The western horizon did not glow with the orange warmth of the napalm fires anymore; instead, it pulsed with a sickly, necrotic green light that made the Geiger counters in the Command Bunker scream. The Nether Sect had succeeded. The Rift was open, a tear in the fabric of reality that bled entropy into the world, freezing the moisture in the air instantly.
Jiang Chen stood at the main console, watching the satellite feed. From the center of the green vortex, a shape was emerging. It was not a beast of flesh and blood, but a towering construct of shadows and weeping faces, draped in tattered robes that swirled in a wind that didn't exist. This was the Ghost King, a being of pure yin energy, a predator that feasted on the spiritual vitality of living worlds.
"It has mass," Chen Wei reported, his voice trembling as he read the sensor data. "But it is phasing. Physical projectiles are passing through it at a 40% rate. Our artillery is ineffective."
"It's hungry," Jiang Chen noted, watching the Ghost King turn its eyeless face toward Beiluo City. To the entity, the city's 15,000 souls were a buffet, but the Spirit Reactor was the main course. "It smells the voltage."
Jiang Chen turned to the comms officer. "Initiate Protocol: Prometheus. Disconnect the Earth Shaker from the city grid. Vent the reactor shielding to 50%. Make it shine."
Deep beneath the city, the clamps holding the Earth Shaker Golem released. The fifty-meter giant, which had been serving as a silent battery for weeks, roared to life. Its eyes flared white, and vents along its spine opened, spewing a plume of superheated, glowing steam—pure, concentrated spirit energy leaking intentionally into the atmosphere.
To the Ghost King, ten miles away, it was as if a lighthouse had just switched on in the dark. The entity shrieked—a sound that shattered glass windows across Sector 02—and ignored the tiny mortal soldiers on the walls. It drifted toward the massive, leaking energy source that had just jumped out of the city and began sprinting north, away from the population center.
"The bait is taken," Jiang Chen said, his eyes cold. "Pilot Li, move the Golem to the Dead Lands. Keep the entity engaged until T-Minus zero."
The chase was a spectacle of impossible scale. The Earth Shaker, a mountain of black steel, thundered across the frozen salt flats north of the city, trailing a wake of blue sparks. Behind it, the Ghost King glided effortlessly, the ground beneath it turning grey and crumbling to dust as the life was sucked out of the soil. The entity was faster. It extended tendrils of shadow, lashing at the Golem's legs, corroding the armor plate.
Inside the Golem, Pilot Li grit his teeth as the proximity alarms blared. "Administrator! It's gaining! The armor is holding, but the necrotic corrosion is eating the joints! I can't outrun it!"
"You don't need to outrun it," Jiang Chen's voice was steady in his ear. "You just need to hug it."
"Say again, Command?"
"Turn around, Li. Grapple the target. Hold it in place."
Li hesitated for a fraction of a second. He was asking a machine to wrestle a ghost. But he trusted the math. He slammed the air brakes. The Earth Shaker skidded, carving deep trenches in the salt, and spun around. As the Ghost King lunged, opening a maw of infinite darkness to swallow the machine whole, the Golem didn't retreat. It charged.
The Golem's massive hydraulic arms slammed into the spectral form. The Celestial Steel—material forged from fallen stars—interacted with the spiritual body of the Ghost King, creating a violent reaction of sparks and lightning. The Golem locked its arms around the entity, pinning it to the ground. The Ghost King thrashed, its shadows burning the Golem's hull, turning the black metal white-hot.
"Target locked!" Li screamed, the cockpit temperature spiking. "I have it! But it's draining the reactor! I have thirty seconds before shutdown!"
"Eject, Li," Jiang Chen ordered. "Get to the bunker. Now."
The cockpit of the Golem blew open. An escape pod shot out, rocketing away into the distance. The Earth Shaker remained, a silent, unmoving statue of iron holding a struggling god of death.
Back at the launch site, ten miles away, a single V-2 Rocket sat on the pad. It was painted a stark, warning yellow. The payload inside was not high explosive. It was a sphere of enriched Uranium-235, surrounded by conventional explosives designed to compress the core into supercriticality.
"Launch," Jiang Chen whispered.
The engine ignited. A pillar of fire lifted the rocket into the grey sky. It didn't arc high. It was a short-range ballistic trajectory. It accelerated to Mach 4, a streak of doom painting a line across the heavens.
The Ghost King, sensing the incoming object, tried to phase out, to slip into the void. But the Golem held firm, its own leaking energy creating a magnetic interference field that anchored the Ghost to the physical plane. The entity looked up. It saw the needle of metal descending.
The V-2 struck the Golem's shoulder.
For a microsecond, there was silence. The conventional explosives detonated, compressing the uranium core. The atoms, crowded too close together, panicked. They split.
FLASH.
The world turned white. It was a light brighter than the sun, a light that cast shadows on the walls of the Imperial Palace a thousand miles away. The snow on the salt flats didn't melt; it vaporized instantly.
Then came the heat. A sphere of plasma, burning at temperatures hotter than the core of a star, expanded outward. The Ghost King didn't have time to scream. The necrotic energy that made up its form was fundamentally incompatible with the absolute purity of nuclear fusion. The shadows were bleached out of existence. The entity was scrubbed from the universe, atom by atom.
The Earth Shaker Golem was engulfed. Its Celestial Steel armor glowed translucent, the very atomic structure of the metal straining against the fury of the blast.
Then came the sound.
CRACK-BOOOOOOM.
The shockwave hit Beiluo City forty seconds later. Windows rattled. The flag on the command bunker snapped. The mushroom cloud rose, climbing higher and higher, piercing the cloud layer, a majestic, terrifying pillar of grey and red that dominated the sky.
Jiang Chen put on his dark glasses and walked out onto the balcony. He watched the cloud bloom. He felt the wind shift as the atmosphere rushed back in to fill the vacuum.
"Administrator," Chen Wei stepped out behind him, his face pale, holding a Geiger counter that was clicking frantically even at this distance. "The target is... gone. Not destroyed. Erased."
"Physics," Jiang Chen said softly, "is the ultimate arbiter. Spirits can dodge bullets. They can't dodge the sun."
He looked at the mushroom cloud. It was a warning. The Cultivation World had spent millennia refining their bodies to become gods. He had just shown them that a rock, if squeezed hard enough, could kill a god.
"Send the recovery drones," Jiang Chen ordered, turning back inside. "The Golem is made of Star Iron; it should have survived the thermal pulse. But it will be highly radioactive. No human personnel within five miles of the crater."
"And the Nether Sect?" Chen Wei asked.
"The Nether Sect just watched their god get eaten by a fireball," Jiang Chen said. "They aren't a threat anymore. They are a memory."
He paused at the door, looking at the System interface. The energy bar was refilling rapidly. The blast hadn't just destroyed the enemy; the radiation fallout was a new kind of energy, dense and dangerous, and his System was already analyzing how to harvest it.
"Prepare the press release," Jiang Chen added. "Tell the Empire that we conducted a 'mining experiment.' And tell the Holy Lands... tell them the sun has come to the North."