Chapter 21
The cultivators inside the tavern laughed—loud laughter, mocking laughter, laughter born from throats that had never felt what it was like to have the Cancer Plague gnawing at their bones.
"A girl at the Eighteenth Level of the Singular Star," one of them said, a man with burn scars across his face, lazily swinging his long sword through the air.
"You think you can fight us? We're all already in the Bright Sky First Stage, kid. A single move from me is enough to turn your fragile bones into dust."
He laughed again, joined by the others, and for a moment, the tavern was filled with echoes of laughter bouncing off the coral walls that had begun to crack.
But Ling Xu did not move.
She stepped forward—one step, two steps, three steps—and on the fourth, the grayish-green threads at her fingertips lashed out in all directions like invisible whips, piercing the shoulders, arms, thighs, and chests of the three cultivators standing at the front.
Even though the wounds were no deeper than shallow kitchen knife cuts, even though the cultivators only flinched briefly before laughing again, Ling Xu continued her assault—again and again and again—without pause, without rest, without caring that each strike only made her enemies slightly irritated, slightly itchy, slightly annoyed, but not injured, not fallen, not dead.
Ling Xu fell once more, her small body thrown like a ragdoll by a bored child.
Blood flowed from her temple, from the corner of her lips, from between her fingers as she struggled to rise even as her muscles screamed in exhaustion, even as her lungs burned with an unending fire.
"Huan Zheng…" she whispered, her voice nearly drowned by the roaring Qi attacks still bursting from the fingers of the Bright Sky cultivators, "don't… don't do anything foolish…"
But Huan Zheng did not listen.
He closed his eyes, and within his chest, among the pulsing 7,700 shards of the Human Star rotating like a vortex ready to explode, he began to feel a vibration he had never experienced before—a tremor rising from the core of his Star Foundation, from the 10 Vast Cosmos Falling Crystals that formed the basis of his existence as a cultivator, as a former Wheel of Cultivation, as a being who had seen too much death to fear his own.
"If I detonate everything," he murmured inwardly, his inner voice flat and cold like an executioner passing a final sentence, "this city will vanish. Along with all the traitors within it. Along with myself."
He drew in a breath—a final breath, the breath that would turn his body into a living bomb unstoppable by anyone—when suddenly Ling Xu's voice shattered the silence in his mind, no longer a whisper, but a shout ringing like a bell struck by iron.
"HUAN ZHENG! STOP! JUST THIS ONCE, THINK OF YOUR RESPONSIBILITY! DON'T ACT OUT OF EGO!"
And in that very moment, something changed within Ling Xu.
Not a slow change, not a gradual transformation, but something sudden, like the sky being split in two by an invisible colossal axe.
The flesh on Ling Xu's body moved.
Not like muscles contracting, but like lava flowing from the crater of an erupting volcano, like thousands of snakes bursting from their nest at once—swelling, expanding, rising until her small body transformed into a mass of grayish-green flesh standing a meter tall, pulsing like a gigantic heart in the middle of the room, with black veins crawling across its surface like roots searching for water in barren soil.
"What—"
One cultivator stepped back, his eyes wide—not from fear, but from witnessing something so grotesque he had never seen in his life.
"What happened to her?"
A Qi-coated spear shot forward from a white-haired cultivator—Bright Sky Second Stage—who had remained silent in the corner, piercing straight into the center of the flesh mass, yet it did not penetrate, did not scratch, left no mark other than a strange "plak" sound, like a stone thrown into water too thick to ripple.
A second attack followed, then a third, then a fourth—dozens of strikes from every direction, from swords, fists, waves of Qi strong enough to collapse city walls—but none succeeded.
The mass of flesh merely trembled slightly with each impact, like a mountain shaken by wind, then fell still again—still in a terrifying way, like something waiting, gathering strength, preparing something no one in that room could escape.
"Stop!" shouted the blue-robed commander, his voice trembling as, for the first time that night, he felt something he did not like.
Fear.
"Kill her! Kill her now before—"
But before he could finish, the mass exploded.
The explosion did not sound like a normal explosion.
Not a deafening blast, not a sound measurable in decibels, but something felt in bones, in marrow, in the deepest layers of consciousness—like thousands of screams emerging from mouths without lips, from throats without vocal cords.
And with that explosion, grayish-green matter burst in every direction—piercing tavern walls, coral roofs, white sandy streets, pearl houses, the palace, coral gardens, every corner of Pearl Dragon City without exception, like a deathly mist that recognized no walls, no doors, no mercy.
Inside the tavern, the burn-scarred cultivator felt an itch on his left arm—he looked down, and beneath the skin that had been smooth a second ago, a small lump began to form, pulsing, swelling, and before he could scream, it exploded, tearing his arm into flying fragments of flesh, followed by a second explosion in his chest, a third in his neck, a fourth in his face.
In less than a second, nothing remained of him but a pool of blood and fragments of bone still steaming.
The same happened to the cultivator beside him, to the blue-robed commander whose eyes were still wide in disbelief, to the guards at the door, to the old fisherman who had betrayed Huan Zheng, to the shell merchant, to the coral girl, to every being standing within the radius of the blast.
One by one, they exploded from within, like overripe fruit suddenly deciding to destroy itself, and amidst the sea of blood and flesh, Huan Zheng still knelt on the floor, unharmed—because around him, the grayish-green substance swirled into a strange vortex, avoiding him, protecting him, as if the Cancer Plague itself obeyed the command of its dying host not to touch the lazy man before her.
"Ling Xu!" Huan Zheng shouted, his voice breaking, wet, like someone who had just realized he had lost something that could never be replaced.
"LING XU!"
To be continued…