The Star-Seer elites moved with the synchronized, lethal grace of a machine. Their power wasn't just greater; it was optimized. Every technique was stripped of flourishes, designed for maximum efficiency in containment and kill.
Kai and Ming were wild, desperate chaos against a wall of cold, sharp order.
Kai roared, slamming his fists together. The ledge beneath two of the elites cracked and tilted, trying to throw them into the abyss. One elite simply hovered, suspended by a gravity-negation artifact. The other stamped down, and a pulse of solidified earth-energy shot back through the stone, striking Kai in the chest with the force of a landslide. He flew backward, hitting the chamber wall with a sickening crunch. His stone-skin cracked, and he slid down, leaving a bloody smear, unmoving.
"KAI!" Ming's scream was a raw thing of fire and grief. Her hair erupted into a corona of blinding white flame. She didn't aim. She became the attack, charging the elite who had struck Kai, a human-shaped comet of pure rage.
The elite raised a hand, and a lattice of silver light formed in the air—a Containment Grid. Ming's fiery charge hit it and was instantly partitioned, her flames sectioned off into harmless, shrinking cubes of light before being snuffed out. The grid closed around her, tightening. She struggled, but her fire guttered, suppressed by the overwhelming order. The grid contracted, crushing in, until she was bound in a cocoon of silent, shimmering light, her furious eyes the last thing to be sealed away.
Two moves. That was all it took.
Ling Xiao saw it happen from the depths of his struggling meditation. The sight of Kai's broken body, of Ming being encased, ignited a panic that threatened to shatter his focus completely. He wanted to scream, to lash out, to burn the world down.
But Shí's memory rose, calm and immense: "The storm does not rage against a single falling tree. It is the storm. To save the forest, you must be the sky."
And Li Ming's last words: "Use your gift to see."
He wasn't a fighter. Not like Feng. He was a reader. A listener. And right now, the planet was screaming its final song.
He forced his eyes shut, turning his perception inward and outward simultaneously. He felt the catastrophic drain of the extraction arrays as a sucking wound. He felt the core's accelerating spin, its stability dissolving into entropy. And he felt the barrier within himself—the Peak of Mortal Foundation—a dam holding back a ocean of chaotic potential that had been filling for years, fed by storms, volcanoes, Titan essence, and grief.
The dam was not meant to hold this. He was trying to contain a universe in a teacup.
The elite squad, having neutralized the "distractions," turned their attention to him. Director Ko watched, his crystalline arm still channeling the final extraction, his expression one of detached analysis. "Observe the energy buildup. The Titan essence is preventing auto-dissolution. Fascinating. Take him alive. The meridian network will be pristine."
Three elites approached, raising devices that emitted null-field pulses designed to collapse spiritual energy without damaging the physical vessel.
Ling Xiao let go.
He didn't try to reinforce the dam. He didn't try to control the flood.
He invited it.
He opened every meridian, every pore, every cell. He reached into the sleeping drop of Titan Blood Essence over his heart and didn't ask for power—he asked for permission.
The essence ignited.
The dam shattered.
Sea Formation Realm.
But his sea was not of placid, orderly qi. It was a Chaos Sea. A maelstrom of violet-gold power that filled his spiritual core, not as a placid lake, but as a raging, creative tempest. The power didn't just circulate; it cycloned, generating immense potential with every turn.
The change was instantaneous and external. A wave of visible force—rippling, distorted space tinged with gold and violet—erupted from his body. The null-field pulses from the elites hit it and were not absorbed, not deflected, but unmade. Their orderly frequencies were dissolved into the background noise of his chaotic aura.
The advancing elites staggered, their polished control broken by the sheer, untamed presence. It wasn't an attack of greater force; it was the negation of the orderly framework their power relied upon.
Ling Xiao opened his eyes. They were no longer just storm-colored. They held swirling galaxies, the birth and death of stars within their depths. He didn't stand up. He unfolded.
He had no formal techniques. But he now had authority. The Titan essence, fully integrated, allowed him to project his will onto the world through the medium of his chaotic sea.
He looked at the cocoon containing Ming. He didn't see a formation. He saw a pattern of ordered light, a story of confinement. He breathed out, and his breath carried a command of dissolution to that specific story. The Containment Grid shimmered, its perfect lines blurring, its narrative of 'bind' conflicting with a new, chaotic assertion of 'release'. The grid came apart like mist in a strong wind. Ming collapsed to the ground, gasping, her flames rekindling weakly.
He turned his gaze to Kai. He saw the discordant pattern of trauma in his body, the chaotic disruption of broken bones and ruptured organs. He couldn't heal it. But he could stabilize the chaos of injury, prevent it from worsening. He directed a gentle, anchoring wave of energy toward Kai, not to mend, but to pause the slide into death, freezing his physical state in a fragile stasis.
Finally, he looked at the elites and Director Ko.
He raised a hand, not in a spell, but in a gesture of stillness.
He pulled the chaotic potential from his internal sea and expressed it as a simple, blanket command to the local reality: Cease.
A wave of silent, shimmering chaos washed over the chamber ledge.
It didn't hurt. It didn't destroy.
It disrupted.
The elites' refined auras guttered out, their connection to their orderly techniques momentarily severed by the chaotic static. Their artifacts flickered. One of them, mid-step, found his leg moving without his brain's command and stumbled. Another tried to summon a shield and produced only a puff of confused sparks.
For a moment, they were just confused, powerful mortals in a room that no longer obeyed the rules they knew.
Director Ko's analytical composure broke, replaced by shock, then dawning, furious understanding. "He's not just manipulating chaos. He's locally redefining spiritual law! This is a Class-Zero existential event! All units, lethal force authorized! Destroy the anomaly!"
But the moment of shocked stillness had passed. The core, pushed past its limit by the final, greedy draw of the arrays, entered a new phase.
A deep, resonant crack echoed, not from a fracture, but from the very center of the crystalline sphere. The core's light, which had been pulsing erratically, suddenly stilled. Then it began to darken from the inside out, like a lamp running out of oil. The massive extraction arrays groaned, their flow of energy sputtering from a torrent to a trickle, then to nothing. They had sucked the heart dry.
The chamber plunged into an eerie, deepening twilight. The only light came from the dying embers of the core's surface and the glow of Ling Xiao's chaotic aura.
The countdown in his mind vanished, replaced by a single, flashing, imminent warning.
CORE CATASTROPHIC FAILURE IMMINENT. TOTAL PLANETARY DISINTEGRATION IN: [ERROR: TIME QUANTUM UNSTABLE].
The final destabilization had begun. Not in hours. In minutes. Maybe seconds.
The planet's heart was going dark.
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END OF CHAPTER 25