Chapter Sixty

With his right hand, he made a universally recognized gesture of disdain toward the other man. Xiao Yan remained silent, and with lightning speed, threw a punch at Lin Dong. Perhaps he hadn't expected the attack to come so decisively, for Lin Dong failed to dodge and was struck squarely. Yet the anticipated scene—Lin Dong being knocked out of the sky—did not occur. Instead, after recoiling several steps in midair, a shattering sound emanated from Lin Dong’s chest, audible only to him. It turned out the force of Xiao Yan’s punch had been absorbed at that very spot.

“What is this?” Lin Dong murmured softly, equally confounded by this unprecedented mutation, so far beyond the ordinary.

Suddenly, Lin Dong’s shirt exploded, fragments of cloth tumbling from dozens of meters above. In the darkness, his robust, chiseled upper body was laid bare. Sensing this strange phenomenon in the other, Xiao Yan too was left stunned, making no further move.

Several seconds passed before Lin Dong turned to Xiao Yan and asked, “What on earth is this thing?”

“I don’t know, either. All I know is that a month ago, this thing fell from outer space without any warning, landed in the outer courtyard of my family’s estate, and gouged out a crater dozens of meters wide,” Xiao Yan replied without concealment. He suspected this thing might be beyond the Xiao clan’s control, and now, seeing Lin Dong undergo such a transformation, he was certain the extraterrestrial object was extraordinary.

What Xiao Yan did not know was that, in the two weeks before Lin Dong had stolen it, dozens of Xiao clan researchers had studied the object for days and discovered it could actually distort space and time.

In the outside world, something with such abilities would have caused a sensation. But to a family of cultivators with centuries of history, it was no more than a useless trinket. When the Xiao clan learned of it, the higher-ups paid little heed, and it was left in a research room with minimal security.

Xiao Yan was unaware of all this. After Lin Dong stole it, the Xiao clan initially sent only a few minor lackeys in pursuit. As a member of the new generation, Xiao Yan, in a moment of hot-blooded impulse, set out to chase Lin Dong without even seeking approval.

Then, as the two stood suspended in midair, stunned, Lin Dong’s chest suddenly burst open without warning. His scream shattered the silence of the night, and his body exploded, a cloud of blood, bone, and flesh fragments filling the air—a gruesome sight.

Xiao Yan could scarcely believe Lin Dong had exploded before his eyes. The blood and carnage left him frozen, a wave of nausea overtaking him, but he made no move.

In the blink of an eye, Xiao Yan felt the shockwave from Lin Dong’s explosion race toward him. In an instant, a second scream split the night. High above, both men were blasted apart, their blood mingling, drifting together—a moment ago locked in combat, now inseparable in death.

Only Luo Wen, lying motionless on the ground, witnessed it all.

Just like that, the two in the sky vanished in the explosion, and the night grew silent, as if their fierce battle had never taken place at all. If not for the blood mist still hanging in the air, Luo Wen would have thought it a hallucination before death.

As he looked upward, Luo Wen finally noticed the center of the blood mist: a red bead—surely the object the two had been fighting over.

The blood mist in the air began to move, slowly at first, then swirling around the red bead. It formed a spiraling vortex, rotating faster and faster, rushing toward the bead, which absorbed it bit by bit.

After several minutes, the red bead had swallowed all the blood mist, then came to a halt. Already crimson, it now looked even more sinister, emitting a ghostly blood-red glow, but it showed no sign of enlarging.

Luo Wen glanced at it, thinking, This doesn’t fit with my physics teacher’s law of conservation of energy.

The bead seemed to hesitate in midair, as if sentient. Luo Wen did not know why the two had exploded into blood mist, nor why the bead had absorbed them. After pondering, he arrived at a conclusion worthy of any avid reader of online novels: The battle between the two must have activated the red bead, causing them to explode, and then, in its rage, the bead consumed them both. Yes, that must be it, Luo Wen thought with a wry smile.

After hovering in the air for a few seconds, the bead began to descend—directly above Luo Wen’s head. Would it kill him if it landed? From ten meters up, if the bead was heavy enough, it might well smash him.

Then again, he was already bleeding out and near death; better to be crushed quickly than to die slowly. Early death, early reincarnation.

The bead paused briefly, then truly began to fall. Luo Wen’s heart skipped a beat—was this really how he would die?

Just as the thought crossed his mind, he instinctively opened his mouth.

The red bead dropped neatly into Luo Wen’s mouth, but it was not as heavy as he imagined; it did not kill him. Instead, as soon as it touched his tongue, it melted away, sliding down his throat into his stomach. A wave of warmth suffused his belly, spreading through his body, and the pain that had wracked him began to subside. Sleepiness vanished.

But after the comfort came a pain so excruciating it seemed to tear him apart. It felt as if his body was being disassembled and then reassembled, piece by piece.

A violent churning erupted in his gut. Luo Wen curled on the ground like a shrimp, fully awake now despite the agony. He could sense his skeleton detaching from his flesh, growing and restructuring before his very eyes. Each of his 206 bones was recombining, flesh and sinew reattaching themselves, as if a deity were reconstructing his body to perfection.

He had no idea how much time passed before the pain finally ebbed. Instinctively, Luo Wen stood up. His eyes were unusually deep; he stretched his right hand before him and was startled to see his bones, muscles, and blood vessels beneath the skin with astonishing clarity.

Glancing at a tree by the roadside, Luo Wen could sense its life force—the bark, the roots beneath the earth.