470: Chapter 469 Looking back, the old peach buds reappear; a single thought of life breaks through ten thousand deaths.

"Creak... Creak-creak..."

The sound of bones grinding, enough to set one's teeth on edge, was infinitely amplified within the grayish-white waterfall of Death Qi, like a rusty, blunt saw dragging back and forth across Zhou Wannian's eardrums.

It was the mournful cry emanating from his own hand bones.

That formless giant axe, bearing infinite Absolute Mass and the breath of Mortal life, had its blade bitten firmly into the deepest part of the crack in the copper coin dome. Yet, faced with that closed-loop crushing pressure representing the Universe's ultimate heat death, it was being pushed outward, bit by bit.

The dark green patina of time, like living granulation tissue, writhed and proliferated frantically on both sides of the crack. With reckless madness, they piled up layer by layer against the axe blade, attempting to use the weight of death, accumulated over billions of epochs, to force out the wedge that had split open this deadlock.

"Crack... Crack!"

Zhou Wannian's right arm bone, already fractured by a third, emitted another shrill, crisp snap under the extreme ravages of the recoil.

The stark white bone splinters completely pierced through the necrotic grayish-white flesh. Several tiny fragments of bone were even sent flying under the extreme pressure, instantly swept away by the surrounding violent grayish-white dead waters and assimilated into nothingness.

The sensation of pain had long since gone numb.

In its place was an absolute coldness, enough to completely strip away the "self" from the depths of the Soul.

The grayish-white torrent gushing wildly from the two-finger-wide crack grew faster and more terrifyingly concentrated. This was not just a scouring on a physical level, but a forced dimensional reduction on a conceptual level.

On the cheek where half of Zhou Wannian's flesh remained, a grayish-decayed color was spreading to the other half at a speed visible to the naked eye. His left eye, fixed tightly on the crack, began to lose its clarity.

A grayish-white film had covered the surface of his eyeball, though he knew not when it happened.

That was the Death Qi freezing his optic nerves, stripping away his right to perceive everything in this world.

In Zhou Wannian's field of vision, the dark green crack above, whose outline could once be clearly seen, had now blurred into a mass of chaotic gray shadow. Light, color, shape—everything was sliding irreversibly toward blurriness and decay under the scouring of this ultimate despair.

And in the deepest depths of his Sea of Consciousness, the situation was dangerous to the extreme.

The great white jade net, woven from ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Jade-ified Chains and protecting the periphery of his Divine Soul and True Spirit, was currently enduring unimaginable destruction.

"Sizzle... Sizzle..."

The sound of corrosion echoed through every inch of the void in his inner universe.

Those "despairs," purified from the destruction of countless parallel Universes, had transformed into blurry, twisted grayish-white ghastly faces, biting fiercely onto the white jade chains.

On the surface of the jade, which had originally been crystal clear and emitting a warm yellow light, those shocking mottled gray spots had now merged into a large patch. The grayish-white blotches, like corpse spots growing on a living person, had deeply permeated into the material of the chains.

The gaps in the great net were growing larger and larger.

That cold, viscous seawater of Death Qi, exuding the sentiment that "all things shall return to zero," had already begun to seep in, drop by drop, through the holes in the great net.

It dripped onto Zhou Wannian's Divine Soul and True Spirit, which were emitting a faint golden light.

With every drop that fell, the golden light on his True Spirit dimmed by a fraction. The negative urge—the desire to let go of his hands, to give up resistance, to merge into this endless void—would proliferate twofold in Zhou Wannian's mind.

"The Old Shopkeeper's abacus... I can't hear it anymore..."

Zhou Wannian gritted his teeth, struggling to maintain the last shred of clarity in his Sea of Consciousness.

He could feel that the Mortal breath of life he used to resist the Death Qi—the sounds of blacksmithing, dog barking, and hawking—were being drowned out by this cosmic tragedy, which had reached an extreme level of grandeur.

No matter how thick the breath of Mortal life was, it was ultimately just a fleeting worldly clamor.

Faced with this weight of death, which had accumulated over countless epochs and devoured hundreds of millions of Major Thousand Worlds, the struggles of a Mortal were like a match in a storm, ready to be extinguished at any moment.

"Hum—"

The handle of the giant axe suddenly slipped upward by half an inch within Zhou Wannian's stark white finger bones!

"Click, click, click..."

As the giant axe slipped, the crack, which had been painstakingly split to a width of two fingers, instantly closed by a finger's width under the frantic pressure of the dark green patina!

It was retreating.

Even though Zhou Wannian had exhausted all the Absolute Mass of his life, even though he had used his Physical Body as a steel nail to wedge himself firmly into the crack, faced with the absolute momentum of death, physical weight had ultimately reached its limit.

Throwing a stone into a pool of stagnant water—no matter how hard or heavy the stone is, it will eventually sink to the bottom, to be thoroughly enveloped and swallowed by the stagnant water.

This copper coin was the foundation of this Universe, and its Death Qi was endless and inexhaustible.

And while Zhou Wannian's mass had no upper limit, his current state was like using his own body to plug a bursting cosmic-level dam. He was staking everything on a single breath, while the dam was filled with the entire ocean of the dead from all the All Heavens and Myriad Worlds.

"Is it... about to close..."

Zhou Wannian's left eye had been completely blinded by the grayish-white Death Qi; before him remained only a monotonous, cold, and despair-inducing grayness.

His breathing became extremely weak. Every inhalation drew a large amount of Death Qi, sharp as knife cuts, into his lungs, after which he would cough up a mouthful of black blood mixed with fragments of his internal organs.

The strength in his hand bones was draining away.

The great white jade net in his Sea of Consciousness, covered in corpse spots, also emitted a crisp sound of being unable to bear the burden; it seemed it would completely collapse in the next instant.

Just at this moment of life and death, when his Divine Soul was about to be completely polluted and lost forever.

Just at the ten-thousandth of a second when the dark green copper coin crack was about to be welded shut again, nailing all hope into the coffin lid once more.

In the depths of Zhou Wannian's mind, which was on the verge of ceasing to function.

Amidst those grayish-white images filled with death, despair, and wailing.

Suddenly, without any warning.

A flash of color appeared.

It was not the warm yellow light of the tavern, nor the dark green patina, and certainly not the grayish-white Death Qi.

It was a trace of extremely faint, yet extremely piercing... tender green.

Zhou Wannian's Divine Soul jolted violently.

That blurry image rapidly zoomed in and magnified within the depths of his memory.

It was at the Taiwu Ancestral Court, at the very bottom of that Withered Well where the world-destroying whetstone was hidden. In that place where the Death Qi of the entire Universe was most concentrated, where it was most impossible for any living thing to exist.

He saw that patch of black-gray sludge, formed from the debris of countless worlds.

He also saw that peach pit, the fruit flesh of which he had gnawed clean and then casually spat into the sludge.

In that ultimate dead zone, where even an Creation Immortal King would instantly turn into yellow water if they fell in, that ordinary peach pit from the Lower Realm, stained with a bit of his saliva, had not been assimilated into ash by the Death Qi.

On the contrary.

On the surface of that hard peach pit, a tiny crack had opened up.

A slender, delicate green tea sprout (or perhaps a peach sprout), which looked as if a breeze could snap it, poked out from that crack, trembling yet incomparably stubborn.

It just endured the sky-filling Death Qi, rooting itself in the foul-smelling sludge, stretching out those two tender green leaves, each only the size of a fingernail.

Zhou Wannian quietly "watched" this tender sprout in his memory.

In this desperate situation where his Divine Soul was about to collapse, his thinking entered an extremely bizarre state of absolute clarity.

"Death Qi..."

On Zhou Wannian's face, half of which had already turned into bone, his lips moved slightly, emitting a barely audible murmur.

"I have been using Absolute Mass to carry this absolute death..."

He understood.

He finally understood why this broken copper coin was so difficult to split, and why these grayish-white waterfalls of Death Qi were able to force him into such a desperate situation with ten deaths and no life.

Because he had been walking down the wrong path of resistance.

The Universe heading toward heat death, all things returning to nothingness—this was the physical rule represented by this copper coin. It used the infinite weight of death to oppress everything.

And Zhou Wannian had been using the Absolute Mass of over ninety thousand Jade-ified Chains to resist, using those Mortal sounds of blacksmithing and abacus counting to scour it. In essence, this was still using one type of more overbearing "physical existence" to resist another type of "physical extinction."

This was like two hard stones colliding with each other.

Whoever had the greater mass would win.

But the problem was, this copper coin carried the accumulation of death from countless epochs; its "death mass" was infinitely stacked. Zhou Wannian using his own bones to go head-to-head with the graveyard of the entire Universe would only result in him being ground to death alive.

A physical deadlock, if broken with pure physics, will always fall into a stalemate.

"Life..."

In Zhou Wannian's mind, the tender green sprout rooted in the sludge appeared increasingly bright against the gray background.

"In this Universe, the most unreasonable thing is never some Absolute Mass, nor is it some Law of heat death..."

"It is living, breathing life!"

Death follows the Laws of physical thermodynamics; it is the inevitability of energy conservation and entropy increase. It is cold, rigid, and as long as the conditions are met, it will definitely happen.

But life is not.

Life is the greatest, and most shameless, "anti-entropy" miracle in the Universe.

A shriveled seed fell into a crack in the rock; there was no water, no soil, only cold stone. According to the Laws of physics, it should have withered and weathered away.

However, as long as you give it even the slightest opportunity, it can take root and sprout within the rock. It can use its delicate rootlets to secrete acid bit by bit, slowly prying open the fissures in the rock, and finally, forcefully split a boulder weighing a thousand catties in two!

Does the seed split the boulder by relying on mass? Does it rely on hardness?

Not at all.

It relies on that reckless vitality, the desperate need to grow and to survive!

No matter how dense your Death Qi is, no matter how foul your sludge is. So what?

In the eyes of life, these are not some ultimate despair; they are all, damn it, fertilizer used to take root!

"Boom—!"

This thought, like a bolt of primordial lightning tearing through Chaos, exploded thunderously within Zhou Wannian's nearly dried-up Sea of Consciousness.

At this moment, Zhou Wannian's left eye, which had been covered by a gray, filmy cataract, suddenly shot out a terrifying gleam.

That was not killing intent, nor was it the cold light of Law.

It was an emerald-green halo, suffused with madness and vibrant vitality!

"Trying to suppress me with the rules of the dead?"

On Zhou Wannian's face—half bone, half flesh—he pulled into a smile that was more arrogant and unbridled than ever before. Fresh blood dripped down his chin, but it could no longer conceal the terrifying Aura that suddenly rose from his body.

"Today, I'm going to plant a tree on your rusty, broken coffin lid!"

He no longer attempted to use the Absolute Mass within his body to forcibly resist the waterfall of Death Qi pouring down from above.

He made a move that even that dark green copper coin felt terrified by.

"Retreat!"

In his Sea of Consciousness, Zhou Wannian let out a sharp shout.

The large white jade net that had originally been guarding the periphery of his Divine Soul and True Spirit, already covered in gray spots and teetering on the brink of collapse, actually disintegrated of its own accord at this very instant!

The ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Jade-ified Chains abandoned their defense.

"Clatter—!"

Having lost the obstruction of the white jade net, that gray-white dead water, mixed with the despair of billions of Universes, surged like a breached flood. With violent cheers, it directly drowned Zhou Wannian's inner universe and lunged toward the True Spirit at its very core.

Death Qi entered his body!

Outside, the gray-white waterfall that was gushing wildly instantly swallowed Zhou Wannian whole. The remaining green robe on his body and the last bit of his flesh seemed to be on the verge of being completely reduced to ashes within this single breath under the frantic corrosion of the Death Qi.

That massive dark green copper coin sensed the disappearance of resistance. The rust on both sides of its crack pressed toward the center with the momentum of an overwhelming landslide, intent on crushing that eyesore of a giant axe and burying this arrogant variable once and for all.

But.

Just at that fatal moment when the Death Qi submerged the True Spirit and the copper coin was about to close.

In the deepest part of Zhou Wannian's Sea of Consciousness, within the core of the True Spirit completely covered by the gray-white dead water.

A point of extremely faint, yet incredibly pure green light lit up.

This was not magical power, nor was it Law.

This was Zhou Wannian completely transforming his own Great Perfection "Absolute Existence" into the most primitive "Concept of Life."

"Back in the day, even if I spat out a peach pit, I could make it sprout in your mud pit."

Zhou Wannian's bone-white hands gripped the invisible axe handle tightly.

He felt the gray-white Death Qi frantically surging into his body.

Those cold, desperate forces of heat death that stripped away everything.

In Zhou Wannian's perception at this moment, they were no longer lethal poison.

"So much Death Qi, such a big pool of mud."

The bones in Zhou Wannian's throat rubbed together, emitting a roar that was hair-raising yet incredibly shocking.

"This must be such a fertile pot of soil!"

"Give it to me... Absorb!!!"

"Hum— Rumble!"

Inside the inner universe, the moment that faint point of green light touched the massive amount of gray-white dead water, instead of being assimilated, it acted like a seed encountering sweet rain after a long drought, erupting with an unimaginably terrifying power of devouring!

Aren't you trying to assimilate me?

Aren't you the return of all things to zero?

Then I will treat you, this energy representing "Death," as the nutrients for my sprouting!

"Sizzle! Sizzle!"

An incredible reversal occurred within Zhou Wannian's body.

The gray-white Death Qi, which had been arrogant and overbearing, attempting to freeze his True Spirit, seemed to have its physical properties forcibly altered the moment it touched that layer of green light. The rules of deathly silence and despair contained within them were forcibly dismantled and absorbed by this unreasonable vitality.

Nourished by the green light, the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine scattered Jade-ified Chains underwent a heaven-shaking transformation in form.

They were no longer cold chains.

On the surface of the chains, rough bark textures grew. The gray-white corpse spots that had originally grown on them now transformed into plump tree burls.

The chains grew and extended crazily within the inner universe, intertwining and entangling with each other.

In the blink of an eye.

These ninety-thousand-plus Jade-ified Chains grew within Zhou Wannian's Sea of Consciousness into a massive jade tree, its roots dug into the void and its canopy piercing the firmament!

On the branches of the jade tree, there were no leaves, only that pure emerald-green light representing the fireworks of the Mortal world and a reckless desire to survive.

Once the jade tree was formed.

The gray-white dead water surging into his body could no longer stir up any waves. They became the most fertile soil for this jade tree, continuously drained dry by the rootlets and converted into even more surging vitality.

And this vitality, following Zhou Wannian's Meridians and his bone-white arm bones, poured frantically outward!

In the starry sky outside.

That massive, boundless dark green copper coin suddenly let out a terrified tremor.

"Crack... Crackle..."

The crack that had been closing rapidly suddenly jammed when there was less than half a finger's width left before it was completely welded shut.

The recoil force attempting to squeeze out the giant axe encountered a bizarre power it could neither understand nor assimilate.

On Zhou Wannian's bone-white hands that were gripping the axe handle tightly.

Actually.

Along the bone-white finger bones, emerald-green sprouts grew!

These sprouts were extremely delicate; they looked like they would ooze green sap if pinched gently. Yet, they possessed a toughness capable of piercing the dimensions of the Universe.

The sprouts spread rapidly along Zhou Wannian's finger bones onto the invisible giant axe.

The invisible blade of the giant axe, which had originally carried a warm yellow glow.

Under the infusion of vitality, completely changed its form.

It was no longer a metal axe used for physical cutting.

The moment the blade of the giant axe touched the dark green rust, it transformed into countless thick, ferocious tree roots emanating a jade glow!

"Creak— Creak—!"

This was the true fatal blow.

No matter how hard this copper coin is, no matter how perfect the closed loop it represents is, before the roots of a plant, as long as there is a single crack, it will face a collapse from which there is no return!

The axe blades that had turned into tree roots, following the crack less than half a finger's width wide on the dome of the copper coin, plunged deep into the thick, dark green rust of time with an extremely frantic and greedy posture!

The rust attempted to corrode these roots.

But these roots carried the crushing force of Zhou Wannian's Absolute Mass, as well as the terrifying vitality converted from the massive amount of Death Qi absorbed.

"You broken copper plate, buried in the soil for so many years."

Zhou Wannian tilted his head back, and on his face, which had been nothing but bone, flesh began to regenerate and squirm at a speed visible to the naked eye as the emerald-green light flowed!

His left eye, which had regained its clarity, reflected the massive copper coin above that was being frantically invaded by the roots.

"Today, it's time to open your eyes and see how the spring of the Mortal world breaks through the soil!"

"Grow... for me!!!"

Zhou Wannian let out a roar that resounded through All Heavens and Myriad Worlds.

He was no longer pressing the axe handle downward.

He was using his own hands to support this giant tree, formed from Absolute Mass and infinite vitality, forcing it to grow upward within the crack of the copper coin!

"Rumble—!"

Under the unreasonable expansion force of the roots.

The closed-loop Law of the copper coin faced the most thorough dual collapse of both physics and concept.

The crack that had just closed to half a finger's width, under the frantic pushing and squeezing of the roots, emitted a terrifying roar like the tearing of heaven and earth.

"Snap!!!"

From half a finger's width, it was instantly pried open to a width of one zhang!

At the edges of the crack, the indestructible dark green metal was forcibly shattered and broken by the roots, turning into massive metal fragments that flew outward across the sky.

At this moment, the gray-white waterfall of Death Qi was split directly down the middle by the emerald-green beam of light rising from the depths of the crack, rolling back into the interior of the copper coin.

That massive, boundless dark green copper coin.

Its square inner-hole dome, which represented the absolute closed loop, before this Jade-ified giant tree that had taken root in Death Qi and shattered despair.

Finally, was completely.

Ripped open into an unhealable chasm!