General Mu was known as the "God-Brain" of the Empire. He had won a thousand battles without ever drawing blood on his own robes. To him, war was a game of Go—precise, mathematical, and predictable.
"The Void Plague is a psychological weapon," Mu shouted, his voice amplified by Qi as he stood atop the fortress's inner sanctum. "It feeds on fear! Harmonize your Dantians! Use the [Heavenly Sun-Dial Formation]!"
Under his command, five hundred elite monks sat in a circle, their golden Qi merging into a massive, rotating disk of light above the fortress. The black mist of the Void Plague hit the golden light and sizzled, held at bay by the concentrated power of the Sun.
"You see?" Mu sneered, looking toward the bone carriage on the hill. "Your 'ancient' tricks are nothing but parlor magic against the modern cultivation of the Empire!"
Shen Yuan stepped out of the carriage. He didn't look angry; he looked amused, the way a teacher looks at a student who has confidently provided the wrong answer.
"Modern cultivation?" Shen Yuan's voice bypassed the wind and the screams, whispering directly into Mu's ear. "You think the Sun is your ally because it is bright? You forget, little scholar... the Sun is merely a fire burning in the middle of a vast, infinite Void."
Shen Yuan raised his hand, and for the first time, he didn't call upon his shadows. He reached into the air and pulled out the [Broken Mirror of the Spirit King] he had taken from the Heavenly Sword Sect.
"You use a Sun-Dial to track time," Shen Yuan said. "But in the Void... time is a circle that has already closed."
"[Sixth Gate: The Gate of Paradox]"
Shen Yuan crushed the mirror in his bare hand. Instead of glass shards, a spectral, howling entity erupted—the Spirit King, a remnant of a Core-Formation master from a forgotten era.
"Feed," Shen Yuan commanded.
The Spirit King didn't attack the soldiers. It dove straight into the [Heavenly Sun-Dial Formation].
General Mu's face paled. "What are you doing? That formation is pure Yang energy! It will incinerate your ghost!"
"I am not attacking your formation," Shen Yuan replied. "I am completing it."
The Spirit King acted as a black ink drop in a bowl of milk. The golden Sun-Dial began to spin faster and faster, but the light turned from gold to a sickly, bruised violet. The formation, designed to protect, suddenly inverted. The five hundred monks didn't just stop their Qi; they were being sucked into the center of the dial, their life force being used as fuel to expand the Void.
"No! Stop the formation!" Mu screamed, but he was caught in the gravitational pull.
The Sun-Dial collapsed inward, turning into a Black Hole of pure spiritual pressure.
BOOM.
The fortress of Iron-Gate Pass didn't explode—it imploded. Stone, steel, and men were crushed into a single point of infinite density.
Shen Yuan walked through the wreckage, the air around him shimmering with the sudden influx of raw energy. He stood before the center of the implosion, where the Spirit King was now a condensed ball of black light.
"My turn," Shen Yuan whispered.
He swallowed the black light.
The ground for ten miles around groaned. The sky turned black as the stars themselves seemed to align above him. Inside Shen Yuan's Dantian, the turbulent ocean of Void Qi began to crystallize.
It wasn't a Golden Core. It was a Black Hole Core—a sphere of absolute darkness that didn't just store Qi, but generated it from nothingness.
[Core Formation Realm: Initial Stage]
The pressure released by his breakthrough was so immense that General Mu, the sole survivor of the implosion, was pinned to a piece of rubble, his lungs collapsing under the weight of Shen Yuan's mere presence.
"General Mu," Shen Yuan said, standing over the 'God-Brain'. "Go back to Ling Xian. Tell her the Sun has set. And when I reach the Capital, I will pull the stars from her sky."
Shen Yuan didn't kill him. He needed the Empire to see the fear in the strategist's eyes.
Suddenly, a voice echoed from the north—not a human voice, but one that resonated from the spirit world.
"Master... is it truly you?"
Shen Yuan froze. He knew that voice. It was Tian Yu, his first and most loyal disciple from ten thousand years ago—now a summoned "Ancestor Spirit" under Ling Xian's control.
"Tian Yu," Shen Yuan whispered, a glint of genuine cold fury igniting in his eyes. "She even dared to disturb your rest? For that... I won't just kill her. I will erase her soul from the cycle of reincarnation."