The white-out did not end with a bang or a celestial chorus. It ended with the sound of a distant car alarm and the mundane, rhythmic clack-clack of a woman's heels on a concrete sidewalk.
The pressurized gold of the Silos didn't explode outward; it imploded inward, collapsing into the very atoms of the earth. The "Update" Chen Feng had initiated wasn't a boost in power—it was a Universal Normalization. He hadn't just broken the dam; he had turned the magical water into ordinary, non-miraculous steam.
The Death of the Miraculous
By 8:00 AM, the world was... quiet.
In the city parks, the trees that had begun to glow with copper light dimmed, their leaves returning to a simple, dusty green. The teenagers who had been manipulating holographic interfaces suddenly found themselves staring at empty air, their hands frozen in mid-gesture.
"My app is gone," one boy muttered, tapping frantically at his phone. "The whole 'Spirit-Net' just... vanished."
It wasn't just the apps. In the hospital wards, the "miraculous healings" ceased. In the private dojos of the hidden clans, the grandmasters who could once leap over walls found their knees suddenly aching with the weight of eighty years of actual, physical time. The Qi hadn't been stolen; it had been De-manifested. It was still there, but it was now inert, serving only as the basic glue of physics rather than a tool for gods.
The Humanization of the Dao
On the rooftop where the battle had raged, the change was most profound.
The obsidian skyscraper had returned to being a mundane office building. The gravity was no longer a weapon; it was just 9.8 meters per second squared, unyielding and indifferent.
Director Zhou stood by the railing. The "Origin" was gone. He looked down at his hands, which were now wrinkled, spotted with age, and shaking. He reached for his pocket to find a handkerchief and realized he felt... cold. Not the cold of a cosmic void, but the simple, shivering chill of a man in a thin suit on a breezy morning.
"I have a pulse," he whispered, his voice cracking with a very human frailty. "A single, fragile pulse."
Beside him, Yue Qin leaned against the brickwork. Her "Architect" status had been stripped away. She looked at her reflection in the glass—she looked like a woman in her late thirties, tired and remarkably ordinary. The silver pin in her hair was just a piece of metal now, beautiful but silent.
"No more Silos," she said, and for the first time in centuries, she sounded relieved. "No more weight. We're just... commuters now."
The New Path: Worldly Progression
The world didn't fall into chaos. Instead, it shifted into a higher gear of human ingenuity. Without the "shortcut" of immortality, the "Iron-Bone Foundry" didn't disappear; they became a legitimate engineering firm focusing on high-efficiency hydraulics. The "Silicon Lotus" rebranded as a chain of high-end wellness retreats.
The "immortals" hadn't died; they had just retired into humanity. They were now CEOs, plumbers, teachers, and librarians, forced to navigate the world using logic, sweat, and social skills rather than spiritual pressure.
The threat of a "World-Ending" battle was gone. The "Great Ebb" had been finalized into a Great Anchoring. The world was now a place of medicine, science, and the slow, beautiful struggle of mortal life.
There was no more "ascending." There was only "growing."