a three-foot forbidden zone of absolute silence.

Zhou Wannian stopped in front of the Stone Tablet, and on his handsome, refined face, a look of serious scrutiny finally appeared.

He recognized this aura.

"Taiwu Ancestral Court."

That forbidden zone of life which he had personally sealed with over ninety thousand chains, hidden in the deepest reaches of endless dimensions, and regarded by the Absolute Truth Realm as the ultimate target for analysis.

Unexpectedly, in the deepest part of the ruins of the Immortal-Demon Great World, in the lair of that Extraterrestrial Angler, there was actually a Stone Tablet tainted with the pure aura of the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

Zhou Wannian did not use his Divine Sense to investigate. He knew very well that if his Divine Sense touched anything from the Taiwu Ancestral Court, it would be corroded by that nihilistic Death Qi, which would follow the trail right back to him.

He reached out his slender, fair right hand, passing through that layer of faint gray mist.

His fingertips pressed steadily onto the rough, cold surface of the dark gray Stone Tablet.

Where he touched it, there was no bone-chilling cold as imagined, only an indescribable sense of emptiness, as if his fingers were pressing against a void, and all sensation had been swallowed by this stone.

The Great Perfection Space Law circulated at Zhou Wannian's fingertips, forming an invisible film of Absolute Mass, firmly blocking the Taiwu Death Qi that attempted to spread up his fingers.

With this protection, Zhou Wannian's finger pads began to slowly rub and investigate the surface of the Stone Tablet.

The surface of this Stone Tablet appeared pitted and uneven, but under the subtle touch of his fingers, Zhou Wannian discovered that those pits and patterns were not formed by natural weathering.

They were a type of extremely ancient, rough carving, as if gouged out of the hard rock with bare fingers.

These carvings had no coherent grammatical logic, nor were they the script of any known civilization. They were like some kind of disorganized graffiti, scattered across the Stone Tablet in a disjointed mess.

However, when Zhou Wannian used the perspective of the Space Law to rearrange and reverse-engineer these scattered carvings in his mind.

A vast, eerie, three-dimensional star map that exceeded the understanding of conventional three-dimensional space slowly unfolded in his Sea of Consciousness.

The composition of this star map was completely different from that of the Truth Realm star map he had seen earlier at the bottom of the moat of the Ten Thousand Bone Long Stairs.

The Truth Realm's star map consisted of cold, precise lines and nodes, while this star map carved on the Stone Tablet was pieced together from countless twisted dimensional vortices and fractured space faults.

This was a navigation marker built on the foundation of "Nothingness" and "Chaos."

Zhou Wannian's gaze followed this eerie star map in his Sea of Consciousness. He saw countless dim, dead galaxies and dimensional traps folded into countless layers.

And beyond these traps and dead zones, at the endpoint of this incomplete star map, an extremely hidden and isolated spatial coordinate was marked.

There were no reference points marked around this coordinate, nor any method for entry. It was like a drop of ink, floating alone in the center of a blank sheet of paper, exuding an absolute silence that brooked no intrusion.

"This is..." Zhou Wannian withdrew his hand from the Stone Tablet, looking at the dark gray stone in front of him, a faint gleam flashing in his eyes.

The coordinates of the Taiwu Ancestral Court. To be precise, it was the coordinate of a certain extremely hidden core area within the Taiwu Ancestral Court, one he hadn't even noticed when he passed by back then.

Zhou Wannian quickly connected the events that had transpired.

The Extraterrestrial Angler, or rather the Absolute Truth Realm behind it, had been frantically collecting the Origin of low-dimensional worlds to deduce the defensive loopholes of the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

The reason they were so persistent must be that they held some clue about the Taiwu Ancestral Court. And this Stone Tablet was clearly that clue.

The Truth Realm had obtained this broken tablet, tainted with the aura of Taiwu and carved with ancient coordinates, from somewhere unknown.

They placed it at the very core of the slaughterhouse that was the Immortal-Demon Great World, letting that Angler guard it day and night, using the massive energy and countless remnant souls they siphoned to constantly scour and analyze the carvings on it.

They wanted to find a safe path to enter the depths of the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

"Their plans are quite clever, but it's a pity their computing power is insufficient. They've gnawed at it for countless eras and still haven't figured out a single stone." Zhou Wannian brushed off his sleeves, his tone carrying a hint of undisguised contempt.

The mechanical code of the Truth Realm emphasizes logic and patterns. But that place, the Taiwu Ancestral Court, is the most unreasonable place when it comes to logic. Trying to measure a pile of shapeless mist with an abacus—it would be a miracle if they got any results.

However, Zhou Wannian looked at this Stone Tablet.

Back then, he had placed over ninety thousand sealing chains around the periphery of the Taiwu Ancestral Court simply because he found the Death Qi there too pungent, so he added a lid as an afterthought. He had not gone deep inside to explore what that dilapidated place was hiding.

Now it seemed that in that forbidden zone of life, which could even swallow light, there were indeed things hidden that even those high-and-mighty high-dimensional mechanical lifeforms coveted.

"Since the coordinates have been delivered right in front of me." Zhou Wannian folded his hands behind his back again, a look of keen interest appearing on his handsome, easygoing face.

It was an expression he only wore when, after long ages, he had finally found some amusement to pass the boring time.

"Idle is idle. I can go smash the nest of those tin cans from the Truth Realm anytime. It's better to go check out the place pointed to on this Stone Tablet first and see what kind of old antiques are buried inside."

Zhou Wannian's thoughts stirred. The eerie star map copied from the Stone Tablet and that isolated coordinate had been completely imprinted into the depths of his vast, boundless Divine Soul, never to be erased.

After doing all this, Zhou Wannian did not take the Stone Tablet away.

Although this thing was made of special material, to him, apart from carrying those coordinates, it was just a rotten stone emitting Death Qi. Carrying it around would just take up space.

Since the coordinates were in his hands, this Stone Tablet had lost its value.

Zhou Wannian raised his right foot, clad in a cyan cloth shoe. Facing the dark gray Stone Tablet that had remained unscathed under the scouring of violent energy, he simply, calmly, stepped on it.

"Crack."

The Absolute Mass bestowed by the Great Perfection Space Law poured down. That ancient Stone Tablet, which had weathered countless eras and which even the analysis beams of Truth Warships could not penetrate, emitted a crisp cracking sound under Zhou Wannian's unreasonable physical crushing force.

Immediately after, the layer of gray mist on the surface of the Stone Tablet, used to isolate everything, collapsed with a boom.

The indestructible dark gray stone body split into countless cracks from the center, and then, under an irresistible weight, it crumbled directly into a pile of ordinary stone powder with no aura fluctuations. It was completely destroyed without a trace.

Even if the Truth Realm fleet arrived here immediately, they would never be able to extract even half a character of coordinate information from this pile of powder.

With the shattering of the Stone Tablet, the last bit of silence in the center of this storm was also broken.

The violent Void Realm turbulence pounced like a hungry beast, instantly sweeping the stone powder into the endless darkness.

The collapse of the Immortal-Demon Great World had reached its final stage.

The sky in all directions had completely disappeared, replaced by a pitch-black, deep Void Realm Universe filled with various lethal rays. The last piece of assembled continental bedrock beneath his feet also broke into countless huge fragments amidst shrill, mournful cries, drifting toward the depths of various dimensions.

This once arrogant high-dimensional tumor, this slaughterhouse that had devoured the flesh and blood of countless low-dimensional living beings, finally, at this moment, completely turned into a speck of dust in the Universe.

Karma is a cycle, and retribution is unavoidable. It is only a pity that this retribution came a little late, and it was forcibly cashed in by a passing idle scholar with a few slaps and a few rough stomps.

Zhou Wannian stood in the center of this ruin that had completely turned into nothingness. There was nowhere to gain leverage beneath his feet, but he still stood steadily in the Void Realm, his spotless cyan cloth robe fluttering casually in the raging Void Realm storm.

He turned his head and glanced at the pitch-black, deep Universe behind him. There, the gate leading to the Qingping Realm had already been torn apart by his own hands.

That low-dimensional world, now with a new gatekeeper, must be licking its wounds slowly under the sunlight of survival, regaining its vitality at this moment.

Zhou Wannian withdrew his gaze. He did not linger on the scenery that had already come to an end.

He raised his head, his gaze following the eerie star map he had just pieced together in his Sea of Consciousness, looking toward a direction of absolute silence in the depths of the Void Realm, folded by heavy dimensions and devoid of any light.

"Taiwu Ancestral Court."

Zhou Wannian walked with his hands behind his back, his tone calm and relaxed. He took a step, his spotless cyan cloth shoe treading on the violent Void Realm turbulence as if walking on a flat, wide bluestone path.

With one stride, his figure disappeared from the spot, directly spanning the distance of countless galaxies.

"I'd like to see what kind of old, dusty accounts are hidden under that broken lid I casually slapped on back then."

The figure in cyan gradually drifted away into the endless dark Void Realm. Only a steady, leisurely sound of footsteps remained, walking unhurriedly toward that oldest, most mysterious forbidden zone of silence in the Universe.