Chapter 93
Yet The Silent One did not fall.
He merely stomped his right foot onto the ground—one stomp that felt like an earthquake shaking the entire artificial hell from its deepest foundation, one stomp that widened the cracks in the stone floor into bottomless chasms, one stomp that reduced the remaining walls into dust, one stomp that caused the already cracking ceiling to collapse upon them all, but no one cared, because more important than the ruins was what happened to Huan Zheng's attack.
All formulas, all waves, all explosions that had filled the space around The Silent One just a second ago suddenly vanished, disappeared, ceased to exist, like mist swallowed by the morning sun, like a dream forgotten after waking up, like water absorbed by dry soil thirsting for moisture.
Huan Zheng gave no pause—not for Pendiam to breathe, not for the blood to stop dripping, not for the scattered dust to find its place to settle.
He rose from his fallen position not with the usual lazy movement, not with the staggering of a man who had just awakened from sleep, but with an agility he had never shown to anyone, like a snake suddenly remembering it could move faster than any prey, like lightning striking without warning from a clear sky, like something unpredictable because it never cared to be predicted.
"My second attack, The Silent One," he said, his voice no longer lazy, no longer flat, but cold—extremely cold—like ice that never melts even under the sun day and night, like death that never asks for permission before taking, and as his eyes opened for the fourth time that night.
Not slowly like petals reluctant to bloom in winter, but with an explosion that shattered silence, that tore reality apart, that made The Silent One feel the hairs on his neck stand for the third time, something terrifying began to gather around Huan Zheng's body.
Not from the outside, but from within, from the deepest axis of his cultivation, from the foundation of the Head Humanity that he had buried for thousands of years, now emerging not as aura or vibration or light, but as adaptation—terrifying adaptation, unfailing adaptation, adaptation that caused time along with the abstract concepts that supported one another within the human universe to suddenly come to a complete halt, like a film paused at its most crucial scene, like a heart stopping between two beats, like a breath held between inhale and exhale, not daring to go out, not daring to come in, only still, still, still.
"You're going to do it, The Lazy One?" The Silent One whispered, his voice no longer restrained as when he enjoyed pain, no longer confident as when he took his stance, but broken, wet, like a harp string snapping in the middle of the most beautiful melody, because for the first time in thousands of years, he could not move, could not raise his hand, could not stomp his foot, could do nothing but stand still, staring at Huan Zheng with those dark yet blazing eyes, watching the terrifying adaptation creeping from the lazy man's body like mist from a swamp at dawn, like a plague that no one could ever stop, like something older than the God of the Vast Cosmos, older than the Gods and goddesses, older than the universe itself.
"I stop everything," said Huan Zheng, and as those words left his mouth, the place where they stood—the artificial hell once filled with black flames, bone walls, and endless screams, now reduced to dust, ash, and smoking ruins—changed, not like the sky shifting from day to night, not like seasons turning from heat to cold, but like a canvas once painted with a complex and colorful scene suddenly wiped clean, erased, returned to pure white, untouched by brush or pen or imagination, clean white, empty white, white waiting to be scribbled upon by tireless hands.
Black and white, that was all that remained—no red from the blood still dripping from The Silent One's right cheek, no gray from the drifting dust, no golden glow that once radiated from The Singer's body still lying weak on the ground, only black and white, like an old photograph worn by time, like a dream that never had color because you woke up before the universe could give it one, like the first page of an unwritten book, still empty, still waiting, still a mystery to anyone who opens it.
"This is no longer artificial hell," Pendiam whispered, his voice barely audible within a silence deeper than the vacuum, within a void emptier than emptiness, within a reality that had turned into something he could not recognize because he had never imagined reality could change like this, that the place where he stood, the ground he stepped on, the air he breathed, could become an empty canvas waiting to be scribbled upon, waiting to be filled, waiting to become something else, something he never expected, something he never planned, something he never prepared for because he never thought he would face someone capable of turning fiction into reality, or reality into fiction, or something in between, depending on the perspective.
"This is a script, The Silent One," Huan Zheng murmured in his heart, his inner voice no longer cold as when he released his terrifying adaptation, no longer heavy as when he opened his eyes for the fourth time, but flat, empty, like the surface of a lake undisturbed for too long by wind, human, or beast, because he was realizing something, something he had never realized before, something that made him want to laugh and cry at the same time, something that made him want to yawn and sleep and never wake again because it was too heavy for a lazy person like him to think about.
"We all—I, you, Ling Xu, The Singer, the God of the Vast Cosmos, the gods and goddesses who have been violated and ravaged, the soldiers of humanity thirsting for victory, all beings across this boundless universe—we are all fictional characters in a story titled Wheel of Cultivation: The Last Descendant of the Reincarnator."
Huuuh!!
"We are not real, The Silent One. We have never been real. We are merely scribbles of a pen on paper, merely the imagination of someone sitting in a cramped room with a cup of coffee that has gone cold, merely words arranged into sentences, sentences arranged into paragraphs, paragraphs arranged into chapters, chapters arranged into a story that will be read by people who will never know that we—those within this story—feel pain, feel fear, feel anger, feel jealousy, feel love, feel everything they feel when they read about us."
He raised his head, looking at the black-and-white ceiling that no longer cracked, no longer collapsed, no longer functioned as a ceiling, but as a boundless empty canvas with no end, no beginning, and from the corner of his eye, he saw something he had never seen before.
A shadow—a shadow of a writer, of someone sitting at a desk with fingers dancing across a keyboard, of someone smiling faintly after finishing a chapter, of someone who never knew that their characters, on one night in an artificial hell turned black-and-white canvas, had realized they were not real, that they were merely words, that they never had free will, that everything they did—fighting, loving, hating, dying—had been written from the beginning, determined from the first page, already part of a plot they could never change, no matter how hard they tried.
To be continued…