Just as Gu Yue was preparing to end everything, a mysterious power descended.
It was as though the sky itself were collapsing.
Gu Yue felt the overwhelming pressure of a mighty, heaven-spanning authority.
She was instantly thrown into stunned uncertainty. "The Planar Consciousness?"
"No, that's not right. It's only similar." Gu Yue narrowed her eyes and lifted her gaze toward the sky.
In her cool, impassive pupils, the image of churning clouds was reflected.
Though the descending power carried that same imposing, heaven-spanning authority, it lacked the boundless, impartial vastness of a true Planar Consciousness.
Instead, it was threaded with a faint and strangely familiar quality, one that belonged unmistakably to a "human."
"A human?"
She turned to look at Tang San, and her indifferent voice rang out. "Hmph, so this is your backup?"
"Interesting. Soul-snatching the Planar Consciousness."
"What a pity."
A pity that the soul-snatching had clearly run into problems.
The thought of retreat rose in Gu Yue's mind.
Through this exchange, she had learned just about everything she needed to know.
This Tang San was nothing more than a rootless, sourceless spiritual consciousness. Gu Yue had all the time in the world to wear him down.
Her figure gradually faded. Gu Yue and Di Tian vanished from the spot, leaving behind a single parting remark. "Hmph. Next time. The power of the Golden Dragon King will return to the Dragon Clan where it belongs."
As if sensing Gu Yue's retreat, that heaven-spanning authority dissipated as well, withdrawing back up into the high sky.
"Father?" Tang San, with no time even to feel relief, stood there in a daze. Tang Hao had come quickly and left just as quickly, without even appearing before him.
The light in Tang San's eyes flickered with unease. Something had clearly gone wrong on Tang Hao's end.
After a long moment, he exhaled a heavy breath and returned to the depths of Tang Wulin's body.
Somewhere in a secluded corner of East Sea City, Gu Yue's figure reappeared. A thread of blood seeped unbidden from the corner of her mouth.
"My lord!"
Di Tian rushed forward.
"There is no need for concern." She raised a hand to stop him and wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth.
"A mere backlash."
She had only recultivated to Level 29 after all; a little less and it would have been fine. This exchange had drawn far too deeply on the power of the Silver Dragon King's origin.
Hence the backlash.
Even so, what she had gained was worth the cost.
She closed her eyes. In her mind flashed a vision of the Golden Dragon King's sealed essence in full, along with the anguished wailing of its dragon roar.
"Tang San."
Gu Yue was confident. Wear him down a few more times at this pace, and that spiritual consciousness would extinguish itself.
There would be no need to pay an excessive price to force a single decisive resolution.
Yet suddenly, Gu Yue found she had no patience for the slow approach. The Golden Dragon King's wailing echoed on and on through her mind.
Since that was the case, she put her extraordinary intellect to work and gave Di Tian his orders. "Di Tian, send someone to find Na'er. Tell her to come here."
Forcing her way through Tang San was too slow. She would go around him instead.
She would draw out the Golden Dragon King's essence and compel it to return to its rightful place on its own.
Before the Dragon God had separated the Golden Dragon King from itself, the Golden Dragon, which had been deeply blessed by the Dragon God's grace, was the absolute pinnacle of power representing the Dragon Clan, the very progenitor of strength. It had originally been born from the Dragon God's own Golden Dragon King power.
If one were to speak plainly, the connection between the Golden Dragon and the Golden Dragon King was no less profound than that between the Silver Dragon King and the Golden Dragon King.
As it happened, Gu Yue had in her possession a strand of Golden Dragon origin energy. It had originally been prepared as a cover for her own martial soul when she took human form, but an unforeseen complication had arisen, forcing her to separate Na'er. To prevent Leng Yaozhu from growing suspicious, the Golden Dragon origin energy had naturally been given to Na'er as well.
"I never imagined it would come in useful at a moment like this."
Gu Yue's brilliant mind went to work.
She would use the Silver Dragon King and Golden Dragon auras residing within Na'er as a two-pronged approach, then employ a secret technique to bring the Golden Dragon King back to its rightful place.
When that moment came, no seal and no Tang San would be able to stop it.
What remained now was simply to make the necessary preparations.
As for the person who had soul-snatched the Planar Consciousness, Gu Yue gave it no further thought. She didn't know why, but that person was already in no position to save himself.
Deep within the Douluo Plane.
Tang Hao awoke to find his sky had fallen.
The path of his soul-snatching of the Plane was on the verge of collapse.
Soul-snatching a plane required gradually eroding the original Planar Consciousness, step by step.
But the primordial Planar Consciousness permeated every corner of heaven and earth across the Douluo Continent; it was everywhere.
Destroying it entirely was extraordinarily difficult.
Even with Tang San aiding him in secret, Tang Hao had spent an incalculable amount of time before finally succeeding.
After eroding the Planar Consciousness down to a single remaining thread, hidden somewhere in an obscure corner of the Douluo Continent, Tang Hao had felt that the outcome was settled.
He stopped searching for it carefully.
In his view, that last thread of Planar Consciousness was like a candle guttering in the wind, liable to fade away on its own at any moment.
And so he had settled into a peaceful slumber, waiting for Tang San's ten-thousand-year plan to unfold.
Then today, he had suddenly received Tang San's summons.
"How could this be..." Tang Hao gritted his teeth, his spiritual consciousness frantically probing toward the Plane's core.
Memories surged over him like a tide.
The moment he received Tang San's summons, he had moved without hesitation to channel the power of the Plane in response, but in that very instant, the primordial Planar Consciousness he had long believed to be on the brink of dissolution suddenly erupted from some unknown quarter, clamping down on him with iron force.
That sliver of consciousness had somehow, at some point, gathered a reserve of strength.
Rather than tugging at him cautiously, it launched a full-frontal counterattack with reckless ferocity, frantically reclaiming the Plane's origin energy he had spent years eroding.
In that moment, though he was startled, Tang Hao had actually felt a flicker of delight. The remnant Planar Consciousness had actually chosen to meet him head-on; he could not have asked for better.
Yet when the fighting truly began, Tang Hao found himself with grievances he couldn't voice.
The Planar Consciousness could not be killed.
He racked his mind and could not work out why.
The Planar Consciousness's origin energy seemed to be held firmly in place, guarded and fixed by something.
No matter how Tang Hao attacked, whether by tearing, devouring, sealing, or any other method he tried, and even drawing on the power of the Plane he had gained through his soul-snatching, none of it was enough to extinguish that sliver of consciousness.
What appeared to be a decisive blow was in truth only feeding the opponent, allowing it to gather strength in the aftermath.
Only after paying an enormous price did he finally see clearly.
At the core of that sliver of consciousness, a faint and barely perceptible beam of light lingered. It was this beam that held the origin energy in an unbreakable lock, granting it a quality akin to being impervious to death.
What unsettled him even more was that the fluctuations flowing through the beam were reconnecting the Planar Consciousness to the deepest reaches of the Douluo Plane.
So long as the beam endured, the Planar Consciousness could hold its ground against his soul-snatching indefinitely, its link to the Plane never severed.
At that moment, Tang Hao had been fully aware that Tang San was in danger and needed help. Yet the resurgent Planar Consciousness had him pinned down completely, and he had no choice but to pay the price of surrendering a portion of his planar authority just to spare enough focus to aid Tang San.
Not long before all of this.
"What's wrong?" Mu Chen walked over to Arthur's side with a puzzled look, watching as Arthur had suddenly moved to stand at the window, rooted there like a statue.
"Can't you see it?"
A column of light was rising in the distance, piercing straight up into the heavens. Arthur suppressed the shock and unease welling up inside him.
He could feel the terrifying high-order power within it, something that surpassed Su Wuyan by far. No, "surpassed" wasn't quite the right word.
It would be more accurate to say they were not on the same plane of existence.
"A god?"
It was a level of existence entirely unlike Su Wuyan, a Super Douluo. The power put Arthur in mind of a divine being.
Were there gods in East Sea City?
Yes.
Gu Yue.
And the spiritual consciousness lodged inside Tang Wulin's mind.
"What did you see?" Mu Chen's expression grew faintly serious. Something felt off about Arthur.
"No, it's nothing. I probably just imagined it."
Arthur shook his head, and Mu Chen's confusion only deepened his certainty that there was something extraordinary about that power.
What is about to make her entrance next is the utterly transformed, supremely invincible, impossibly awe-inspiring Na'er!