For a heartbeat, Lu Chen's vision didn't show the Sword Pavilion. Instead, he found himself floating in a cold, silent abyss. There, he saw a figure—Fang Yuan—moving with a grace that defied physics.
He watched as Fang Yuan performed the "Nine Strokes of Non-Existence." Each palm strike felt like a tectonic plate shifting in Lu Chen's mind. He saw the obsidian mountain vanish, not broken by force, but erased by a higher understanding of reality.
Lu Chen felt like an ant watching a star collapse. He realized that while he was struggling to forge a needle, Fang Yuan had already mastered the thread that wove the universe together. The "Smallest Point" he had been so proud of was merely the first step of a ladder that Fang Yuan had already climbed to the top of, thousands of years ago.
The shock was physical. Fang Yuan, sensing the intruder, turned his head slightly. His cold, dark eyes seemed to pierce through the vision, looking directly into Lu Chen's soul across thousands of miles.
"Is that all you have brought me, little survivor?" Fang Yuan's voice echoed in Lu Chen's mind, not as a shout, but as a heavy, crushing fact.
Lu Chen was snapped back into his body, gasping for air, his skin covered in a cold sweat. He fell forward, the Aether-Zero blade clattering to the floor. Beside him, Yue Xiao rushed to catch him, her hands glowing with frost.
"Chen! What happened?" she cried, feeling his heart racing at a suicidal speed.
Lu Chen looked at her, his eyes wide with a terror he hadn't felt even when he died in the previous life. "It's not enough... Yue Xiao. The blade, the alliance, the training... it's not enough. We aren't fighting a man. We are fighting a force of nature that has practiced how to kill us for eons."