The Silver Steel Forest was not a territory that forgave intruders. The colossal trees, with metallic‑gray trunks thick as watchtowers, exuded a wild, crushing Qi. The very density of gravity there would grind the organs of any ordinary mortal to dust in seconds, turning unrefined bones to powder under the weight of the atmosphere.
But gliding through the air of that untamed forest, the Young Master Lǐ Wēi displayed the serenity of someone strolling through his own garden.
Perched atop a bronze compass that floated gently among the metallic leaves, he wore silks embroidered with the emblem of the Celestial Lance City. The youth of his face concealed nearly a century of life and the accumulation of resources that had forged his Sea of Qi. Behind him, without needing artifacts to repel the world's weight, floated Elder Gu. The Protector's cadaverous face showed no effort; with each breath of the old man, invisible currents of wind bent the steel blades of the surrounding leaves, resonating with the environment in natural submission. He was one step away from condensing his own soul into a nascent divinity.
"The Iron‑Horned Beast escaped into the dark fissures of the Dead Echo Valley, Elder Gu," Lǐ Wēi grumbled, idly spinning the green jade ring on his thumb. The jewel subtly distorted the surrounding light, indicating an internal storage space vast enough to house an entire palace courtyard. "A whole week mapping this filth and we return empty‑handed."
Elder Gu did not answer immediately. The old man's narrow eyes fixed on a dark clearing to the left. The wind around him hissed, bringing the metallic taste of ozone and something more… a recent scar in the very fabric of reality.
"The hunt may have failed, Young Master," the Elder's voice sounded like two stones scraping against each other. The threads of wind around his wrists became invisible, lethal razors. "But the borders of space have just oscillated violently just ahead. Rifts opening in this forest often spew abyssal aberrations. Keep your guard up."
They changed course and advanced through the shadows of the metallic trunks. What they found in the center of the next clearing, however, made Lǐ Wēi blink in confusion.
It was not an ancestral beast. It was a carriage.
Beneath the colossal shadow of the steel foliage rested a fortress of dark cedar and iron. The vehicle was pulled by four black horses. Rustic beasts. The poor animals neighed in pure agony, their trembling knees buckling against the black earth, blood beginning to leak from their nostrils as their lungs crackled, slowly crushed by the mere gravitational pressure of that plane.
On the wooden driver's seat, holding the reins with wrinkled hands, an old coachman slumped to his knees. The man coughed up dark clots, his bones cracking terrifyingly from the lack of purified oxygen.
But Lǐ Wēi's eyes ignored the dying cart and the agonizing elder. The Young Master's heart missed a beat as he focused on the entrance of the armored cabin.
The woman leaning against the wooden doorframe did not seem to care about the place's deadly atmosphere. She wore heavy dark leather boots, combat trousers, and a martial tunic of dark‑gold silk, thick and rigorously closed. A plain, opaque black veil covered half her face.
But the attempt at concealment was a biological disaster. The hair falling to her waist gleamed like living gold. The thick layers of martial fabric strained scandalously with each breath, outlining the heavy fullness of her breasts and the dense curves of her hips. The almond eyes peeking above the black veil showed no panic or submission; they exuded a carnivorous, wild boredom.
"By the heavens…" Lǐ Wēi murmured, the bronze compass descending to touch the ground. The frustration of the hunt evaporated, replaced by a blazing greed. "What kind of exotic treasure did a dimensional storm vomit up?"
Elder Gu frowned, trying to measure the woman's energy. But his perception, accustomed to reading the world's Laws, crashed against an incomprehensible physical wall. The golden girl did not radiate magic; her body was a silent dam of raw violence. The old man's millennial instinct sent a chill up his nape, but the arrogance of one who dominated the winds of the higher realm kept him cemented in place. No filthy outsider, no matter how exotic, would challenge the resonance of heaven.
"Trash swept up from an exhausted lower world, Young Master," Elder Gu pronounced, tilting his chin toward the blood‑spitting coachman. "Look at the state of the servant. He can't even handle the breath of our trees."
The conqueror's smile returned to Lǐ Wēi's face. He stepped forward, adjusting his silk sleeves.
"You there," he ordered, his voice carrying the authority of one who bought and sold lives in the local cities. "I am Lǐ Wēi, of Celestial Lance City. You are trespassing on my clan's territory. Hand over the cart and all storage rings. In exchange, my Protector will save that old man's pathetic life, and you will have the honor of cleaning my private palace. If you take off that veil and please me, perhaps I won't throw you to the guards when I tire."
On the driver's seat, Mò Yán's old grandfather let out a wet wheeze. He coughed more blood, but with clouded eyes, he cast a look of genuine pity at the Young Master. The coachman harbored a Seed of Destruction in his own chest. He knew exactly what the abyss did to those who shouted at the edge of its well.
Yù Méi stopped tapping her boot against the veranda wood.
The Brutal Blade tilted her head to the side. Her blood, already boiling with the newly awakened euphoria of her Sea of Gold, had found a target.
"I just arrived, the air in this hole still stinks in my nose, and you're already begging to be hit?" Yù Méi's voice sounded muffled by the black veil, but the raw, bestial mockery vibrated through the earthen courtyard. "Stay quiet down there, boy. Those who bark without knowing the yard's owner end up swallowing their own teeth."
The raw insolence made Lǐ Wēi's face twist with indignation. But Elder Gu did not tolerate disrespect from scum.
"Watch your mouth, bitch!" the Protector snarled.
The old man did not need to draw a sword. The air of the Silver Steel Forest, already naturally dense and crushing, obeyed his resonance. With a merciless hand seal, he projected an invisible, hyper‑compressed blade of wind. The attack was not aimed at Yù Méi, but shot fast and cruel toward the neck of Mò Yán's old grandfather on the driver's seat, intending to decapitate him as a bloody warning.
The sound of wind tearing through space was deafening. The metallic leaves of the trees screamed.
The atmospheric pressure of the blow struck Yù Méi head‑on. The Brutal Blade was not pushed. Her unhinged smile tore through the black silk of her veil. Her newborn Sea of Law—the Law of Rupture—throbbed deep in her entrails, boiling in her fists. She bent her knees, ready to leap from the veranda, intercept the gale with her own chest, and turn that old man's skull into metallic dust.
But she did not need to move.
The heavy armored door of the cabin at her back unlocked with a click that seemed to swallow all sound in the world. The door opened gently.
The hyper‑compressed air blade of Elder Gu, millimeters from decapitating the coachman, did not merely stop in the air. The very concept of wind disintegrated into a pathetic breeze, dying before a Will that did not belong to any biological ecosystem.
The sound of a dark leather‑covered boot stepping onto the cedar veranda echoed through the clearing.
The killing tension imposed by Gu was brutally obliterated by an absolute vacuum. The Elder gasped, his eyes bulging in pure terror as he felt his connection to the Wind silenced within his own body. He tried to pull in air, but the atmosphere was now a block of solid concrete.
Zhì Yuǎn stepped out of the cabin. The black silk cloak fluttered lethargically over his imposing shoulders. The god in the charcoal‑gray tunic did not assume a combat stance or shout orders. He walked to the edge of the veranda and lowered his black, abyssal, indolent eyes onto the two intruders.
The Protector's heart, forged in nearly a century of battles, froze.
He is not resonating with the world…, Gu's mind screamed in hysterical panic, his knees buckling as the earth seemed to sink. Heaven itself is bending simply because he steps on the ground!
Zhì Yuǎn did not utter a single word. He did not debate with dusty insects.
The god raised his right hand. Without forming seals, he squeezed his fingers in the air. Wisdom pulled the density of space around Elder Gu and inverted it, crushing the area from the outside inward with a colossal contraction.
CRUNCH.
There was no time for screams or defensive comprehension. The sound in the forest was not that of a magical attack, but of a cosmic concrete mixer grinding the environment. The Daoist Protector's body imploded. Flesh, tempered bones, robes, and soul were compacted in a fraction of a second. A perfectly dense, thirty‑centimeter cube of gore fell heavily onto the metallic roots of the tree, dead before the pain even reached the brain's nervous system.
Lǐ Wēi, the prodigy Young Master covered by the crimson mist of his own invincible master, dropped to his knees on the black earth.
Air left his lungs, and he urinated into his own silks. Abject terror shattered the aristocrat's sanity into a thousand pieces. He looked at the carriage's veranda, meeting that dark well of indifference turned toward him.
"No… my vision was blind… mercy…" Lǐ Wēi babbled, sobbing in hysteria as he crawled backward across the ground. He raised his left hand, desperately tearing off the storage ring and throwing it into the dirt as an offering for his own soul. "The ring! Take it! Three inner halls! Maps of the province… treasures! Take everything!"
Zhì Yuǎn descended from the carriage, the gravity of each step making Lǐ Wēi groan in agony. The god bent lethargically and picked up the fallen jewel from the mud, Wisdom immediately penetrating the spatial distortion of the ring.
The darkness of his eyes fixed on the weeping Young Master. The Law of Destruction radiated from Zhì Yuǎn without flash or glory. Only the end.
Lǐ Wēi's molecules began to silently disintegrate from the legs upward, turning the arrogant heir into a shower of silver ash before his scream even finished, swept away by the forest's damp breeze.
Zhì Yuǎn spun the jade ring between his fingers, assessing the vast scope of resources the artifact housed. Ignoring the mountains of gleaming stones the idiot had considered valuable, he focused on the detailed maps of that new ecosystem.
"The nearest city has a broad information market, and resources that can stabilize the burden of this domain," Zhì Yuǎn murmured, his deep, pragmatic voice breaking the silence of the clearing. He turned his face slightly toward his wife, who watched him from the veranda with a wet, devoted smile, delighting in the banquet of dust he had just made. "The rules of this heaven may be heavy, Qíng. But our harvest is only beginning."
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