Chapter 95
"The fourth attack," said Huan Zheng, "is my defeat. And because you have never lost, you have never learned how to deal with defeat. You have never learned how to fall and rise again. You only keep standing, keep adapting, keep winning—and that—"
He smiled, a bitter smile, a smile he had never shown to anyone, a smile that made Ling Xu in the distance fall to his knees because he understood what that smile meant.
"… That is your greatest weakness, The Silent One."
The fifth attack never came.
Or rather, the fifth attack was the moment when Pendiam decided that he could no longer hold back his power, that if he continued playing like this, if he kept allowing Huan Zheng to unleash increasingly absurd and unadaptable attacks, then for the first time in his life—in his infinite existence—he would die.
"Enough," The Silent One said, and his voice was not loud, not explosive, not like someone who was angry or frustrated.
His voice was calm, flat, like someone stating that it would rain today and you should bring an umbrella.
But beneath that calmness, something moved—something he had long locked away in the deepest chamber of his existence, something he had never shown to anyone, not even in the worst moments of his battles against the Gods and goddesses who had tried to destroy him thousands of years ago.
"You are indeed extraordinary, Huan Zheng—I cannot deny that. But there is one thing you have forgotten: I am the one who stands at the peak of the three Wheels of Cultivation, the being who became a terror across the entire universe. And everything you have done—"
He raised his hand, and for the first time, from his palm emerged something not unlike what had come from Huan Zheng's body, yet greater, denser, more absolute—like the difference between a candle flame and the blazing midday sun.
"— Is nothing but a toy."
And when the two adaptations collided—Huan Zheng's adaptation, which had shattered the boundary between fiction and reality, which had ensnared time and space, which had created impossible cardinals—
And The Silent One's adaptation, which had existed since before the first universe was born, which had witnessed every destruction and every rebirth, which had adapted to things beyond imagination because the mind itself was not strong enough to conceive them—
The air around them did not explode.
The air around them did not tremble.
The air around them did nothing, because there was no longer air, no longer space, no longer time, no longer concepts, no longer anything except the clash between two entities that should never have met—because if they did, reality itself would not be able to bear the weight of their mutually negating existence.
"A clash of adaptations," whispered the consciousness of the cancer-like plague within Ling Xu's body, forced into stillness, yet not completely frozen.
From afar, its voice was barely audible, like dry leaves brushing against one another in an autumn that lasted too long.
"This is no longer a battle. This is—"
It could not finish the sentence because no word could complete it.
There were no words in human language, no words in the language of gods, no words in any language, because language was created to describe reality, and what was happening before it now was not reality.
It was something beyond reality, beyond fiction, beyond anything that could be named.
And then, The Silent One exhaled.
Not a tired breath, not a frustrated breath, but the breath of someone who had made a decision and no longer wished to delay it.
"Ten percent," he said, and you could hear the smile in his voice even though you could not see his face, because his face no longer had form—because he had become something without form, without boundaries, without anything except the will to continue existing.
"That is what you have seen all this time, Huan Zheng. Ten percent of what I truly possess. And you—"
He raised one finger—his right index finger—and although the movement was small, no more than a slight flick of his wrist, the entire adaptive system Huan Zheng had built over four consecutive attacks—the threads that ensnared time, the shadow that devoured space, the impossible cardinal symbols, even the defeat he had offered as a weapon—everything vanished.
Not destroyed, not unraveled, not transformed—but gone, like chalk drawings on pavement washed away by the first rain of the monsoon season.
"Because you forgot," The Silent One continued, and now color returned, the black-and-white canvas that had become their battlefield began to fill with colors never before seen, colors that did not exist within any spectrum known to humanity, "that being second means you will always be second, no matter how hard you try, no matter how deeply you dig into your past, no matter how much you sacrifice yourself for the ones you love."
And when those words were spoken, Huan Zheng fell.
He fell not because his body was wounded, not because his power was exhausted, but because of gravity—gravity that he had long ignored, gravity he had long taken lightly, gravity that now reaffirmed that he was merely a fictional being who never had full control over anything, not even himself—reclaimed his body, pulling him down to the ground that had regained its color, ground that had become ground once more, no longer a canvas to be scribbled upon at will.
Reality returned.
The colors that had vanished, that had been replaced by silent black and white, that had once proven that this world was merely writing upon paper that could be erased and rewritten at any time—returned.
The sky returned to blue, the earth returned to brown, and in the distance, Ling Xu—who could not comprehend what had just happened—suddenly ran, ran with trembling legs, with arms reaching forward, with a voice shattered like glass falling from the tenth floor, impossible to piece back together because the fragments were too small, too sharp, too many.
"Huan Zheng!" he cried, and for the first time since he lost both his eyes, since he chose to become empty, since he decided that there was nothing left for him to feel except pain with no outlet—tears truly fell from his hollow sockets.
Not ordinary tears, but tears made of light, tears made of memories, tears made of all the nights he had spent alone in the bamboo pavilion, listening to the wind and hoping that one day, someone would come and say that all of this was just a nightmare, that he did not need to be strong, that he did not need to sacrifice anything, that he only needed to be himself.
But Huan Zheng did not hear his cry.
Huan Zheng had already lost consciousness, his body lying on the ground with both arms spread to the sides, his hair scattered like a river across snow, his mouth slightly open as if he were about to say something—perhaps "I love you," perhaps "forgive me," perhaps "I am just a lazy man unworthy of being loved by anyone"—but no sound came out, only a faint breath carrying the last remnants of the power that had once made the entire universe hold its breath.
To be continued…