425: Chapter 425 A Silent Funeral for All Living Beings, Bones Piled Up to Form a Tower to Heaven

The soles of his cyan cloth shoes landed steadily on this central area that had been completely cleared of grey mist.

The sensation from beneath his feet was no longer that of soft, sticky bone ash soil. The ground here had been forcibly packed into a single piece of mirror-smooth, grey-black hard shell by a terrifying pressure that could not be measured by numbers. His soles stepped on it, producing a crisp and short light sound. This light sound rippled through the deathly silent wilderness, but it failed to travel far before being entirely swallowed by the heavy aura emanating from the colossal structure ahead.

Zhou Wannian stood in place, his hands withdrawing from behind his back to hang naturally at his sides.

He tilted his head slightly, his gaze climbing all the way up the high tower that occupied his entire field of vision.

The wind stopped.

The surrounding viscous grey Death Qi seemed to be forcibly isolated at the periphery of this circular clearing by some invisible force field, forming a towering grey wall of mist. In the center of the clearing, there was no breath of living things, no flow of energy, only a pure desolation after all things had been stripped of their vitality.

It was a tower.

A high tower of white bones so massive that a single glance would cause a Mortal's Divine Soul to collapse.

The tower's base was boundless, deeply embedded in this deathly silent earth. The tower body narrowed as it rose, piercing straight through the grey canopy above and vanishing into the depths of dimensions invisible to the naked eye.

But Zhou Wannian's gaze was not intimidated by this grand scale. His eyes, deep as ancient wells, penetrated the layer of swirling grey-white flames on the tower's surface, seeing clearly the true building Materials of this tower.

This was not built by piling up the skeletons of some giant beasts at all.

As he drew closer, he could smell the nauseating stench of blood, the fishy scent of soil, and a scorched odor unique to the destruction of civilizations permeating the air.

Composing the base of this high tower were vast continents forcibly compressed and twisted by external force.

Zhou Wannian stepped forward and stopped at the edge of the tower's base.

At a level even with his line of sight, a grey-white stone the size of a millstone was embedded. That was not a stone; it was a miniature of a mundane world that had been forcibly squeezed into a ball.

He could clearly see that within that compressed world were dried and cracked vast oceans, where the silt at the bottom had turned into black hard scabs. There were undulating, majestic mountain ranges with peaks snapped in the middle like broken bone spurs. And between those mountains and dried riverbeds, it was densely covered with fine powder almost invisible to the naked eye.

The color of that powder carried a hint of dark red.

Those were the life traces of tens or hundreds of billions of Mortals, birds, and beasts who, at the moment the world was forcibly compressed, didn't even have time to scream before being squeezed into a blood mist, eventually weathering into the ruins.

A stone the size of a millstone was once a vivid Major Thousand World full of the hustle and bustle of life.

And this high tower piercing the clouds—how many such worlds was it built from?

A hundred thousand? A million? Ten million?

Further up the tower, those worlds were compressed tighter and tighter, eventually losing their original outlines entirely and turning into sections of pale, coarse, giant bones. The Heavenly Dao Laws of the worlds were drained, the vitality of mountains, rivers, and vegetation was squeezed dry, and what remained was only this most pure death and desolation.

This was the final destination of the massive amount of low-dimensional Origin collected by the Truth Realm to deduce the defensive loopholes of the Taiwu Ancestral Court, as mentioned by the Extraterrestrial Angler.

They did not burn these worlds as fuel; instead, they used the corpses of the worlds as bricks and stones to build a Tower to Heaven in this forbidden zone of life, attempting to reach higher dimensions.

"Kneading the grave of an entire world into a single brick."

Zhou Wannian extended a slender, fair index finger and calmly tapped twice on the millstone-sized world wreckage before him.

His knuckles collided with the dried continental plate, producing a dull thud like striking rotten wood.

"You tin cans haven't put your strength toward the Righteous Path; instead, you're willing to pay a heavy price for this kind of devious civil engineering."

There were no angry roars, no riots of mana.

On Zhou Wannian's handsome and easygoing face, his features tightened slightly, and the three-foot Absolute Vacuum Domain around him contracted by half an inch at this moment. The mass tempered by the Great Perfection Space Law pressed down silently toward the grey-black earth beneath his feet through his body.

The ground did not crack, but it emitted a faint groan of being overburdened.

He raised his head, his gaze continuing to look upward.

The entire surface of the white bone tower was burning with a kind of grey-white flame.

This flame had no temperature and did not feel even slightly hot. It burned quietly against those world corpses like a layer of constantly flowing cold mucus.

But in Zhou Wannian's perception, the essence of this flame was more hair-raising than any Tushita Divine Fire or Nine Nether Demon Flame in the world.

This was not a fire that existed in nature.

This was pure resentment.

The billions upon trillions of living beings whose homes had been crushed and who had died in despair and pain—their unwillingness, curses, and wails before death were forcibly collected and compressed by the Truth Realm using a kind of cold underlying code.

The code was like a wick, and the resentment was like lamp oil.

The Truth Realm used their rigid mathematical logic to give these disorganized resentments a unified direction of flow.

At this moment, although his ears could not hear any sound, deep within Zhou Wannian's Divine Soul, he could clearly capture the shrill, mournful wails emitted by this flame of resentment as it burned.

Those mournful wails converged to form an invisible spiritual torrent, surging madly upward along the tower body.

This was the "World Funeral" mentioned by that foolish Stone Spirit.

The Truth Realm was not commemorating these dead lives at all. They were using the resentment of these living beings as an indestructible drill bit, combined with the height of the white bone tower, attempting to use this massive negative emotion to forcibly drill a hole in the mist canopy of the Taiwu Ancestral Court that could peek into the forbidden.

Using the bones of all living beings to build a stage, and the resentment of all living beings to clear the way.

This kind of cold calculation, calculated down to the bone, exuded an undisguised arrogance and cruelty.

Zhou Wannian took half a step back, his hands once again clasped behind his back.

His gaze penetrated those raging grey-white flames of resentment, following the convergence of the tower body all the way to the highest point of the tower, hidden deep within the dark grey canopy.

There, the concentration of the resentment flames reached an incredible level, almost condensing into physical grey crystals. All energy and code logic were converging toward that needle-tip-sized formation eye.

And right in the center of that formation eye, which gathered the entire power of the heaven-reaching bone tower and carried the Truth Realm's ambition to penetrate dimensions.

An object was floating quietly.

Zhou Wannian narrowed his eyes. His vision, bolstered by the Great Perfection Law, ignored the distance of space and the obstruction of resentment, clearly capturing the outline of that object.

It was not some Truth Realm Core Matrix flashing with high-dimensional light.

Nor was it some peerless divine weapon unearthed from ancient ruins.

It was a piece of fabric.

A piece of fabric only the size of a palm, with uneven edges and a few loose threads faintly showing.

The color of the fabric was washed out to a pale white, presenting a simple and old cyan hue. Amidst the surrounding violent and cold grey flames of resentment, it was neither burned to ash nor torn apart by that drilling force capable of rending dimensions.

It just hovered there quietly, even with a hint of laziness. No matter how the Truth Realm used code to stimulate it or world wreckage to nourish it, it maintained that dusty, unremarkable appearance.

Yet, strangely, it was precisely this seemingly fragile scrap of cloth that became the only stabilizing force capable of withstanding the terrifying pressure of the entire white bone tower.

Zhou Wannian looked at that piece of cyan fabric.

He lowered his head and glanced at the cyan cloth robe he had worn for an unknown number of eons.

On the left side of his waist near the hem, there was a gap with uneven edges. The shape and size of that gap matched the piece of fabric floating in the formation eye at the top of the tower perfectly, without the slightest discrepancy.

A flash of memory swept through his mind.

That was a long time ago, so long ago that Zhou Wannian himself could barely remember the exact time.

At that time, he had just begun wandering through these endless dimensions, passing through a Barren Star Belt overgrown with Void Thorns. Those thorns grew sharp and messy; he was too lazy to detour and walked straight through. Although Absolute Mass meant those thorns couldn't hurt him at all, while passing through a dense thicket, his hem accidentally caught on a barb.

He was walking casually then and didn't care. He only heard a faint sound of tearing silk, and that small piece of cyan fabric was torn off, left hanging on the thorns.

For such a trivial matter, he naturally wouldn't turn back to pick it up. An old set of clothes that had faded to white; having a hole in it actually suited his style as a leisurely scholar even better.

Who could have imagined.

This scrap of cloth he had abandoned in an unknown corner of the starry sky had, through long years, somehow ended up in the hands of those bean-counters from the Absolute Truth Realm.

Zhou Wannian could almost reconstruct the scene in his mind when those tin cans got their hands on this fabric.

The Truth Realm's fleet was patrolling the Void Realm when they unexpectedly discovered this cyan cloth hanging on the thorns. They used their highest-level scanning rays to probe it, only to discover in horror that this seemingly ordinary cotton cloth contained a physical mass whose upper limit even their Super Matrix could not calculate.

This cloth was neither born nor destroyed, unable to be destroyed by any known high-dimensional weapon. It defied the Laws of thermodynamics and the conservation of mass.

Thus, the Truth Realm's Main Brain enshrined this fabric as a supreme treasure.

They couldn't decipher its mysteries, but they knew how to utilize it.

In the mist of the Taiwu Ancestral Court, they needed an indestructible 'drill bit' capable of withstanding the impact of the resentment from tens of billions of worlds to pierce through the dimensional barrier of that mist. All Truth Realm alloys turned to dust under such impact; only this scrap of cyan cloth became the most perfect carrier for the formation core.

They enshrined this cloth at the top of a tower and laid the flesh and blood of countless living beings at the base.

Using a Bone Tower to the Heavens to support this palm-sized corner of a garment, they conducted this grand funeral across dimensions.

"Picking up the trash I didn't want and even enshrining it above your heads like a treasure."

Zhou Wannian looked at that familiar fragment of a cyan robe at the top of the tower, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly in helplessness.

A loose thread was still hanging from the edge of the fabric. He remembered that thread; back then, he had even given it a couple of tugs but failed to snap it.

"Using a scrap of old clothing as a drill bit... the imagination of you tin shells is truly limited to counting on an abacus."

Zhou Wannian shook his head and withdrew his gaze from the top of the tower.

He refocused his gaze on the base of this bone tower piled high with the remains of countless worlds.

This tower standing here was not only an eyesore, but that soaring Death Qi was also so noisy it made one's eardrums ache. Zhou Wannian didn't care what channel the Truth Realm wanted to open with this tower. But looking at this 'drill bit' forced together from countless low-dimensional worlds, a sliver of displeasure finally arose within his calm leisure.

Big fish eating small fish is the Law of the Universe.

But to drain the water from the fish pond and crush the fish bones to use as stepping stones, all while calling it some 'exploration of truth'...

This way of eating is too filthy.

Zhou Wannian stepped forward, his spotless cyan cloth shoes walking steadily toward the base of the Bone Tower.

As he approached, the grayish-white flames of resentment burning on the surface of the tower seemed to sense some fatal threat. The flames, which had been surging upward, suddenly split off a thick tongue of fire, like a grayish-white venomous python, opening its maw and biting fiercely toward Zhou Wannian's face.

This tongue of fire contained the desperate curses of tens of millions of beings before death; if a Soul Transformation Cultivator touched even a bit, their Dao Heart would instantly collapse.

Zhou Wannian did not stop his pace.

He didn't even lift his hand.

That menacing tongue of resentment fire, the moment it came within three feet of him, slammed into that invisible barrier composed of Absolute Mass.

"Sss—"

There was no explosion, only a soft sound like a drop of water falling into boiling oil.

That resentment, which was enough to pollute the Heavenly Dao, didn't even have the right to struggle under the physical crushing of Absolute Mass. Code logic and negative emotions at the microscopic level were crushed in an instant into a nothingness that wasn't even considered basic particles. The grayish-white tongue of fire began to annihilate inch by inch from the tip, turning into a wisp of odorless blue smoke that dissipated at Zhou Wannian's feet.

Zhou Wannian walked to the base of the high tower.

This base was truly too large; standing before it was like facing a precipice spanning between heaven and earth.

Those world remnants compressed into stone blocks were packed tightly together. Between the gaps flowed an adhesive formed by Truth Code mixed with dried blood.

Zhou Wannian slowly extended his right hand.

His slender, fair fingers had distinct knuckles.

He didn't form any profound hand seals, nor did he mobilize the Divine Soul power within him that was like a deep abyss or sea.

He simply and plainly pressed the palm of his right hand against a world remnant compressed from mountains and continents.

The moment his palm contacted that rough, cold tower base permeated with endless Death Qi.

The lines on Zhou Wannian's handsome face turned completely cold and hard.

"If you're going to set up a stage, you should pick a good place."

Zhou Wannian's calm voice rippled across this deathly silent circular clearing, not swallowed by any gray mist or resentment, clearly reaching the entire tower.

"Coming onto the manhole cover I built and using other people's bones as stepping stones..."

His right palm, pressed against the tower base, saw the wrist sink slightly.

At this moment, the Great Perfection Space Law was pushed by him to an extreme frequency that the naked eye could not capture.

It was no longer the static Absolute Mass used for defensive counterattacks.

But a physical tide pouring outward, intended to completely crush everything blocking the way ahead.

This mass was no longer limited to within three feet. It followed Zhou Wannian's palm, like a vast ocean bursting its banks, pouring unreservedly into the interior of this massive Bone Tower.

"Buzz—"

An extremely dull physical vibration, as if coming from the beginning of the Universe's birth, exploded at the bottom of the entire tower.

The Truth Code used to glue the world remnants together instantly fell into a frantic logical death loop under the wash of Absolute Mass. Crimson error warnings flashed in the gaps of every remnant, only to be completely erased within a ten-thousandth of a breath.

The tightly fitted base began to emit a series of tooth-aching cracking sounds.

"Crack. Crack."

Cracks centered on Zhou Wannian's palm, like a frantically growing spiderweb, spread upward along the tower. Those world remnants compressed to the extreme began to shatter outward under the forced internal pressure of the mass. Large chunks of debris with dried bloodstains peeled off the tower and smashed onto the grayish-black ground below.

The grayish-white flames of resentment burning on the tower's surface were torn to shreds by this physical vibration erupting from within. The pillars of fire that originally shot into the clouds were broken into countless segments, quickly extinguishing in mid-air like wood without roots.

The tower was tilting.

This sky-reaching structure, which carried the countless efforts of the Truth Realm and was supported by the bones of tens of billions of worlds, emitted a mournful cry on the verge of collapse under Zhou Wannian's single palm.

Zhou Wannian stood amidst the rain of falling debris, his cyan robe unstained by dust.

He looked up at the fragment of cyan fabric at the top of the tower, which was teetering as the tower tilted.

"When clothes are torn, I don't want them anymore. But this funeral is too noisy; I'll have to scatter it."

As his voice fell.

Zhou Wannian's right hand against the tower base was no longer pressing.

His five fingers suddenly gripped a protruding world remnant.

The muscles in his arm tightened slightly under the cyan sleeves, and power surged from his waist and back.

A most simple, most unreasonable pulling motion.

"Come down."

Accompanied by this plain yet endlessly overbearing sentence.

Absolute Mass transformed into an irresistible horizontal pulling force, crudely tearing at this Bone Altar that towered into the clouds.