457: Chapter 457 The Clay Statue Collapses, Black Rain Falls, and a Mysterious World Lies Deep Within the Cracks

After that punch was thrown, the Void Realm fell into a deathly silence that defied common sense.

Zhou Wannian's slender, fair right hand remained in its extended posture, while the black dot at the tip of his fist, dense to the limit, had silently dissipated, turning into a gentle breeze that brushed past his faded blue cloth sleeve.

But along the trajectory of that punch, the terrifying destructive power had only just begun to reveal its true face.

The massive monster lurking at the bottom of the Withered Well—that mire kneaded together from the remnants of countless dead Universes, the despair of billions of living beings, and pure, zero-return Death Qi—had welcomed its total disintegration in terms of its very concept of existence after enduring that inwardly collapsing Absolute Mass.

"Argh—"

A scream, shrill to the depths of the marrow, erupted from the deepest part of that black-gray mire that was collapsing frantically.

This cry was not a sound wave transmitted through air vibrations, but a spiritual storm that swept directly across all dimensions of this Star Domain.

The sound was mixed with too many chaotic things: the desperate roars of ancient gods and demons when stars fell, the helpless wails of Mortals in the Lower Realm when the sky collapsed and the earth sank, and the sharp, garbled noises emitted by cold mechanical civilizations before their logic cores were incinerated.

Billions upon billions of different screams were forcibly crushed and churned together, forming a terrifying sound wave capable of instantly tearing the Divine Soul of an ordinary Grand Unity Golden Immortal into pieces.

The sound wave rippled through the dead silence of the vacuum, with visible gray ripples spreading outward in layers.

Zhou Wannian stood where he was, his hands already folded behind his back again.

In his eyes, deep as a cold pool, there was not a ripple caused by this shrill scream.

Those spiritual storms capable of destroying one's mind, the moment they touched his body, were like a breeze brushing against an ancient, unyielding basalt mountain; apart from emitting a faint whimper, they couldn't even stir a single hair at his temple.

Ahead, the collapse of the mire monster was accelerating.

That carcass, originally large enough to fill a galaxy, had lost the internal tension to maintain its form after being pierced by the fist and having its core completely smashed.

Those viscous black-gray dead waters and the overlapping faces of myriad races began to expand and twist violently in mid-air.

"Boom!"

Accompanied by a series of muffled roars resembling the chain detonation of stars, the monster's body completely exploded.

There was no blinding firelight, nor a mushroom cloud of energy rising into the sky.

It was a rain.

A black-gray rainstorm that swept across the entire Chaotic Star Domain and completely submerged the Void Realm.

In the instant of the explosion, the monster's massive volume turned into trillions upon trillions of muddy droplets.

These droplets were not ordinary rainwater; each one was wrapped in an impossibly dense, acidic, and rotting Death Qi, wrapped in the ultimate Law of the Universe's heat death.

The rain poured down in torrents.

There was no gravity in the Void Realm, but these black-gray raindrops seemed to carry some strange guidance, shooting wildly in all directions.

The entire world, at this moment, turned into a mottled painting of only black and gray.

The raindrops were so dense they formed curtains of black water, obscuring the starlight in the distance and the wreckage of warships floating in the Void Realm.

Zhou Wannian was in the very center of this rainstorm.

"Plop."

A drop of black-gray rainwater hit the Void Realm three feet in front of him diagonally.

The Absolute Mass refined by the Great Perfection Space Law formed an invisible and intangible barrier there.

The raindrop struck the barrier, emitting a dull, crisp sound, and then shattered into hundreds of smaller water beads.

The Death Qi within the water beads tried to corrode this layer of the barrier, but it was like a few drops of strong acid falling onto a solid gold ingot; apart from emitting a wisp of faint white smoke, it could not shake it in the slightest.

"Plop, plop, plop..."

The rain grew heavier, and the sound became incessant.

Billions of drops of black water slammed against the Domain around Zhou Wannian, and the splashing mist permeated the air, shrouding his blue figure in a hazy gray vapor.

Zhou Wannian did not open any immortal magic shield to shelter from the wind and rain.

He just stood there quietly, letting the most filthy and desperate rainwater in the Universe shatter before him.

He tilted his head slightly, his gaze piercing through the layers of black water curtains.

In his nostrils, that nauseating smell became even more intense.

With the monster's explosion, those specimens of dead Universes that it had swallowed and digested also released their final aura in this rainstorm.

The smell of rotting wood, the scent of dried blood, the metallic tang of rust, and a stench similar to that emitted by an ancient corpse stored for millions of years.

These smells mixed together to form a stench capable of making one's internal organs churn and roil.

Zhou Wannian was expressionless.

He was a man who could swallow even the most sour, inferior wine in a Lower Realm tavern, and could stroll leisurely through moss-covered, muddy alleys; this bit of smell was not enough to make him cover his nose.

He just felt it was a bit dirty.

"Spilling out all the bad water in your belly."

Zhou Wannian's calm voice rang out amidst the dense sound of rain, revealing a chill of being disturbed from his peace.

"This thing at the bottom of the Withered Well, even when facing death, doesn't forget to disgust people."

He turned his head to look at the Void Realm to his side.

There, a piece of wreckage from a Truth Realm warship, previously shattered by the mass ripples, was floating.

It was a high-dimensional alloy armor plate weighing thousands of tons, with a durability sufficient to withstand the high-temperature scorching of a star's surface.

At this moment, the black rain filling the sky was mercilessly slamming against this armor plate.

"Sizzle—"

A scalp-tingling sound of corrosion exploded instantly.

Those black-gray raindrops fell onto the high-dimensional alloy like a red-hot branding iron pressed against delicate skin.

The Death Qi within the raindrops rapidly dissolved the molecular structure inside the metal, and a large amount of pungent yellow-green toxic smoke rose from the surface of the hard armor plate.

In just a few breaths, that thousands-of-tons alloy wreckage, under the scouring of this black rain, turned into a pool of foul-smelling molten iron, and then quickly solidified in the low temperature of the vacuum into a lump of irregular black slag.

This was the power of the rainstorm formed after the monster exploded.

It was not using physical force to smash matter, but using the pure Law of heat death to erase the existence concept of all things with form.

If this black rain were to fall into a living Major Thousand Worlds, in just half an hour, the mountains and rivers, birds and beasts, and even the cultivation experts in that world would be completely assimilated by this rainwater, turning into a pile of lifeless black ash.

Zhou Wannian withdrew his gaze.

No matter how heavy this rainstorm was, no matter how strong its corrosiveness, it could not penetrate the small space constructed by his Absolute Mass.

His faded blue cloth gown remained dry, not even a single thread was dampened.

His gaze was cast forward once again.

Deep within the black-gray water curtains pouring down from the sky, at the location of the Void Realm fault that he had punched through.

A crack about a zhang long, with jagged edges, was floating there quietly.

This crack was a wound left behind after the fundamental Law barrier supporting the existence of this Universe was forcibly smashed by the Absolute Mass.

At this moment, against the backdrop of this dim, desperate rainstorm, this crack underwent a strange change.

Inside the crack, which originally revealed endless blankness where even light and the concept of space did not exist, a layer of fluorescence gradually lit up.

This light was incredibly faint.

It was not the hot, blinding white light of a burning star, nor the cold, rigid light on Truth Realm warships, and certainly not the colorful, dazzling treasure light emitted by the Magic Treasure of a cultivator.

This was a cold, pure, faint fluorescence devoid of any emotional Impurities.

This fluorescence was like the cold halo emitted by some unknown creature at the very bottom of the deep sea, or like the flickering trajectory of the most primitive logic code in the void.

It shone out from the depths of the crack, illuminating the jagged, broken edges, outlining the opening clearly in the dark rainstorm.

When the black-gray raindrops filling the sky approached this crack, a phenomenon that defied common sense occurred.

The rainwater carrying intense Death Qi did not pass through the crack and fall into it.

Several feet away from the crack, the raindrops seemed to have struck an invisible wall composed of higher-level Laws.

"Puff. Puff."

Under the illumination of the fluorescence, the rainwater was directly decomposed into the most primitive void particles, without even a wisp of white smoke rising, and then it disappeared completely.

The monster's rainstorm of Death Qi, capable of corroding the Universe, appeared so low-level and vulnerable in front of this crack emitting faint fluorescence.

Zhou Wannian watched the glowing crack quietly.

In his deep eyes, that cold fluorescence was reflected, and a ripple of thought arose in the depths of his eyes.

"Breaking the layer of mud on the surface, the background revealed is actually somewhat interesting."

Zhou Wannian lifted his chin slightly.

He knew that behind that crack was the true source of all this turmoil.

That mire monster lurking at the bottom of the Withered Well was merely an execution program derived by this source to accelerate the heat death of the Universe, a scavenger used to clean up cosmic waste.

Now, the scavenger had been beaten into a sky full of dirty rain by his punch.

The door to the backend had been opened.

Zhou Wannian slowly lowered his hands, which were folded behind his back.

He raised his right arm, placing the wide blue sleeve across his chest.

His slender, fair left hand reached out, fingers together, and he calmly dusted his right sleeve twice.

"Pat, pat."

The two slight sounds of fabric being patted seemed insignificant amidst the deafening sound of the rain, yet they clearly reached his own ears.

On this blue gown, clearly protected by the Absolute Domain, not even a drop of muddy water or a speck of dust had touched it.

But Zhou Wannian still dusted it off earnestly.

This was a habit. It was also a distinction in state of mind.

What he dusted off was the filth from the mud pit outside, and the nonsensical schemes and clamor.

He wanted to tidy himself up, to go and see what kind of trash was actually placed in the backend at the very bottom of this Universe, with the demeanor of a fresh and clean idler.

After dusting his right sleeve, he switched hands and dusted his left sleeve twice as well.

After doing all this, Zhou Wannian let his hands fall naturally to his sides.

He stepped forward.

Spotless cyan cloth shoes stepped upon the Void Realm, facing the black-gray rain pouring down across the sky.

He walked toward that fissure emitting a faint fluorescent glow.

Enveloped by the gale, the rain smashed crazily before him.

The pitter-patter of shattering water droplets was endless.

Zhou Wannian's pace was steady and firm.

With every step, the Void Realm beneath his feet rippled with mass ripples invisible to the naked eye.

He was like a traveler holding an umbrella, walking alone through a rainy alley in Jiangnan; no matter how fierce the storm outside, it could not dampen the tranquility in his heart.

Three steps later.

He arrived at the edge of the fissure.

Viewed up close, this fissure looked even more shocking.

It was a sense of fragmentation that acted directly upon the cognitive level.

The edge of the fissure was not a break in matter, but an abrupt cessation of the concept of space.

The cold, fluorescent light poured out from within, illuminating Zhou Wannian's handsome, easygoing face, which nevertheless revealed an unshakable stubbornness.

He did not hesitate, nor did he release his Divine Sense to scout the path.

He lifted his right foot.

With steady composure, he stepped across that jagged boundary.

Half his body submerged into that fluorescent void.

As he stepped in, a strange sensation, indescribable in words, instantly enveloped his entire body.

It was a feeling of complete detachment.

The sounds of the rain, the wind, and the hissing of melting warship wreckage behind him were cleanly and decisively cut off the moment he crossed the boundary.

The stench of rotting corpses mixed with machine oil in his nose also vanished completely.

Zhou Wannian felt that the physical constants constituting his three-dimensional coordinates had lost all points of reference at this moment.

Gravity, direction, and the speed of time's passage were all blocked outside that fissure.

If it were an ordinary cultivator, even those Soul Transformation experts who claimed to live as long as heaven and earth, the moment they lost the support of these fundamental parameters of the Universe, their Divine Soul and Physical Body would collapse directly into nothingness because they could not define their own existence.

But Zhou Wannian was different.

The ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine jade-like chains within his body emitted a soft, steady hum.

A luster like white jade circulated within his inner universe, firmly anchoring his limitless Absolute Mass to his own "concept."

When the outside Universe gave him a coordinate, he could stand.

When the outside Universe took away all coordinates, he remained himself.

He did not need the Universe to prove his existence; his existence itself was an absolute truth that transcended this world.

He brought his left foot forward.

Zhou Wannian passed through that fissure completely.

The opening behind him did not heal like an ordinary spatial fissure after he entered.

It remained suspended there, emitting a faint fluorescent glow, like a one-way door that was forever open.

Zhou Wannian stood in this brand-new space.

He looked around.

The scene before him caused this scholar in green robes, who had wandered for countless epochs and witnessed all manner of bizarre phenomena in the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds, to betray a look of deep astonishment in his eyes.

Here, there was no starry sky.

There were no nebulae flashing with multicolored light, nor were there cold and dead asteroid belts.

Here, there was no matter either.

There were no mountains, rivers, or earth, no pavilions or towers; even the tiniest specks of dark matter that should exist in a vacuum could not be found here.

This was a pure, completely emptied place.

There was no sky overhead, and no earth beneath his feet.

Everything around him was filled only with a faint, uniform, and eternal fluorescent glow.

This light had no source; it seemed to be the color of the space itself—cold, rigid, and devoid of any warmth.

After adapting to this strange light, Zhou Wannian's gaze locked onto the only thing that existed in this space.

Directly in front of him.

Or rather, in this space devoid of direction, everywhere his gaze fell, there were countless transparent threads arranged in lines.

These threads were not tangled together in a chaotic mess.

They presented an astonishing sense of absolute, rigorous order.

Row upon row, column upon column.

These transparent threads were like books neatly arranged on shelves in a super library so vast it had no boundaries.

However, there were no physical shelves here.

The threads were suspended in mid-air, maintaining an absolutely equal distance between them.

They extended vertically upward until they vanished into an endless height beyond reach, while simultaneously hanging downward, piercing into the void abyss below.

Between each row of threads, there was a passage about a zhang wide that led straight into the distance.

Zhou Wannian stood at the entrance of one such passage, watching those transparent threads.

These threads were extremely thin, so thin they even transcended the scale of microscopic particles.

If not for the fact that they occasionally refracted a faint, elusive glimmer under the fluorescent light, the naked eye of a normal person would be unable to capture their existence at all.

"The Loom."

In Zhou Wannian's mind flashed the name mentioned in that line of distorted runes pieced together from the severed tentacle on the ancient starry road outside the Qingping Realm.

The very word that had lured him here.

But looking at the boundless, neatly arranged matrix of threads before him, he shook his head.

"How can this be any sort of loom for weaving cloth?"

Zhou Wannian took a step and walked into the passage flanked by two rows of transparent threads.

His cyan cloth shoes trod upon the intangible void, his gait remaining steady.

He walked to a row of threads on the left and stopped.

From a very close distance, he could clearly hear these transparent threads emitting a series of subtle vibrations.

"Hum... hum..."

This sound was not a sound wave, but a frequency fluctuation acting directly upon the Divine Soul.

Billions upon billions of threads vibrated in unison, converging into a low, vast, and grand symphony that seemed to encompass all the information in the entire Universe.

Zhou Wannian extended his right hand.

His fair, slender fingers slowly approached one of the transparent threads.

He did not pinch it directly with his hand; instead, he hovered the pad of his index finger less than half an inch away from the thread.

His Divine Soul's perception followed his fingertip like a probe, reaching toward the thread that was vibrating slightly.

The instant they made contact, a massive and complex stream of information rushed into Zhou Wannian's Sea of Consciousness.

It was not a passage of text, nor was it an image.

It was a set of physical Laws, rigorous to the extreme.

Within that tiny thread, Zhou Wannian perceived a specific value.

It was a constant formula regarding gravitational decay.

Every vibration of this thread radiated this formula outward.

Its fluctuations penetrated this backend space, connected to the vast sea of stars outside, and precisely anchored onto a star in a certain lower Major Thousand Worlds.

This thread was maintaining that star's gravity so that it would not collapse.

Zhou Wannian moved his finger away and hovered his fingertip over a thread next to it.

Information flooded in again.

This time, it was a Law of Karma regarding the propagation of life.

It connected to a certain race in a Mortal World, dictating all possible paths of their evolution from birth to death, from genes to destiny.

The third thread, the fourth thread.

Zhou Wannian walked through this passage with his hands behind his back, his gaze sweeping slowly over the rows of transparent threads displayed like bookshelves.

Strong and weak nuclear forces, spatial curvature, the flow of time, and even the ebb and flow of Spiritual Qi tides in a cultivation realm.

This was no machine for weaving cloth.

This was the underlying logic control console for the entire All Heavens and Myriad Worlds and all parallel dimensions.

It was the "backend" of this Universe.

That sea of stars outside, seemingly vibrant and full of bizarre phenomena—those lofty gods and demons, those mechanical civilizations calculating desperately, those Mortals struggling in the Mortal World—the rising and setting of the sun and moon, birth, aging, sickness, death, and the cycle of Karma they all followed were all dictated by these transparent threads arranged here.

Each thread represented a fundamental line of code for the operation of the Universe.

Billions upon billions of threads intertwined to construct the world outside, which appeared vast but was in fact tightly confined within these rules.

"If those tin cans from the Truth Realm could see this place, they would probably burn out their own motherboards on the spot."

Zhou Wannian walked in the passage, emitting a cold, mocking laugh.

Li Changge had spent his entire life, even turning himself into a half-human, half-machine monster, building vast fleets to deduce the ethereal ultimate truth of the Universe.

He thought the truth was hidden in deep space, hidden under the ruins of the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

He did not know that the truth he sought, the physical constants he had struggled and risked his life to unlock, were here, hanging in mid-air row by row, like common cabbages.

As long as someone could walk to this place, as long as someone could pluck these threads, then the rules of the Universe outside could be tampered with at will.

Zhou Wannian stopped.

He looked at the long corridor of threads ahead that seemed like it would never end.

Although it was clean, tidy, and filled with a sense of absolute order, Zhou Wannian felt that this place was even more suffocating than the belly of the foul-smelling, muddy monster outside.

There were no variables.

There was no warmth.

Everything was nailed firmly into a predetermined framework by these transparent threads.

"Turning the living Mortal World into a bunch of marionettes."

A look of deep disgust appeared on Zhou Wannian's handsome face.

He was the type of person who liked to drink the inconsistent, potentially souring inferior yellow wine from street-side taverns; he liked to watch the chaotic splashes on the bluestone slabs during a rainy day.

He liked the uncontrollable, earthly vitality, and he liked the unreasonable variables born from life as it struggled and crawled forward.

And here.

This backend of the Universe, this machine room maintaining the operation of everything, was the deepest culprit that deprived life of those variables.