430: Chapter 430 The First Circle Appears, Geometric Sequence Locks the Void

The white light on the bluestone path was dazzlingly bright, illuminating the originally dim core area of the Taiwu Ancestral Court as if it were broad daylight.

Zhou Wannian stepped over the threshold of the dilapidated tavern, his azure cloth shoes stepping firmly onto the bluestones covered in dried moss. Behind him, the wooden tavern stood no chance against the pure white light; in an instant, it disintegrated into white ashes that swirled and dissipated with the flow of the light.

There was no wind, and even the Death Qi, carrying a musty and sour stench, was forcibly pushed away by this white light.

Zhou Wannian stood in the middle of the long street, hands clasped behind his back, narrowing his eyes slightly as he looked directly at the center of the distorted light ahead.

There was no temperature in this white light; he felt neither heat nor cold. Instead, it carried an intense, unquestionable sense of order. Everywhere he looked, all originally straight lines were changing.

The neatly paved bluestone path beneath his feet, the dark misty walls on both sides that should have extended straight, and even the deathly silent Void Realm overhead were all slowly curling upward under the pull of this white light. It felt as if someone had taken a scroll laid flat on a table, grabbed both ends, and forced them together toward the middle.

"Crack, crack."

The bluestones cracked from the forced bending, and the rubble defied gravity, hovering in mid-air and swirling to form perfect concentric circles.

Zhou Wannian stood his ground. He watched the place where the white light was brightest, where several blurred silhouettes were gradually becoming clear.

They were not the flesh and blood of living beings, nor were they mechanical creations pieced together from metal and code like those in the Truth Realm.

There were four figures.

Or rather, they were four "rings" wearing humanoid shells.

They had crossed the dimensional barriers of the Taiwu Ancestral Court's outskirts, silently descending upon the four corners of the long street. These four messengers, known as "The Initial Circle," were composed entirely of ever-flowing silvery-white light. They had no faces; their heads were absolutely regular spheres, and their torsos and limbs were formed by countless interlocking rings of various sizes.

They floated quietly in the Void Realm three feet above the ground, emitting not a shred of Killing Intent or emotional fluctuation. Their very existence was for the purpose of executing a mission that was mechanical and rigid to the core—to draw all irregular variables into circles and completely erase them.

Zhou Wannian's gaze swept over these four Circle Envoyss.

"You don't even have faces, yet you dare come out for a stroll with a few rings on your heads," Zhou Wannian said calmly, his voice rippling through the distorted space. "That paper-thin thing just now said you don't follow logic, only rules. To me, your rules look more like a turtle shell used for self-imprisonment."

The four Circle Envoyss did not respond to Zhou Wannian's mockery.

They didn't even make a sound; they simply performed a synchronized movement at the same time.

The four messengers slowly raised their arms made of light rings, crossing their hands before their chests with fingertips touching, forming a hollow circular hand seal.

The moment they formed the seal, the surrounding white light suddenly contracted.

Heaven and earth changed.

Zhou Wannian felt a buzzing deep in his eardrums—the dimensional oscillation produced when space was forcibly cut and closed.

The bluestone street that was still slowly curling, the surrounding ruins, and the dark sky overhead vanished without a trace in an instant. In their place was an absolutely enclosed spherical space where one couldn't see their hand in front of their face.

Above, below, front, back, left, and right.

Everything was a pure, curved dome emitting a faint white light.

Upon taking action, these four messengers didn't use any probing attacks or brandish swords or Magic Treasures. They directly used their own rules to cut out the space where Zhou Wannian was located, forcibly kneading it into an absolute sphere with no seams and no exits.

A certain-kill Formation: Geometric Sequence Void Lock.

Zhou Wannian stood on a fragment of bluestone that had also been cut into the space. He looked around; the diameter of this spherical space was barely a hundred zhang, its walls smooth as mirrors, with silvery-white light flowing like ripples.

The air stopped flowing.

In this absolutely closed sphere, there was no wind, no sound, and even the concept of time passing was completely stripped away. It was pure sensory deprivation; if an ordinary Cultivator were trapped here, they would go mad within half an incense stick's time due to the terrifying claustrophobia and silence.

Zhou Wannian did not panic. He still had his hands behind his back, his handsome face showing the leisure of someone inspecting a novel object.

He took a step, walking to the edge of the floating bluestone beneath his feet. His spotless azure shoe tip extended past the stone, stepping into the Void Realm below.

The Great Perfection Space Law spread out from beneath his sole.

But this time, the sensation of the Law flattening space met a slight resistance. The Void Realm beneath his feet was no longer an endless plain; instead, it possessed a tenacious curvature that attempted to bend his flattened Law back.

"Interesting."

Zhou Wannian withdrew his foot and stood on the stone. He raised his right hand, slightly bent his index finger, and casually flicked it toward the curved wall emitting white light ahead.

"Ssh—"

A wisp of Absolute Mass, refined by the Great Perfection Space Law, transformed into a nearly invisible transparent Sword Qi, slashing straight toward the wall of light.

The Mass Sword Qi sliced through the Void Realm, creating a piercing sound as it struck the white light firmly.

There was no earth-shattering explosion.

The moment the curved wall of light came into contact with the Absolute Mass, it acted like a soft glob of water, suddenly bulging outward. The terrifying power contained within the Sword Qi was rapidly dispersed by this circular wall, traveling around the entire inner wall of the sphere.

Light waves rippled, and the inner wall of the sphere erupted in a burst of dazzling white light.

Immediately after, the bulging lump snapped back inward.

The wisp of Mass Sword Qi that Zhou Wannian had flicked was actually reflected back perfectly by this spherical space, shooting straight toward his face along its original path.

Zhou Wannian's eyebrows twitched slightly. With a casual wave of his right hand, the Absolute Vacuum Domain within three feet of him silently crushed the reflected Sword Qi.

"Distributing the force across the entire circular surface, then throwing it back along the curve," Zhou Wannian shook his wrist. "This trick of redirecting and returning force is a bit smarter than those tin cans in the Truth Realm who only know how to take hits head-on."

While he was testing the boundaries of the Formation, the four Circle Envoyss outside began their true obliteration process.

Inside the closed spherical space, the pressure suddenly surged.

This pressure did not come from a single direction; instead, it squeezed toward the central point uniformly and without any blind spots from the curved dome in all directions.

The diameter of the sphere began to shrink.

A hundred zhang, ninety zhang, eighty zhang...

As the space contracted, the air inside the sphere was forcibly compressed, and the temperature rose sharply. The originally faint white light became blindingly bright, and tiny electric arcs began to drift in the air, making crackling and popping sounds.

Under the terrifying pressure from all sides, the bluestone fragment Zhou Wannian was standing on let out a shrill cracking sound and instantly turned into a cloud of dust.

Before the dust could scatter, it was kneaded and melted by the continuously shrinking spatial pressure, eventually turning into a nail-sized high-density crystal emitting a piercing red light.

This was the erasure of all variables—compressing all irregular matter into an absolute singularity, finally returning it to nothingness.

The diameter of the sphere continued to shrink.

Fifty zhang, thirty zhang.

The surrounding temperature had reached a terrifying level that could easily melt high-dimensional alloys. The air turned into a blinding plasma flow, and the entire interior of the sphere became a white furnace.

Zhou Wannian stood at the very center of the furnace.

His three-foot Domain let out a low rumble under the uniform pressure surging from all directions.

The barrier composed of Absolute Mass held firm against the light wall that was constantly shrinking inward.

The high-temperature plasma flow washed over these three feet of space, yet it couldn't even ignite a corner of Zhou Wannian's azure robe. Bathed in this world-destroying white light, his handsome face was illuminated clearly.

The external pressure grew stronger, and the curved wall of light had already closed in to within five zhang of him.

Zhou Wannian was in no hurry to break this shell.

His eyes, deep as ancient wells, carefully scrutinized the approaching curved dome amidst the blinding white light.

Initially, he thought this Formation was a trick played by some Advanced civilization hidden behind the scenes in the Truth Realm; after all, this method of emphasizing absolute rules and kneading space into a sphere carried a certain scent of calculation.

But as the light wall closed in and the power of the Formation fully erupted...

Deep within that dazzling silver-white light, the underlying patterns forming this "The Initial Circle" gradually surfaced within Zhou Wannian's sight.

It wasn't binary code made of zeros and ones.

Nor was it the Talisman incantations of the cultivation world that emphasized the Yin and Yang and the Five Elements.

They were ink lines... of uneven thickness, carrying a hint of dryness and white streaks from a parched brush.

That's right, they were ink lines.

A flash of strangeness crossed Zhou Wannian's eyes. He fully released his Great Perfection perception, staring fixedly through the blinding halo at the lines flowing inside the light wall.

These lines intertwined to form a perfect sphere.

But if one were to deconstruct it and return to the premise of a primitive plane...

Zhou Wannian discovered that this was not a naturally formed circle at all.

On the light wall directly above his head at an angle, those flowing ink lines had an extremely subtle flaw that was impossible to detect without examining it with the Great Perfection Law.

It was a seam.

At the start of the stroke, the ink was heavy and forceful; however, at the end of the stroke, it seemed rushed and lacked strength, leaving a faint, ethereal white streak. The start and end overlapped at that node but did not perfectly fuse; instead, they produced an imperceptible misalignment.

This was not a Law nurtured by heaven and earth.

This was someone using a tool to draw a circle in a single stroke. Because the force at the beginning and end differed, this circle bore the traces of artificial craftsmanship.

Looking at that seam—heavy at the start, light at the end, and misaligned...

Looking at those dry ink lines flowing within the light wall...

Zhou Wannian was stunned.

He stood in the center of that searing plasma flow. The surrounding space had been compressed to a danger zone less than ten feet away from him. In just a few more breaths, these four Circle Envoyss would be able to completely close this sphere.

Yet, at this moment of life and death, he stopped all movement.

On that face which was usually calm, casual, and lazy, his expression became exceptionally strange in an instant.

Memories surged up from the deepest corners of his Divine Soul, like pond water being violently stirred by a stick.

It was a period of time far more distant than the memory of the torn sleeve earlier.

Back then, the Taiwu Ancestral Court was not the mist-shrouded, lifeless place it was now. Around the withered well, there were several bare, gray high walls.

That day, Zhou Wannian had just finished a long stroll through the endless dimensions and felt a bit thirsty. He found a clean rock to sit on beneath those high walls, started a fire, and used an earthenware wine gourd to brew a pot of wild tea he had obtained from the Lower Realm.

The tea boiled, too hot to drink.

He sat idly on the stone bench, waiting for the tea to cool.

Bored out of his mind, Zhou Wannian casually picked up a half-charred piece of black firewood from the fire.

He walked to the gray high wall, looked at the smooth surface, and a bored thought suddenly struck him.

"I wonder if I can draw a circle with perfectly overlapping ends on this wall using just the strength of my Physical Body's wrist, without using any magic power."

With this time-killing thought, Zhou Wannian gripped the charred wood and, with his wrist suspended, casually drew a circle on the high wall.

The wood scraped against the rough wall; he pressed down heavily at the start.

His wrist turned, drawing most of the circle.

Just as he was about to return to the start to finish the stroke, he heard the gurgling of boiling water from the clay pot behind him. His focus wavered, and the strength in his wrist loosened.

The wood dragged a white streak across the wall. The closing line overlapped with the starting ink but deviated by half an inch, leaving a misaligned seam.

Zhou Wannian looked at the slightly crooked circle with its mismatched ends and shook his head in disdain.

He casually tossed the charred wood back into the fire and turned to drink the now-cooled wild tea, never looking back at the graffiti on the wall again.

Years flowed by, and eras changed.

The Taiwu Ancestral Court became a forbidden zone for life, the gray walls collapsed, and Death Qi permeated the air.

Zhou Wannian could never have imagined that a rough draft he had casually drawn on a wall with black charcoal while waiting for a pot of tea to cool...

After absorbing the Law fragments accumulated over the long years in the Taiwu Ancestral Court...

After fusing with the mutated Origin of Death Qi from beneath the abyss...

It would actually give birth to intelligence and manifest as a mysterious organization called the "The Initial Circle."

They revered that flawed graffiti as the highest truth of the Universe and treated that casually drawn circle as an insurmountable rule. They traveled through the myriad realms, hunting down any variables that didn't fit the shape of this circle, calling themselves the scavengers who maintained the balance of the Universe.

And now.

This bunch of line-things that had jumped out of his rough draft had crossed dimensional barriers and run in front of him to form a lethal Formation derived from that graffiti.

They intended to forcibly erase him—the Creator who had once held the charcoal to draw them—as a variable.

The light wall had already pressed against the edge of the three-foot Domain around Zhou Wannian.

A piercing grinding sound echoed outside the vacuum Domain as Absolute Mass clashed violently with the contracting Space Law. The white light was so bright it blinded the eyes, and the terrifying high temperature was enough to burn stars to ash.

But in the core of this furnace submerged in light...

An uncontrollable smile suddenly surfaced on Zhou Wannian's strange face.

At first, it was just a slight tug at the corners of his mouth.

Then, the smile rapidly expanded, turning into bouts of uninhibited laughter vibrating from deep within his chest.

"Haha... Hahahaha!"

Zhou Wannian's laughter echoed in the extremely compressed space, carrying a sense of the absurdly comical and a ruthless mockery of the so-called "rules" of the myriad realms.

He laughed until his shoulders trembled slightly, and his faded green cotton robe shook violently within the Domain.

"And here I was wondering what kind of remarkable ancient god or high-and-mighty scavenger it was."

Zhou Wannian stopped laughing and looked up. His deep eyes flickered with a cold and playful glint as he stared directly at the misaligned seam on the light wall above him.

"After all that fuss, it turns out to be a piece of trashy draft work that isn't even fit for a wastepaper basket."

The four Circle Envoyss outside could not hear Zhou Wannian's mockery. They simply executed the erasure command faithfully, continuing to pour all their power of Law into the sphere, attempting to completely crush this final three-foot Domain.

"You drew a broken, misaligned circle, absorbed some Death Qi from a mud pit, and now you really think you're the Heavens, daring to come out and set rules."

Zhou Wannian shook his head, the playfulness in his eyes turning into a blade-like coldness.

He didn't reach for his sword, nor did he perform any hand seals to break the Formation.

He simply slowly raised his long, fair right hand.

He pressed his fingers together and flattened his palm.

Like a teacher in a private school facing a few messy scribbles on a blackboard.

"Since it's a trashy draft I casually drew back then..."

Zhou Wannian's tone was calm, without the slightest ripple.

Facing the light wall that pressed before his eyes, containing terrifying erasure power, he placed his flattened right hand against it with utter nonchalance.

"...then I should take a blackboard eraser and wipe it clean."

As the words fell...

His palm made contact with the white light where the ink lines flowed.

The Absolute Mass tempered by the Great Perfection Space Law erupted through his palm. It was no longer a defensive three-foot Domain but had transformed into an invisible "eraser" capable of smoothing out the physical rules of the entire Universe.

Zhou Wannian's wrist sank slightly as he pressed against the light wall and wiped across it from left to right with effortless ease.