2026-09-18 03:00:28The Demonic Ape’s twin fists crashed into the earth where Lu Chen had been standing a split second before. The impact exploded the mud and bedrock, blasting out a crater five feet deep and sending a hail of razor-sharp stone shrapnel whistling through the purple fog.
Lu Chen rolled hard to the left, his tattered rags tearing further against the jagged rocks. He scrambled to his feet instantly. Before he could fully steady his stance, the massive beast whipped its long, heavy arm across the clearing like a falling tree trunk. There was no time to dodge. Lu Chen crossed his forearms in front of his face, channeling his glass-shard Qi to reinforce his bones. BOOM! The impact sounded like two boulders colliding. The sheer physical weight of the Tier-2 beast sent Lu Chen flying backward through the air. He crashed hard into a moss-covered stone wall, the impact cracking the granite behind him and knocking the wind completely out of his lungs. A thick stream of crimson blood spilled past his lips, painting his chin. "Gah!" Lu Chen gasped, dropping to one knee. The Demonic Ape beat its massive chest, its blood-red eyes flashing with cruel satisfaction. It raised its head and let out a deafening roar, savoring the scent of human blood, before bounding forward to finish its prey. But as Lu Chen knelt in the mud, his dark eyes didn't fill with fear. Instead, they burned with a wild, manic intensity. The devastating strike had fractured three of his ribs, but the intense physical trauma had triggered the exact survival mechanism of the Shattered Mirror Technique. Inside his belly, the jagged vortex wasn't failing—it was screaming for blood. Vrrr—! The miniature cyclone of broken glass-like shards began to spin at a terrifying, unprecedented velocity. As the Demonic Ape lunged forward for a final stomp, Lu Chen didn't try to retreat. He pushed himself off the stone wall, executing a violent burst of speed, and slid directly beneath the beast’s massive, furred belly. He reached up with both hands, digging his fingers straight into the matted black fur of the ape's flanks. "Now," Lu Chen growled through his bloody teeth. "Let’s see who eats whom." He unleashed The Devouring Maw. The moment his bare hands made solid contact, the razor-sharp vortex inside him didn't just push out energy—it created a violent, crushing vacuum. The glass-shard Qi began to violently shred the beast’s external spiritual defenses, boring straight into its flesh like a drilling rig. The Demonic Ape froze mid-stride, its ears splitting with a sudden, agonizing screech. A massive torrent of dark, corrupt demonic Qi began to violently pull away from the ape’s body, visible to the naked eye as a swirling river of black and purple smoke flowing straight into Lu Chen’s palms. The beast thrashed frantically, slamming its heavy elbows down onto Lu Chen’s back to break his spine. Thud! Crack! Another rib shattered. Blood sprayed from Lu Chen’s mouth, but his grip remained absolute. His hands were locked onto the beast like iron vices. He ignored the agonizing pain in his body, entirely focused on the intoxicating rush of energy flooding into his widened meridians. The corrupt demonic energy of the ape was incredibly dense and hostile, filled with raw, chaotic violence. To a normal cultivator, absorbing this would have caused their mind to fracture and their meridians to melt instantly. But Lu Chen’s internal pathways were already a landscape of beautiful destruction. The glass-like fragments of his foundation seized the incoming beast energy, grinding it down, crushing its impurities, and forcing it to fuse with his own core. The miniature cyclone inside his navel grew larger, hotter, and incredibly sharp. CRACK. An internal barrier within his soul suddenly shattered with the sound of breaking ice. The incoming flood of refined energy settled heavily into his belly, expanding the razor-sharp vortex until it occupied his entire lower torso. The air around Lu Chen suddenly exploded in a radial shockwave, violently blasting away the surrounding purple fog for fifty yards in every direction. He had achieved a breakthrough. He had stepped directly into the Iron Qi Peak. The Demonic Ape was now visually shrinking, its vibrant black fur turning a dull, lifeless grey, its terrifying musculature withering as its life force and core energy were completely hollowed out. Realizing its impending doom, the beast let out a weak, desperate whimper. "Too late," Lu Chen whispered, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, layered resonance. He withdrew his hands from the ape's flank, balled his right hand into a fist, and channeled the newly evolved, peak-tier jagged Qi into his knuckles. The shimmering aura around his hand was no longer just a faint light—it was a dense, visible sphere of crackling, razor-sharp crimson force that hummed like a thousands of buzzing saws. With a swift, fluid motion born of absolute power, Lu Chen punched straight up through the beast's chest. SPURT! His fist tore through the matted fur, muscles, and heavy ribs of the ape as if it were nothing but wet paper. The jagged Qi exploded inside the beast's torso, completely liquefying its internal organs and shattering its Tier-2 beast core into countless sparkling fragments. The fifteen-foot-tall Demonic Ape went entirely limp. It tumbled forward, crashing into the mud as a hollow, lifeless husk. Lu Chen slowly pulled his blood-soaked arm out of the beast's chest. He stood tall in the cleared clearing, his chest heaving, his broken ribs already beginning to knit back together at a visible rate under the immense pressure of his new, peak-tier Qi. He looked down at his bare, blood-stained hands, feeling the vast, unyielding power spinning within his belly. He was no longer just a survivor trying to scrape by. He was a force to be feared. He reached into the beast’s mangled chest, pulled out a large fragment of the shattered Tier-2 core as proof of his kill, and tossed it into his small storage pouch. He turned his eyes toward the exit of the gorge, looking back in the direction of the Vermilion Sect's floating peaks. "The elders wanted to bury me in this valley," Lu Chen said, a dark, dangerous smile breaking through the blood on his face. "It's time to go back and show them what crawled out."
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Chapter 47 Forged in Fire and Void
The central chamber of the Star-Ship Foundry descended into a chaotic symphony of violence and creation. Colossal steam-powered gantry cranes whined under the weight of massive, four-inch-thick hull plates forged from dark Void-Iron—a rare, density-defying metal that could withstand the crushing gravity of the higher planes. Thousands of multi-limbed Iron-Weaver blacksmiths swarmed the split-open chassis of the Iron Sovereign, their heavy hammers raining a continuous shower of blinding orange sparks onto the deck.Lu Chen sat cross-legged at the absolute center of the exposed hull, directly above the ship's pulsing star-core. He had discarded his torn burlap cloak. His bare, marble-dense chest was a network of glowing, pitch-black cosmic veins that directly mirrored the newly installed copper conduits of the warship."The ship’s skeletal framework cannot handle the sheer kinetic feedback of the Primordial Dreadnought Schema [1.1]!" Forge-Master Vulcan roared from the elevated gantr
Chapter 46 The Star-Ship Foundry
The Iron Sovereign tore through the glowing stellar highways of the Star-Strand conduit like a comet forged of rusted iron and raw malice [1.1]. Powered by the stolen Star-Core Propulsion Unit [1.1], the flagship’s auxiliary copper lines hummed at a violent, bone-rattling frequency, illuminating the dark vacuum with a brilliant, translucent silver radiance [1.1].Up on the primary command bridge, Lin Xue frantically managed the hexagonal emerald crystal communication device she had looted from Officer Jaro [1.1]. A dense grid of translucent green data slips projected into the air before her, mapping out the local celestial sector."Lu Chen! The destruction of the skull-fortress has triggered a total lockdown across the Northern Star-Strand!" she shouted, her voice thick with static as she filtered the cosmic radiation. "The Ascendant Council of the True Void has deployed an entire sector patrol fleet. Seven silver-hulled dreadnoughts are already locking onto our warp-trail. If we s
Chapter 45 The Skull of the True Void
The high-pitched, mental shriek of the starlight alarm vibrated directly through the vacuum of the Star-Strand, echoing like glass shattering inside the skulls of every living entity within five miles.On the deck of the listing Iron Sovereign, Lin Xue pressed her palms hard against her temples, a trickle of dark blood seeping past her fingertips as her wind-affinity Qi buckled under the weight of the incoming psychic wave. "Lu Chen! The fortress cannons are tracking us!" she screamed into her fading air bubble. "They’re drawing power directly from the Star-Strand’s main river-conduit!"Across the void, the three-mile-wide skull of the ancient cosmic beast began to violently shift. The massive golden arrays embedded within its hollow eye-sockets whirred, the light turning from a passive gold into a blinding, hyper-concentrated white heat. The surrounding cosmic skiffs immediately pulled back, their silver hulls flashing as they cleared the firing lines.Lu Chen did not retreat to
Chapter 44 The Star-Strand Toll
The sensation of planar ascension did not feel like riding a gentle cloud; it felt as if a colossal iron hammer was continuously pounding Lu Chen’s physical vessel into a thin sheet of gold foil.The colorless pillar of light from the Planar Nexus Gate shot through the atmospheric boundaries of his mortal world, dragging the Iron Sovereign upward into the deep, freezing void of the Greater Heavenly Domain. The ship’s iron hull violently buckled, its thick plates groaning and emitting high-pitched shriek-like sounds as the atmospheric pressure completely vanished, replaced by a harsh, suffocating vacuum.CRACK.The mechanical Helmsman’s Core on the primary bridge instantly imploded, unable to handle the alien, highly concentrated ambient Qi of the higher planes. The flagship gave a heavy, lifeless lurch, its massive iron propellers grinding to a complete halt as it drifted into the orbital ring of a colossal, glowing cosmic river-conduit known as the Star-Strand.Lin Xue lay flat
Chapter 43 The Horizon of the Void
The shattered fragments of the Prismatic Throne lay scattered across the black jade floor plates like frozen starlight, completely drained of the solar fire that had kept the continent enslaved for generations [1.1]. The grand imperial vault, once the absolute center of the world's wealth, was now a silent, shadow-drenched tomb. The only light remaining in the entire Sovereign Holy Land was the violent, crackling golden-crimson lightning leaking from Lu Chen’s skin [1.1].Lin Xue stepped through the dust of the ruined gold-leafed archway, her wind-affinity Qi swirling in slow, heavy currents around her boots [1.1]. She didn't look at the piles of gray ash that had once been the Seven Sun-Kings [1.1]. Her green eyes were fixed entirely on the youth standing at the edge of the empty throne platform."The high kingdoms are completely silent, Lu Chen," she said, her voice carrying a deep, layered exhaustion that echoed off the broken black pillars. "The communication lines are dead, th
Chapter 42 The Vault of the False Heavens
The central capital of the Sovereign Holy Land did not resemble a mortal city anymore. Deprived of the grand refinery’s strategic ether, the massive jade palaces and ivory towers that once floated high above the clouds had lost their anti-gravity fields [1.1]. They had plummeted out of the sky, crashing into the lower plazas in a cataclysmic rain of shattered emerald masonry and white marble dust [1.1].The Iron Sovereign glided through the dark, cloud-chrouded ruins of the upper tiers, its heavy hull navigating a landscape of absolute devastation.Up on the primary command deck, Lin Xue stood by the shattered brass console. The Grand Sect Alignment Registry pulsed weakly in her hand, its blue ink fading fast [1.1]. She looked at the colossal golden mountain at the center of the ruins—the Imperial Zenith Palace—which had miraculously remained anchored to the bedrock by hundreds of massive gray bone chains."The high kings are dead or fleeing, Lu Chen," Lin Xue said, her voice shak
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