433: Chapter 433 No key is needed to open the iron lock; the door opens by the thought.

The dark red gate towered into the clouds, its surface marked with uneven pits and hollows, like dried, peeling scabs of blood.

Zhou Wannian stood before the gate, his posture upright. He tilted his head slightly, his eyes—deep as an abyss—fixed on the copper lock, covered in reddish-brown rust, resting in the gap between the two doors. The three hammer marks in the shape of the character " product" on the lower left, in the dim, dead gray light, exuded a worldly, mundane aura that did not belong to this high-dimensional Forbidden Ground.

His raised right hand, slender and fair, had already touched the rough lock body.

This lock had no immortal formation patterns flowing in its keyhole, nor the dense geometric code found in the Truth Realm. It was just a crude object made by banging a piece of pig iron and a few taels of brass together with a common blacksmith's hammer.

Having survived countless epochs and soaked in the deepest Death Qi of the Taiwu Ancestral Court, this lock had already undergone some physical mutations. The reddish-brown rust was actually a hard shell formed after the Death Qi and the brass/iron devoured each other. If an ordinary Soul Transformation Cultivator came here, let alone breaking it by force, just touching this layer of rust with a finger would drain the Qi and blood from half their body in a single breath.

But Zhou Wannian's fingertip pressed against it without the slightest hindrance.

Flesh and blood tempered by the Great Perfection Space Law were completely immune to the erosion of this Death Qi. From his fingertip came only the dry coldness of metal and the stagnation settled by time.

He did not take out a key.

Back then, this lock was made to guard against wild cats in the town; the key had long ago turned to dust in the long passage of time.

Zhou Wannian did not intend to use that Absolute Mass capable of crushing the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds to forcibly tear it apart. This lock recognized his aura, and he recognized the texture of this lock.

He pinched the lock beam with his index finger and thumb, his middle fingernail resting plainly on the edge of the rough, cross-shaped keyhole.

Deep within his Divine Soul, that imperceptible memory was stirred.

Zhou Wannian's wrist sank slightly, and his middle fingernail flicked upward along the rusted-shut mechanism lines inside the keyhole.

No brute force was needed; he simply followed the physical leverage principle he had personally set all those years ago, applying an insignificant push to the most fragile and core node of this lock.

"Click."

A crisp, stiff sound of the mechanism jumping, carrying the stagnation of metal friction, rang out clearly before this silent gate that could swallow even a heartbeat.

The lock beam snapped open.

The reddish-brown rust flaked off with the vibration of the mechanism, falling onto the instep of Zhou Wannian's feet.

There was no earth-shaking movement, no ten thousand rays of light.

This rusty iron lock, which had locked the largest mud pit in the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds, was easily picked open by the Creator using the most ordinary method.

Zhou Wannian casually took the brass iron lock off the beast-head door knocker. He weighed it in his hand, the heavy feeling of the metal pressing into his palm. He did not throw it away; instead, he flipped his wrist and tucked the broken lock, with its three hammer marks, into the wide sleeve of his green robe.

The moment the lock fell.

The dark red gate in front, ten thousand feet high and seemingly tightly shut since the birth of the Universe, began to move.

"Boom... rumble..."

A dull, continuous, massive roar, like the cracking of earth veins, rolled out from the depths of the gate. The bearings beneath the gate rubbed against the gray-black bedrock, emitting a terrifying, sharp screech that set one's teeth on edge.

Accompanied by this roar, the two dark red gates slowly slid open, creating a gap inward.

The moment this crack opened.

An ancient aura, accumulated over who knows how many epochs and settled to the extreme, surged out from the gap like a bursting ocean.

There was no killing intent in this aura, nor that nauseating, sour, moldy smell. It carried a sense of absolute emptiness and desolation, like pushing open the stone door of an Ancient Tomb sealed for ten thousand years, with that withered breath—drained of all moisture and vitality by time—rushing to meet him.

The aura rolled outward.

Zhou Wannian stood before the gate, the hem of his green robe pulled taut backward by this airflow.

This ancient aura surging from behind the gate collided directly with the thick, heavy, mercury-like gray fog outside the gate.

There was no stalemate, no tug-of-war.

That layer of gray fog wall, which even the "Dimension Extractor" of the Absolute Truth Realm could hardly pierce, dissolved instantly the moment it touched the aura from behind the gate, like residual snow under a scorching sun.

It was not just the open space in front of the gate.

With the gate as the center, this aura swept wildly in all directions. The withered, deathly gray fog that had occupied countless galaxies on the periphery of the Taiwu Ancestral Court was met with destructive retreat under this impact.

The gray fog was forcibly wiped away as if by an invisible giant hand.

The gray, oppressive sky overhead shattered inch by inch. The Chaos that had been pitch-black all around peeled away layer by layer.

Zhou Wannian watched this spectacular scene.

It took no more than the time it takes to finish a cup of tea.

The gray fog that had plagued countless mighty beings of the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds and caused the Truth Realm army to lose their way had completely vanished.

His vision, at this moment, suddenly cleared.

The true face of the Taiwu Ancestral Court was revealed before Zhou Wannian without any obstruction.

Without the cover of the gray fog, the space at the bottom of this abyss was larger than any logic could conceive. Zhou Wannian took a step, his spotless green cloth shoes crossing that high dark red wooden threshold, stepping inside the gate that had been sealed for countless epochs.

What he stepped on was no longer the polished dark gray flagstones from outside.

Instead, it was a ground of shattered white jade bricks.

Each of these white jade bricks was as large as a bed, originally glowing with a warm luster. But now, the surface of the jade was covered in cobweb-like cracks, withered and yellowed, having lost all spirituality. Some jade bricks were even ground into fine powder, spread on the ground, making a rustling sound when stepped on.

Zhou Wannian looked up and surveyed the scene.

Before his eyes lay a vast, magnificent, yet ancient ruin filled with absolute Death Qi.

The remnants of rolling palace complexes spread out over this vast, boundless plain, stretching as far as the eye could see.

On the distant horizon stood huge palaces, thousands of feet high. Most of the domes of those palaces had collapsed, revealing bronze beams as thick as a monster's ribs. The glazed tiles that originally covered the roofs were shattered into countless pieces, scattered on the withered white jade stairs, refracting a bleak glimmer in the dead light.

Tall, coiled dragon pillars lay scattered on the ground, the ancient dragon patterns carved on the columns weathered by time and Death Qi until they were blurred, leaving only smooth stone surfaces.

Surrounding these palaces were wide moats crisscrossing the area.

There was no water in the canals. On the dried riverbeds, the silt had hardened into black lumps. Between those lumps, they were piled high with white, bleached bones. There were skeletons of exotic beasts with wings on their backs, and remains of ancient gods with bodies as huge as mountains. They remained in the posture of fighting and entangling before their deaths, dead and stiff in this dried-up riverbed.

Magnificent.

The scale of this ruin and the architectural style all spoke of its prosperity and grandeur when it served as a Universe experimental outpost. Every brick and every pillar here exuded an ancient majesty that surpassed that of the upper Major Thousand Worlds.

Death Qi.

There was not a shred of vitality here. There was no wind, no sound, and even the air had stopped flowing. That withered smell of moisture being drained filled his nasal cavity, as if the world had been made into a giant corpse, lying quietly at the bottom of the abyss, waiting for complete weathering.

Zhou Wannian walked on this dilapidated white jade avenue.

His green robe appeared exceptionally thin in the silent ruins.

He strolled along, his gaze sweeping over the collapsed walls and ruins. His deep, abyss-like eyes reflected this desolate scene.

At first, he only regarded this as an old site that had been abandoned for too long. After all, having been locked by him at the bottom of this dry well for so many years, even the most magnificent building could not withstand the double erosion of time and Death Qi; collapsing into ruins was a matter of course.

He walked past a broken, huge bronze pillar.

The tip of his green shoe inadvertently kicked a piece of half-broken glazed tile scattered on the ground.

The tile slid more than a foot across the white jade bricks, hit the edge of a slightly raised stone step, and stopped.

Zhou Wannian's footsteps slowed down along with the stopping of the tile.

He lowered his head, his gaze falling on the stopped tile, then followed the tile to look at the raised stone step.

The Great Perfection Space Law granted him eyes capable of seeing through the essence of all physical structures in the Universe. Usually, he couldn't be bothered to look at the world from this perspective; it would make him feel it was too cumbersome. But in this Forbidden Ground, full of crises and calculations, his perception always maintained a sharp, restrained edge.

His gaze lingered on the stone step for a moment.

Zhou Wannian raised his head, his gaze casting back toward the rolling palace ruins ahead.

The suspense of the hidden line was like a straight auxiliary line suddenly appearing in a seemingly chaotic ink wash painting, glaringly spanning the center of his vision.

Something was wrong.

These ruins were not right.

For buildings collapsed by natural weathering, the distribution of debris should be chaotic and disordered. Rubble would roll into depressions, broken pillars would tilt randomly due to gravity, and cracks in the ground should appear in a branching, tree-like pattern.

But.

In Zhou Wannian's Great Perfection vision, the ruins before him presented a creepy, rigid regularity.

He looked at the half-collapsed side hall on the left.

The angle between the tilted, collapsed wall and the ground was an obtuse angle precise to the point of having no deviation. The pile of blue stone bricks scattered nearby looked chaotic, but if one connected the center point of each brick, they actually formed a perfect equilateral hexagon.

He cast his gaze further away.

The silhouettes of the uneven main hall ruins in the distance formed an undulating curve against the background of the gray sky.

This curve.

Zhou Wannian took a deep breath, the lines on his handsome face tightening slightly.

This was not a contour line formed by random collapse at all. This was a logarithmic spiral curve that perfectly fit the golden ratio.

He turned back to look at the white jade avenue he had just walked along.

The cracks on the avenue, the spacing between the collapsed coiled dragon pillars, and even the height of the piles of withered bones in the dried-up moat.

Everything, from the grand, rolling palace complexes to the tiny distribution of dust in the cracks of the floor tiles.

All were following a strict, cold, lifeless mathematical constant.

This was not a ruin.

Or rather, this had long ceased to be a naturally collapsed ruin.

In the long years Zhou Wannian had been away, someone, or rather some force, had used a patience like water dripping through stone to carry out a long-term micro-carving transformation inside this sealed Taiwu Ancestral Court.

They had no way to break the Great Perfection bronze lock chain Zhou Wannian left behind from the outside.

So, like a swarm of pervasive ants, through weak codes that seeped in, through energy collected by moss parasitic on the chains, they moved every stone, bit by bit, inside this dry well, and snapped every pillar.

They treated this magnificent ancient divine court ruin as a giant sand table.

Using years of calculation, they transformed this place into a super mathematical model that perfectly fit the underlying logic architecture of the Truth Realm.

A huge, boundless matrix cage.

"Good calculation."

Zhou Wannian stood in the center of the ruins square, full of traces of calculation, and uttered a whisper with a cold chill.

That bunch of tin cans from the Truth Realm put on a posture of wanting to attack hard in the starry sky outside, making a big scene like the Heaven-Reaching Bone Tower.

In fact, those were just a smokescreen to attract his attention.

Their real trump card had long been deeply rooted in every inch of land of this Taiwu Ancestral Court over these long epochs. This transformed ruin itself was their greatest weapon.

And the "true master" who reigned as king at the bottom of the dry well, devouring all the remnant souls.

Did it live in this cage that had been carefully measured and transformed by others, and could it be unaware?

Or rather, had it already been completely assimilated by this ubiquitous mathematical model, becoming a calculation node in this huge formula of the Truth Realm? Were these two forces, in this closed dry well, killing each other, or had they long reached some kind of disgusting symbiosis?

Zhou Wannian lowered his head and flicked his toe slightly.

A piece of white jade debris, the size of a fist and shaped like a perfect cube, popped up from the ground and fell into his palm.

This piece of jade was originally irregular, but its edges had been forcibly ground and cut by some force, turning it into a geometric body that fit the aesthetics of the Truth Realm.

"Tearing down someone else's house and rearranging the building blocks according to one's own blueprints."

Zhou Wannian closed his five fingers.

The Great Perfection Space Law vibrated slightly in his palm.

The perfectly cubic white jade did not make any sound, directly turning into a fine white dust, pouring down through his fingers, and falling back onto the white jade avenue.

"Regardless of how many epochs you have calculated inside, or how good-looking a formation you have set up."

Zhou Wannian patted the jade powder off his hands, and his hands were folded behind his back again.

He raised his head, his calm eyes looking directly at the core main hall ruins deep in the ruins, which was the tallest and had the densest mathematical proportions.

"When I go for a walk, I've never liked having broken bricks and tiles on the ground that trip me up."

The green robe fluttered.

His spotless green cloth shoes took a step, treading on those precisely calculated ruin remnants, walking steadily toward the deepest part of this eerie matrix.