Chapter 42
Ling Xu's back pressed tightly against Huan Zheng's back like two sides of a coin that could never truly be separated, and amidst the irregular rhythm of heartbeats caused by the pressure of twenty-seven Bright Sky Old auras pressing from all directions, Ling Xu's eyes kept moving.
To the left, to the right, to the top, to the bottom—searching for a gap that could not possibly exist, searching for a weakness that may never have been born, searching for a single way out among walls of flesh and iron that were closing in tighter.
"We can't hold on forever, Zhao Wei," she whispered, her voice as thin as a shard of glass about to fall from a table. "I don't see any opening. Anywhere. What's your plan? You must have a plan—you always have a plan."
But Huan Zheng did not answer with the words Ling Xu expected.
Instead, he yawned—truly yawned in the middle of a circle of death filled with twenty-seven assassins whose power was a thousand times above the average of their cultivation realm—then stretched his body with slow movements like someone who had just woken up on a hot afternoon, rising onto his toes once, twice, as if easing the stiffness in his calves after a long journey.
"A plan? No need for a plan," he finally said, and when his eyes—closed tightly since the moment he stepped into Wuji City like someone enjoying a peaceful nap in a garden—slowly opened, Ling Xu felt something she had never felt in her entire life, something that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand even without wind, something that made her chest tighten even though she was neither running nor fighting nor afraid.
The aura emanating from Huan Zheng was not an ordinary aura.
It was not the Qi aura of a cultivator that could be measured by levels or Longitude or numbers, but a terror older than the concept of destruction itself, an aura possessed by only one being in the boundless universe—The Lazy One, the second of the three Wheels of Cultivation, who for months had hidden behind the mask of the indifferent and slothful Zheng Huan, and now, for the first time, he was no longer hiding.
The Bright Sky Old cultivators surrounding them from all directions did not feel that aura—or perhaps they did, but chose to ignore it, because they were too busy with laughter that began to break out from behind their white masks, laughter that started as faint whispers like wind brushing through dry leaves, then grew into chuckles, then burst into roaring laughter that shook the ruins around them, echoing from wall to wall, from rooftop to rooftop, from one ear to another with a horrifying rhythm—synchronized, coordinated, all centered on the same thought.
"Look at her hair," shouted a man with a dragon mask, his voice filled with undisguised lust. "White with multicolored veins—must be a Goddess. You know, I haven't tasted a Goddess since the Harmony Conflict ended."
"My turn first, brother," another replied, his voice higher, more giggly, like someone ordering drinks in a crowded tavern. "I want to go first. Let me feel how it is when a Goddess with that pure white hair writhes beneath me."
Their laughter filled Wuji City for thirteen seconds—long enough to count every breath leaving Ling Xu's mouth as she bit her lower lip until it nearly bled, long enough to remind her of a night when similar laughter echoed in her ears while she was still a child hiding behind silk curtains, covering her ears yet still hearing everything, long enough to make the fire of hatred in her chest burn brighter than the sun.
"Zhao Wei," she whispered, her voice trembling between anger and despair, "I can't—I won't let them—"
But before she could finish, Huan Zheng, who just a moment ago had been standing casually with his hands in his pockets and his usual lazy expression, did something Ling Xu had never expected: he looked forward.
Not an ordinary gaze, not one of anger or arrogance, but an empty gaze, a hollow gaze, the gaze of someone who had seen too much death to need to move a muscle or gather Qi or raise a finger to kill.
All it took was opening his eyes, directing his gaze, allowing his presence as the Lazy One to seep out of his body like mist rising from a swamp at dawn.
And what happened next could not be explained with ordinary words, because ordinary words were not made to describe death that arrived without sound, without movement, without warning.
The heads of the Bright Sky Old cultivators—who thirteen seconds ago had been laughing loudly while imagining depraved acts they would inflict upon Ling Xu—began, one by one, to separate from their necks.
Not as if severed by a blade that left bloody wounds, but as if erased by an unseen hand that decided they were no longer worthy of having heads upon their shoulders.
As those heads still floated in the air—still wearing their white masks, still with eyes wide open in disbelief, still with mouths half-formed into laughter that would never finish—Huan Zheng blinked.
Not an ordinary blink that simply closed and opened the eyelids in a fraction of a second, but a blink that tore into something deeper than sight itself, a blink that touched the very foundation of time, and when his eyes opened again, the world around him had become a painting that no longer moved.
"What did you do, Zhao Wei?" Ling Xu whispered from behind him, but her voice came out like a recording played at one-thousandth speed—broken, bubbling like air escaping underwater—because her mouth was indeed moving, but time around her body had frozen, and only Huan Zheng could still move freely within a silence deeper than the vacuum of space.
"I borrowed time, Liu Xin," Huan Zheng replied with an oddly calm voice, his once-lazy eyes now sweeping the surroundings at an inhuman speed. "Just for a moment. Enough to question these corpses before they truly become corpses."
He stepped—not an ordinary movement, but a run that surpassed logic, surpassed physics, surpassed anything ever recorded in ancient texts about the limits of a cultivator's ability.
In a world where time had been forced to stop, where droplets of blood from severed necks still hung in the air like suspended rubies, where fragments of dust from crumbling buildings floated aimlessly because even the wind no longer dared to blow, Huan Zheng moved from one cultivator to another with such speed that he seemed like a ghost that could never be captured by any eye.
His once-lazy hands became swift, rummaging through the pockets of the black robes of the still-standing corpses, turning their half-collapsed bodies with movements that were crude yet effective, reading the frozen expressions hidden behind their masks, removing those masks one by one to see who these enemies truly were—the ones bold enough to surround them in this half-destroyed floating city.
To be continued…