2026-04-06 19:41:05Lin Feng's POV
The damp stone of the Gravel-Run seemed to pulse in time with my shattered arm. Kenan stood frozen, his eyes wide and vibrating with a primal, soul-deep terror. The violet mist of the [Soul-Devouring Counter] snaked up his arms like hungry vines, turning his tan skin a sickly, translucent grey. "My... mana..." Kenan managed to choke out, his voice sounding like it was being dragged through gravel. "What are you... doing to me?" "I’m not doing anything, Kenan," I whispered, the [Phantom Rib] hovering inches from his throat, though he couldn't see the invisible blade. "The Void is just hungry. And you brought a feast." I could feel it. The Tier-2 Earth mana he had spent a decade cultivating was being ripped from his meridians. It didn't flow into me like a refreshing spring; it hit my core like molten lead. My [Devouring Void-Body] groaned under the pressure, the "Zero-Percentile" vacuum in my soul finally finding something to grind into dust. [MANA ABSORPTION IN PROGRESS...] [Target: Kenan (Tier 2 Elementalist).] [Conversion Rate: 100% Efficiency (Void-Attribute).] [Physical Strength: +300% (Surge)] "Your parents were dogs," Kenan hissed, even as his knees began to buckle under the soul-paralysis. "They died in the mud, just like you. A Commoner... playing at being a cultivator... it’s an insult to the heavens." The mention of my parents didn't trigger a burst of hot rage. It triggered a cold, clinical curiosity. I wondered how much "Agony" I could harvest from his fear if I took my time. [CRITICAL EMOTIONAL TRIGGER: PARENTAL INSULT.] [LUCK MULTIPLIER: 2x.] [POINTS HARVESTED: 1,500.] I didn't use the [Phantom Rib]. That was too clean. Too quiet. For the first time in my life, I felt the heavy, intoxicating weight of power coiling in my muscles. I let the invisible blade dissolve back into my marrow. I stood up. My broken arm gave a wet, sickening thud as the bones knit themselves together, forced into place by the sheer pressure of the stolen mana. I towered over Kenan as he fell to his knees, the paralysis finally breaking, replaced by a crushing spiritual weight. "You talk a lot about 'Natural Order', Kenan," I said, my shadow stretching long and jagged across the tunnel walls. "Let’s test your theory." Kenan scrambled backward, reaching for a dagger at his belt. "Stay back! I’m a citizen of the Spire! You’re just…” I didn't let him finish. I stepped forward, my movement a blur of stolen speed. I didn't punch him. I didn't stab him. I wound back my right hand, the absorbed Earth mana coating my palm in a shimmering, crystalline gold. WHACK. The sound wasn't a slap. It was an explosion. My palm connected with Kenan's jaw with the force of a battering ram. The impact sent a shockwave through the tunnel, extinguishing his torch. I felt his mandible shatter like cheap porcelain under my fingers. His body didn't just fall, it was launched sideways, slamming into the stone wall of the drake pen with a crunch that made my own teeth ache. He slumped into the filth, his face a distorted ruin of blood and bone. His eyes were rolled back, his Tier-2 pride leaking out of his ears in the form of dark, spent mana. [OBJECTIVE COMPLETE: DELIVER THE FIRST FACE-SLAP.] [BONUS REWARD: 2,000 AGONY POINTS.] I walked over to his twitching form. I felt... light. The starvation was still there, but it was being drowned out by the sheer adrenaline of the harvest. I reached down and ripped the Silver-Spire Hunter’s Badge from his chest, the metal cold against my palm. Then, I slid the spatial ring off his broken finger. A quick pulse of my new, stolen energy cracked the ring's primitive soul-seal. [INVENTORY ACQUIRED:] [30x Low-Grade Spirit Stones.] [1x Tier-2 Healing Salve.] [1x Map of the Extermination Trial Grounds.] I uncorked the healing salve and smeared the glowing green paste over my shoulder wound and my chest. The relief was instantaneous, the cooling sensation washing away the rot and the fever. I crunched down on a spirit stone, the raw energy sparking against my tongue like lightning. I looked back down the tunnel, toward the faint light of the upper world. For all of my life, I had been the punching bag. I had been the "Void," the "Nullity," the "Trash" that everyone stepped on to reach the light. I gripped the Hunter’s badge until the edges bit into my skin. "Nineteen years of hell," I whispered to the darkness, the red Gacha screen flickering one last time before I stepped into the shadows. "Now, I start the harvest." [NEW QUEST: THE EXTERMINATION TRIAL.] [GOAL: SURVIVE THE HUNT.] [REWARD: ???] The Tablet in my pocket gave a final, hungry throb. The "Zero" was gone. The predator was hungry.
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Chapter 201: The Symphony of the Void
Yun Qian's POV“I think I genuinely love being a part of him. I can't have him, he'll never see me how I see him, but being a part of him is one way I can get close to him.” This is what I told myself. I had been operating as a permanent system unit within Feng's interface, I projected a massive acoustic field across the upper atmosphere, her bone-flute playing a song of simply zero velocity. Existing within the quiet, central processing layers of the King of Ash was unlike my past life in the cold scrap-mines or my brief tenure as a silver-crested specter on the flagship deck. I was no longer a fragmented file floating in the ocean wind, I was embedded directly into the foundational logic of his Ash-Forge Core, a harmonic sub-routine pulsing alongside his heavy, rhythmic heartbeat. From this deep vantage point, I could feel the immense, un-enchanted heat of his soul-forge, the quiet resolve of Imoabasi’s data-vines, and the steady, zero-percentile anchor of Lin Chen below.When t
Chapter 200: The Grounding Stylus
Lin Chen's POV Standing at the base of the rail-cannon, I decided to use my father's old iron stylus to re-route the celestial hand's leaking data down into the earth. Things like these are very compulsory to help accomplish Feng's full plan. I believe he hasn't told me everything he has planned yet, but the little I know, I'd help him implement it to the best of my abilities. The sky above the Grand Registry Ark vibrated with a sharp, high-frequency whine as the massive golden fingers remained pinned against Imoabasi’s emerald data-vines. Golden static and blue compliance code bled from the joints of the giant hand, spraying across the upper atmosphere like pressurized steam from a cracked pipe. Up on the promenade, my brother Feng held his heavy forge-hammer ready, his face looking up and his eyes locked directly onto the sky. But I didn't look at the gods. My eyes were fixed on the copper-lined grounding rails embedded in the marble docks beneath my boots.I held my father’s d
Chapter 199: The Sylvan Shielding
Lin Feng's POV The sky above the floating continent didn't just darken, it groaned under the weight of the golden hand descending through the atmosphere. The fingers, each wide enough to span a city block, were carved from solid, burnished gold and laced with glowing blue compliance runes that hummed with a high-frequency whine. The air pressure dropped so fast my eardrums popped, and the golden marble docks beneath our boots began to spiderweb with deep fissures.The divine hand came down like a falling mountain, aiming its massive palm straight for the peak where Feng stood, targeting the Ash-Forge Core pulsing in his chest.I didn't step back. I didn't wait for Feng to swing his forge-hammer. Grounding my heels into the cracked marble, I drove the emerald-veined stone plate of the Sylvan Codex directly into the central data-line beneath my feet."Activate The Sylvan Fortress!" I shouted, my voice cutting through the deafening roar of the descending mass.A dense, blinding networ
Chapter 198: The First Strike Against the Sky
Lin Feng's POV“Yes.” I responded and immediately pulled the handle. The white light radiating from the Seventh Server Gate didn’t blind me as I stepped up to the floating interface bar, it was actually very bright. Up close, the input field was cold, dead silent, and totally devoid of the shimmering golden flourishes that used to accompany every interaction with the system. There were no drop-down menus or pre-compiled choices designed to entice a user into spending credits. It was just a thin, dark line hovering in the empty air, waiting for raw data.I reached out, my fingers calloused and stiff from years at the anvil. Instead of picking up a hammer or typing a command syntax, I pressed my open palm against the black bar.I didn't enter a command script to claim the divine throne for myself, nor did I request an upgrade to my personal status screen.I began to write names. First was Scribe Shen, whose fingers had turned stiff from logging illegal tax quotas in the coal pits. T
Chapter 197: Target: The Heavens
Lin Feng's POV The notification locks down every remaining interface from the Scavenger Pits to the Grand Ark, its text written in a clean dark ink that carries no mana. Across every quadrant of the world, the blinding golden advertisements, the parasitic credit trackers, and the flashing lineage alerts died in a single, silent millisecond.In the frozen scrap-mines of the North, on the high-society balconies of the ruined Southern Capital, and across the obsidian decks of the oceanic fleet, millions of glowing blue screens instantly flickered and turned to a cold, unyielding pitch-black. The text that burned across them carried no imperial magic, no high-frequency administrative radiation, and no Gacha compression scripts. It was pure, un-enchanted ink, a baseline reality written in the plain, unpolished syntax of common iron.For ten thousand years, humanity had lived under the ticking clock of their allocated life-points, their every breath audited by the lineage lords. Now, t
Chapter 196: The Sovereign Synthesis
Lin Feng's POV“ssss….” I winced when I felt the touch of heat inside my brain, it was as though the gacha tried to say something, and immediately retreated. I paused, then continued. The floating, white-hot geometry of the Seventh Server Gate did not hum with the familiar friction of lower-tier engines or the wet, mechanical grind of the subterranean cogs, it vibrated at a pitch so absolute it flattened the acoustic profile of the Basilica into dead, un-indexed silence.I stood before the floating, white-hot geometry of the Seventh Server Gate, all six Tablets I acquired were floating in a circular orbit around my head like a crown of rusted iron, it was beautiful not going to lie.The six artifacts, the Sylvan Codex, the Scales of Fate, the Scepter of Tyranny, the Ledger of Wealth, the Scepter of Tides, and the shattered, re-stitched frame of the Mirror of Truth, no longer radiated their distinct, factional hues. Stripped of their imperial lacquer by the [Equalization Protocol], t
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