435: Chapter 435 The Chief Mastermind Finally Revealed; Half-Human, Half-Machine, Also Pitiful

Transparent ripples of mass radiated from the soles of Zhou Wannian's cyan shoes, skimming over the devastated ruins and pushing outward in all directions.

There was no deafening explosion of Qi. The Absolute Mass tempered by the Great Perfection Space Law, once freed from the shackles of his three-foot Domain, unleashed an unreasonable form of physical erasure.

The dozens of scarlet tractor beams hanging above Zhou Wannian's head, attempting to imprison him in place, bore the brunt of it.

The moment the beams touched the ripples of mass, they snapped and dissipated silently, like fragile spider silk colliding with a speeding millstone.

The dozens of escort warships behind the beams didn't even have time to sound their alarms before their massive hulls twisted severely in mid-air.

The silver-gray armor caved inward, and thick energy conduits ruptured.

"Clatter."

The logic core of a cube-shaped warship was crushed, and the plasma exhaust at the bottom of the ship extinguished instantly.

This steel behemoth, larger than a mountain, fell straight into the dried-up moat bed below like a lifeless lump of iron, kicking up a cloud of murky dust.

This was just the beginning.

The ripples of mass continued unabated, sweeping across the thousands of main warships surrounding the edge of the sinkhole and pouring firepower into the ground like autumn winds sweeping away fallen leaves.

Those high-dimensional alloys, capable of withstanding cosmic rays and spatial turbulence, were as fragile as thin window paper under the crushing force of Absolute Mass.

Bursts of teeth-grinding metallic screeching echoed continuously in the air.

The Truth Realm warships that were frantically excavating the earth's veins a moment ago collectively lost all lift the next.

Deep blue cutting beams backflowed into the barrels, triggering a series of muffled internal explosions.

Countless pieces of burning scrap metal, mixed with leaking coolant, rained down like a dense hailstorm, smashing onto the ten-thousand-foot deep sinkhole.

Zhou Wannian stood with his hands folded behind his back, stepping on the Void Realm.

He watched the warships falling like dumplings, a cold expression on his face.

If they ran into his locked courtyard from back then to dig pits, they should have been prepared to be kicked to pieces.

It took less than half a cup of tea's time.

That main fleet, armed to the teeth and dormant for countless eras, turned into a ring of scrap metal piled at the edge of the sinkhole.

The stench of burning engine oil mixed with the original sour, rotting Death Qi of the Taiwu Ancestral Court, brewing into a pungent wave of filth in the air.

The surroundings were finally quiet.

Zhou Wannian put down his raised right foot, preparing to walk to the edge of the sinkhole to see what was buried underneath that could make these tin cans go so mad.

Just as he took two steps.

A rhythmic vibration came from the bottom of the sinkhole, which was piled high with warship wreckage.

This vibration was different from the violent digging of the warships before; it was steady, sluggish, and carried the sticky sensation of liquid struggling to flow through rusty pipes.

Immediately after.

"Gurgle... Gurgle..."

The sound of muffled bubbles bursting came from deep underground.

The rubble and warship scrap at the bottom of the sinkhole were slowly lifted by an invisible force, sliding to both sides.

Blinding, ghastly white light overflowed from the ground cracks, illuminating the mountain of metal wreckage in a pale pallor.

In this blinding white light, a massive shadow, bearing countless pieces of falling scrap armor, rose little by little from the very bottom of the abyss.

Zhou Wannian stopped in his tracks, his gaze locked firmly on the rising shadow.

Amidst the pungent smell of engine oil in the air, there was suddenly another scent.

It was the faint, musty odor of carbon-based biological flesh after it had rotted and withered.

The shadow rose higher and higher, gradually leveling with Zhou Wannian's line of sight.

When the ghastly white light dimmed slightly, Zhou Wannian finally saw clearly what had crawled out from under the sinkhole.

It was a throne of white bones floating in mid-air.

The back of the throne was woven from countless intricate, thick cables, the ends of which connected to invisible dimensions in the Void Realm below.

Gray-white data streams flowed through those cables, like veins giving blood transfusions to a machine.

And on this throne, bristling with cables, sat a "person" who made Zhou Wannian's eyes narrow slightly.

Or rather, a pieced-together monster.

The monster's body was massive, but most of it was wrapped in heavy, silver-gray armor of the Truth Realm.

From the neck down, there was not a trace of flesh, only precisely interlocking gears, cold-glinting reactors, and thick hydraulic pipes.

But its head.

The head, placed on the mechanical neck, had human contours.

Zhou Wannian's gaze fell upon that face.

It was a face that had been brutally split down the middle.

The right half of the face was pure matrix metal.

On the polished, smooth, and shiny metal plate, there were no eyes, only an optical sensor constantly flashing red and blue light.

This half of the face exuded absolute rationality and coldness; it was an unquestionable machine.

The left half of the face.

Was actually real flesh and blood.

However, the flesh had long since withered and shriveled, like a layer of yellowed parchment stuck tightly to the cheekbones.

The cheeks were covered with deep wrinkles, and the corners of the mouth drooped, revealing endless exhaustion and vicissitudes.

That left eye, belonging to a human, was deeply sunken in its socket.

The eyeball was murky, covered with black bloodshot veins, and was currently staring at Zhou Wannian without blinking.

On the top of this monster's skull, several optical fibers as thick as an infant's arm pierced directly through the cranium, driving deep into its brain, welding that half of a human brain tightly to the vast data network surrounding it.

This was the Chief Mainframe of the Absolute Truth Realm.

The supreme will that issued bounties from behind countless dimensions, controlled tens of thousands of warships, and played with All Heavens and Myriad Worlds like beads on an abacus.

A half-human, half-mechanical abomination.

Zhou Wannian stood on the Void Realm stairs, looking at that half-withered flesh face, looking at that murky left eye.

Deep in his mind, those old memories, sealed away by the long passage of time and piled up in a corner, seemed to have a thick layer of dust suddenly swept away by a broom.

That half-face, that drooping corner of the mouth, and that eye that always held a stubborn streak.

On Zhou Wannian's usually calm face, a complex expression of astonishment and absurdity emerged.

"Li Changgeng."

Zhou Wannian parted his lips slightly, speaking a name that had vanished from this Universe countless eras ago.

The moment the half-mechanical monster sitting on the throne heard these three words, the optical sensor on its right metal face flashed with a blinding red light.

And on the left half of its withered flesh face, that murky eyeball suddenly widened, and the muscles at the corner of its eye twitched uncontrollably.

It opened its mouth.

Its dry, cracked lips moved up and down, revealing a row of yellowed teeth and half a mechanical tongue replaced by metal.

"Wannian..."

The voice came out.

This voice made one's scalp tingle. Half of it belonged to a living person—hoarse and airy—while the other half was a cold, rigid, and emotionless electronic synthesized voice.

The two completely different vocal lines were forcibly fused together, echoing over the dead ruins, appearing exceptionally eerie.

Zhou Wannian looked at the monster in front of him.

He recognized this face.

It was an old friend he had met when he was still a Mortal blacksmith, just stepping onto the path of Cultivation.

The Li Changgeng of the past was a poor, shabby Daoist who wore a tattered Daoist robe and spent all day talking about "saving the common people" and "seeking the supreme Dao."

The two of them had once sat in a dilapidated, leaking temple, drinking a few bowls of sour, turbid wine by a campfire.

Li Changgeng was a madman; in order to pursue the so-called ultimate truth of the Universe and find a method that would allow all living beings to escape the suffering of birth, aging, sickness, and death, he gave up the Cultivation of his Physical Body and dove headfirst into those ancient, obscure dimensional mazes.

Later, Zhou Wannian forged an iron lock in that rainy town and wandered to this Taiwu Ancestral Court. As for Li Changgeng, he lost contact during one of his explorations and completely disappeared in the long river of time.

Zhou Wannian had thought that this old companion had long since rotted in some unknown corner of the starry sky, his bones turned to dust.

Who would have thought.

Countless eras later, in this Taiwu Ancestral Court that sealed the greatest secret of the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds.

The high and mighty, cold-blooded and ruthless Truth Realm Mainframe, having peeled away those layers of metal shell, revealed none other than that poor Daoist who used to drink sour wine and spout grand words in a broken temple.

Meeting an old friend.

Zhou Wannian felt not a shred of joy at this long-awaited reunion.

He looked at the thick optical fibers plugged into Li Changgeng's skull, looking at the circuits that were constantly transmitting cold code into his brain.

"Old Li." Zhou Wannian let his hands hang naturally at his sides, his tone calm but tinged with a hint of a sigh and coldness. "Back in that broken temple, you said you wanted to seek a supreme Dao to save the world from suffering. I thought you were going to achieve Immortal Ascension and become an ancestor."

Zhou Wannian's gaze swept over the warship wreckage he had kicked to pieces, and over the core main hall that had been razed to the ground.

"After all that, the Dao you were seeking was to crack open your own skull, plug in a few pipes, and crawl into this iron turtle shell to become a half-human, half-ghost monster?"

Hearing this merciless mockery.

The muscles on Li Changgeng's half-withered flesh face twisted violently. In his murky left eye, a heart-stopping mix of pain and fanaticism surged.

"What do you know! You idler who only knows how to wander around and only cares about the peace beneath your own feet, what do you know!"

Li Changgeng roared.

His right hand, that mechanical claw made entirely of high-dimensional alloy, gripped the armrest of the bone throne tightly. The immense gripping force deformed the armrest, emitting a harsh creaking sound.

"The Immortal Dao is fake. The Demonic Path is also fake. Those experts who Cultivate to the peak are, in the end, nothing more than a handful of yellow dirt."

Li Changgeng's voice reverberated in mid-air, the proportion of the electronic synthesized voice clearly drowning out his original human voice, revealing a hysterical madness.

"I have traveled through endless dimensions, and I have spent tens of millions of years deducing. Wannian, you have no idea what I have seen!"

Li Changgeng's mechanical arm trembled, pointing toward the Void Realm canopy above, which, though the gray fog had been dispersed, remained dim and oppressive.

"This Universe is broken."

Zhou Wannian stood quietly in place, watching this old friend who had fallen into madness.

"All worlds, all Heavenly Dao, are following a leaking hourglass, leaking sand downward. Spiritual Qi is drying up, and the Origin is being lost. One day, the entire Universe will fall into absolute heat death, and all living beings will turn into cold, temperatureless stones."

Li Changgeng's murky human eye stared fixedly at Zhou Wannian.

"I cannot watch this happen. I must patch this loophole, I must rewrite the underlying logic of this Universe!"

He tugged hard at the optical fibers on top of his head, causing a few drops of thick, dark-red blood to seep from his scalp, flowing down his half-metal cheek and dripping onto the silver-gray armor.

"A human brain cannot calculate such vast data, so I split my Divine Soul in two; one half retains my humanity, and the other half is installed into the matrix."

"I established the Truth Realm, I collect the Origin of those low-dimensional worlds." Li Changgeng's voice became shrill. "Do you think I want to crush those living beings? I am saving them! Only by using their broken Origin can I deduce the formula to patch the sky."

Zhou Wannian looked at Li Changgeng.

Listening to this declaration of salvation, which was grandiose to the extreme, and also cruel to the extreme.

Using the corpses of billions of worlds as stepping stones, crushing millions of Mortals into a single brick.

And finally telling others that this was all to save the common people of the entire Universe.

"Old Li." Zhou Wannian shook his head, the temperature in his tone dropping to freezing point. "Grinding perfectly good living people into blood and gore, putting them into your abacus to play with like beads. The way you act as a savior is even more disgusting than those Devil Heads who drink blood and eat flesh."

"That is because they do not understand!"

Li Changgeng stood up abruptly from the bone throne.

His massive half-mechanical body hovered above the sinkhole, the thick cables behind him pulled straight, flashing with blinding gray-white light.

He did not launch an attack on Zhou Wannian.

In that left eye, full of bloodshot veins, the original fanaticism gradually faded, turning into a plea that was humble to the extreme.

This Mainframe that controlled the highest mechanical civilization of the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds, this madman who didn't hesitate to turn himself into an abomination for the sake of the greater good, actually bent his waist toward Zhou Wannian in mid-air with his clumsy mechanical body.

"Wannian. I have checked countless eras, I have searched through all the ancient texts."

Li Changgeng's voice became low and hoarse, carrying a thick plea.

"The loophole in this Universe's logic is right here beneath the Taiwu Ancestral Court. It is the 'Number Zero Constant' that we have been digging for for so long."

He pointed to the abyssal sinkhole below that had been blasted out by the warships.

"However, that loophole is too big. All the computing power of the Truth Realm, plus all the Origin I have scavenged, cannot even make a sound when poured into it."

Li Changgeng raised his head, that murky eye staring straight at Zhou Wannian, his gaze like that of a drowning person grabbing the last straw.

"Only you."

"I have calculated the mass on your body. Your Absolute Mass, which is not bound by any physical rules and has no upper limit."

Li Changgeng reached out that mechanical hand, covered in gears and circuits, toward Zhou Wannian.

"Wannian, I beg you."

"Unlock those chains deep within your Divine Soul. Give that mass to me, let me fill it into that logical black hole. As long as I have your power as a foundation, I can patch up this leaking Universe. The living beings of the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds will no longer have to wait for death."

The shrill night wind blew up from the sinkhole.

Li Changgeng's half-human, half-mechanical body trembled slightly in the wind, the little bit of human flesh on his face turning red with excitement.

For the sake of saving a nebulous, future Universe.

He begged Zhou Wannian to release the shackles suppressing his Absolute Mass.

Zhou Wannian stood where he was.

The hem of his cyan shirt was ruffled by the wind blowing from the abyss.

He looked at the old friend bowing and begging, looking at that eerie face mixed with tin and withered flesh.

He was not moved, nor was he infected by that grandiose slogan of salvation.

He slowly lowered his hands, which had been folded behind his back, and his spotless cyan cloth shoes tapped lightly on the Void Realm.

"Old Li, it's been tens of thousands of years. It seems the water in your brain has all leaked out through those broken pipes on top of your head."

Zhou Wannian raised his hand and tapped his own temple with his index finger.

"I don't understand those formulas you speak of, nor do I care which day this Universe will turn into cold stones."

His calm voice echoed over the dilapidated ruins, carrying an unshakeable stubbornness and leisure.

"When I go for a stroll, I only care whether these cloth shoes on my feet have gotten muddy, and whether the bowl of rice wine I begged for today is sour or not."

Zhou Wannian looked at the mechanical hand Li Changgeng was holding out in mid-air.

"Let me unlock the chains and hand over my life for you to patch a hole?"

He sneered, and in those eyes, deep as an ancient well, killing intent condensed inch by inch like freezing ice.

"What kind of thing do you think you are."