446: Chapter 446 Copper coins fall to the ground, creating ash mist; ripples rise in the Qingping Realm.

Zhou Wannian's right foot hovered steadily above the pitch-black hole that was devouring the spring rain filling the sky.

Outside the wine shop gates, the sound of wind and rain remained clamorous. Splashes hit the bluestone slabs, shattering into sprays of white mist. Just as he prepared to step the Absolute Mass refined from the Great Perfection Space Law firmly into this void, a flurry of panicked movement came from behind him.

"Oh, my heavens!"

The Old Shopkeeper had been napping behind the counter and had just woken up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He had intended to carry the plate of peanuts, freshly salted, to the guest by the window. But as he looked up, through the open doorway, he clearly saw the bottomless black hole outside the threshold, a void so deep that even the falling rain made no sound as it disappeared within.

The old man's legs went weak with fear, and he trembled all over. He could no longer hold the coarse ceramic plate, and it plummeted toward the rammed earth floor.

Zhou Wannian did not turn around.

His left hand, carried behind his back, gave a seemingly casual flick toward the Old Shopkeeper.

A gentle yet dense stream of True Qi rose from beneath, catching the coarse ceramic plate steadily just half an inch above the ground. Subsequently, this True Qi carried the plate, perfectly balanced, back into the Old Shopkeeper's hands, which were frozen in mid-air from terror. Not a single salted peanut fell from the plate.

"Shopkeeper."

Zhou Wannian's calm voice resonated in the dim wine shop, its tone carrying a gentle, mellow quality that soothed the spirit. This voice drowned out the wind and rain outside, drilling straight into the Old Shopkeeper's ears.

"It is a cold spring day. That inferior Yellow Springs wine you've been drinking makes it easy for one's eyes to play tricks. Outside is nothing but a bluestone slab covered in water; there is no hole."

Clutching the recovered plate of peanuts, the Old Shopkeeper's heart, which had been pounding violently from terror, miraculously calmed down under the soothing effect of that steady voice. His turbid old eyes blinked hard a few times, his vision began to blur, and his mind grew drowsy.

"Is... is it just my eyes playing tricks from drinking too much?" The Old Shopkeeper let out a long yawn, shook his head, and mumbled as he turned away. "This wretched weather, there isn't even a ghost to be seen. I'd better go back to the kitchen and lie down for a while. Take your time, guest; just leave the wine money on the table."

Zhou Wannian listened as the Old Shopkeeper's shuffling footsteps gradually faded, until they disappeared completely behind the curtain leading to the backyard.

His washed-out blue cloth robe fluttered slightly in the cold, damp wind and rain blowing in from the front.

Confirming that this mundane Mortal was sleeping soundly, Zhou Wannian withdrew his focus and re-centered his gaze on the dimensional black hole beneath his feet, which radiated a spatial pulling force.

His right foot did not hesitate again, landing plainly.

The moment his shoe sole touched that pitch-black void, there was no sound. The Absolute Mass, capable of crushing black stone steles, brutally suppressed the violent spatial turbulence at the edge of the black hole.

Zhou Wannian, in his entirety, stepped into the abyss just like that.

Outside the wine shop, the three-foot-wide black hole, after swallowing that cyan figure, closed like an eyelid, rapidly shrinking toward the center. Within the blink of an eye, the black hole vanished without a trace, and the bluestone path returned to its original state. Rainwater pounded against it, splashing up, as if the passage to the endless dimensions had never existed.

...

The process of crossing dimensions, in Zhou Wannian's perception, was like walking through a narrow, long tunnel paved with colorful glass shards.

The surrounding light was twisted and stretched into blinding, multicolored ribbons of light. The flow of time became meaningless here. If an ordinary Cultivator were to enter such a dimensional passage, their Divine Soul would be torn to shreds by the space in an instant. But the layer of Absolute Mass around Zhou Wannian was like a heavy, solid iron ship, crushing all spatial storms that attempted to approach outside the hull.

There was no sensation of weightlessness, nor any dizziness.

Only a sound like tearing silk, a "shhh" noise, reached his ears, and at the end of the light ribbons ahead, a blinding white light appeared.

Zhou Wannian stepped on the void and crossed out of that white light in one stride.

His feet landed firmly on solid ground.

The sensation from his soles was not the hard, smooth bluestone of a Jiangnan town, but a sticky, soft, and slimy mud.

Zhou Wannian stood steady, his eyes, deep as an abyss, slowly sweeping across his surroundings.

A thick, pungent odor rushed into his nostrils first. It was not the refreshing scent of green bamboo after rain that the Qingping Realm should have had, nor the fragrance of soil in the mountains.

It was a stench mixed with intense blood, acrid sulfur, and the sour, rotting Death Qi of decaying meat.

Zhou Wannian tilted his head slightly.

The sight before him caused that face, usually revealing a hint of leisure, to be covered in a layer of eternal frost.

The sky was no longer azure blue.

Above the firmament, it looked as if it had been hacked wildly by a giant, rusted axe, with seven or eight massive black gashes, each thousands of miles long, crisscrossing it. Those gashes were bottomless, their edges showing a festering, deathly gray color.

Accompanied by a deafening roar, like billions of peals of thunder rolling simultaneously, waterfalls of turbid, yellow, foul-smelling water were pouring down from those cracks in the sky.

It was the Yellow Springs backflowing.

These murky waters, capable of corroding all life, fell from the sky, smashing onto the once beautiful mountains and lands of the Qingping Realm.

The rolling, emerald green mountains in the distance were now nothing but charred remains. Trees had withered and carbonized, and the mountains had been carved with bottomless gullies by the Yellow Springs water. The ground was covered in ankle-deep, murky yellow mud, with a layer of greasy, gray-white foam floating on the water's surface.

Thick gray mist rolled slowly over this apocalyptic muddy water.

Zhou Wannian was all too familiar with the aura of this gray mist. It was the unique Death Qi from the Withered Well at the bottom of the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

The Qingping Realm, which he had once casually snapped the extraterrestrial thread for and re-infused with Heavenly Dao Origin to grant a new life, was now suffering a tragic, apocalyptic catastrophe.

The monster at the bottom of the Withered Well had rooted its tentacles through the dimensions into this place, intending to turn this lower-level fish pond into another incubation pool for its Death Qi.

A nauseating wet slapping sound came from the mud.

Zhou Wannian looked toward the sound.

Several green oxen, which should have been used by Mortals in the Lower Realm for farming, were blindly wandering out of the gray mist ahead.

Their bodies had undergone horrific distortion. Large areas of their fur had festered, revealing gray-white rotting flesh underneath. Thick white bones pierced through their skin, growing outward haphazardly, like bone spurs stuck into their backs. There were no pupils in their eyes, only two jumping gray ghostly lights.

These twisted monsters dragged their feet through the mud, emitting meaningless roars, heads lowered, gnawing on clumps of unrecognizable rotting meat floating in the mud.

One distorted green ox seemed to detect Zhou Wannian, a living being radiating a different aura. It suddenly lifted its head, spat out a stream of gray, turbid Qi, kicked its four hooves in the mud, opened its fang-filled mouth, and lunged straight at Zhou Wannian.

Zhou Wannian's hands remained folded behind his back, not moving a single finger.

The moment that massive distorted monster lunged within three feet of him.

The Absolute Mass refined from the Great Perfection Space Law crushed over it silently.

"Bang."

There was no flying flesh, no shrill screams.

The distorted green ox, as if it had crashed into an insurmountable wall of iron, had its massive body crushed directly into the finest gray-white powder the instant it touched the invisible Domain. The powder scattered into the mud beneath his feet, not even causing a ripple.

Zhou Wannian did not pay attention to the other monsters wandering in the distance.

He took a step, his pristine blue cloth shoes stepping onto the mud formed by the Yellow Springs backflow; the water automatically parted to both sides, not a drop touching him.

Following the direction where the mud spread, he walked toward a Mortal village in his memory not far away.

The outline of the village loomed in the sky-filling Yellow Springs rain and gray mist.

Most of the houses built of mud and grass had collapsed, with several charred roof beams stuck diagonally in the mud. The fence walls had shattered into a pile of rotten wood.

Zhou Wannian walked into the village.

There was no noise of living people here, nor the vitality of chickens and dogs.

There wasn't even a single corpse.

Zhou Wannian stopped in front of a half-collapsed thatched cottage, his gaze falling into the courtyard.

In the center of the courtyard stood a gray-white stone statue.

It was a person dressed as a farmer. His hands were raised high, seemingly originally holding a hoe used for resistance, but the hoe was already gone. The facial features on his face were twisted, retaining the indescribable terror and despair of his final moment. His mouth was open, as if emitting a shrill scream, but no sound could ever come from his throat.

Zhou Wannian stepped forward, extended his fair, slender fingers, and placed them plainly on the shoulder of this farmer stone statue.

The sensation from his fingertips was cold, hard, and carried the rough, granular texture unique to rock.

There was no trace of any technique or illusion.

This living person, with their beating warm heart, flowing blood, and soft flesh—the moment the underlying Heavenly Dao Law was forcibly tampered with, from inside to outside, from bone marrow to hair, they had completely turned into a piece of lifeless, stubborn stone.

Zhou Wannian turned his head and looked toward the dirt road of the village.

There, a woman knelt on both knees, shielding a young child tightly beneath her.

The mother and child had turned into a single, seamless block of gray-white rock, the rain hitting them and sliding down along the cold stone patterns.

The entire Qingping Realm, all living beings, whether birds, beasts, Mortals, or Cultivators, as long as they hadn't been twisted into those bloodthirsty monsters, had all turned into silent, screaming stones across the mountains and plains under this reversed Law.

This was not just a massacre.

This was modifying the fundamental concept of this world's existence.

Just then.

A faint, dull rhythmic sound pierced through the roar of the sky-filling Yellow Springs waterfall and reached Zhou Wannian's ears.

"Thump... thump..."

The sound was extremely faint, like a heart about to stop beating, making its final, powerless struggle.

Zhou Wannian followed the sound to an abandoned water well.

Beside the well lay a flat bluestone that village women usually used to beat clothes. The surface of the bluestone was covered in withered moss, and its edges appeared somewhat rounded from years of pounding.

The sound was coming from inside this ordinary piece of bluestone.

Zhou Wannian lowered his head and gazed quietly at this bluestone.

The surface of the bluestone was undergoing a hair-raising change at that moment. Cracks resembling spiderwebs were slowly splitting open on the hard stone surface.

From deep within those dark stone crevices, a viscous liquid was seeping out.

It was not murky mud water.

It was blood, presenting a blinding scarlet red, carrying the warm aura belonging to a living organism.

"Thump... thump..."

With every resonance of that heart-like rhythm, the blood in the crevices was squeezed out as if by an invisible pump, gushing out continuously. The blood flowed along the texture of the bluestone surface and dripped into the mud below, staining that pool of water bright red.

The stone was bleeding.

Lifeless, dead objects, under this forcibly reversed Heavenly Dao Law, had actually sprouted the rhythm of flesh and blood, possessing the pulse of a living person.

Zhou Wannian squatted down, looking at the bluestone millstone that kept gushing blood.

Living people had turned into cold, stiff, stubborn stones across the ground, retaining their desperate postures before death.

And the cold, dead stones found everywhere by the roadside had, as if granted life, painfully throbbed in the crevices, weeping hot blood.

Living beings turned into stubborn stones.

Stubborn stones flowed with emerald blood.

In Zhou Wannian's eyes, deep as a cold pool, there was no reflection of the Yellow Springs' turbid water, nor the tragic state of the stone statues.

Inside them, there was only an Absolute calmness that seemed capable of freezing the stars.

He knew all too well what this scene meant.

Back then.

He had strolled past this Qingping Realm, watching as this world was drained of Spiritual Qi by the Extraterrestrial Angler, who treated it as a fish pond. He found it an eyesore, so he snapped that crystal-clear thread with one finger.

To leave a gatekeeper for this world.

He had chosen that Mortal youth named "Stone."

He had slapped the entire world's Heavenly Dao Origin into the center of that Mortal's brow, causing an imprint of a broken ring intertwined with a teardrop to appear there.

He had allowed a Mortal, lowly as dirt, to ascend to the heavens in one step and become the new Realm Lord with the power of life and death over a realm.

That method was called Turning Stones into Gold. It bestowed the destiny of the Heavenly Dao upon a Mortal.

And now.

The real master beneath the abyss of the Withered Well had pierced the dimensional barrier with its tentacles, which carried Death Qi and gray mist, and rooted them firmly into the soil of this Qingping Realm.

It did not choose to use violence to directly shatter this world.

Instead, it used a method bordering on paranoia and madness to completely reverse the Heavenly Dao Law of this Qingping Realm.

You bestowed life and creation upon "Stone" back then, making him a high-and-mighty Realm Lord.

Very well.

I will turn all living things in this realm, whether human or beast, into lifeless stones.

And I will bestow a beating pulse upon all the dead stones in this realm, making them bleed until they are drained dry.

This was the most vicious, naked mockery and revenge against the Karma of that "Turning Stones into Gold" event back then.

The monster hiding beneath the mud was provoking this leisurely Creator with the miserable end of the living beings of an entire lower-level world.

Borrowing this scene of devastation, it whispered coldly into Zhou Wannian's ear: The Mortal world you casually saved, I can casually knead into this hellish, neither-human-nor-ghost appearance. What can you do to me?

Zhou Wannian slowly stood up.

The hem of his green robe left the mud, not stained by that glaring, scarlet red.

He looked up at the black cracks in the sky that were continuously pouring out Yellow Springs sewage. He felt the viscous malice belonging to the Withered Well's Death Qi that permeated this world.

He did not let out a heaven-shaking roar, nor did his eyes split with rage because of this hellish scene before him.

He simply raised both hands and plainly straightened his lapels.

Then.

His slender, fair fingers gently brushed his wide green sleeves.

It was as if he had just walked along a dusty dirt road and was brushing off the dirt he had picked up.

"Turning living people into stones, and stones into bleeding flesh."

Zhou Wannian's calm voice transmitted clearly amidst the roar of the Yellow Springs waterfall.

"Your aesthetic for molding mud is truly rotten to the core. To set up such a foul-smelling scene in this Qingping Realm, just to disgust me for a moment."

His hands, folded behind his back, clenched slightly.

His pristine blue cloth shoes took a steady step on the muddy yellow water.

The direction his toe pointed.

Was exactly the core of this tampered Heavenly Dao Law, and also where the tentacle of Death Qi was rooted the deepest.

The ruins of the former Realm Lord's palace.

"Since you stretched out your claw and set up this stage."

Zhou Wannian walked forward, strolling leisurely against the sky-filling Yellow Springs rain.

"Then I will go over, and following this dirty hand of yours, I will break off that entire arm you are hiding behind it, inch by inch."