A week had passed since the Ancestor's quiet plundering of Ye Fan's minor fortunes in the Antic Market. The stolen treasures—the dormant Earth-Swallow Cauldron, the fragmentary movement technique jade, the inert seed—lay in a corner of his spatial ring, their potential neutered. They were trophies of a war the other side didn't yet know it was fighting.
The Ancestor's focus had shifted inward, to the very core of his power base. The Black Dragon Citadel was more than a fortress; it was a complex organism of qi channels, defensive formations, and layered spatial pockets, a legacy of the previous Lu Tian's millennia of paranoid accumulation. Lin Mo's goblin mind, married to this ancient knowledge, saw not just security, but untapped potential. The Citadel itself could be a tool for his new purpose.
He stood in the Citadel's heart, the Nexus Chamber—a room the original Ancestor had used to monitor the Luo Region's leylines. Before him swirled a holographic map of the territory, glowing lines of energy representing spiritual veins and nodes of power. The System's interface was overlaid upon it, its analytics cold and precise.
[Leyline Convergence Analysis: 72% efficiency. Primary Qi drain: Defensive Array 'Umbra Aegis' (45%), Ancestral Training Grounds (30%), Spatial Stabilization (15%), Waste/Leakage (10%).]
[Proposal: Re-route 20% from 'Umbra Aegis' to new 'Destiny-Severing Array'. Array Purpose: Passive detection and minor attenuation of 'Protagonist Aura' within designated radius.] [Risk: Regional defensive capabilities reduced by 9.7%. Reward: Constant -0.01% to -0.05% reduction in Target Ye Fan's Luck and Karmic Attraction per lunar cycle.]
A slow, predatory smile touched the Ancestor's lips. The original owner would never have dared lower his defenses by a single percent. He was a hoarder, a turtle in a shell of his own making. But the Eternal Goblin Ancestor was a hunter. And hunters understood that sometimes, the best defense was a better, more subtle offense.
"Initiate rerouting," he commanded softly.
The Citeldel groaned, a deep, subsonic hum felt in the bones rather than heard by the ears. Across the massive walls, ancient runes briefly dimmed. The immense shadow-dome shield that protected the Citadel, the 'Umbra Aegis', thinned by a fraction, its opaqueness turning a shade more translucent. The diverted power, a colossal river of spiritual energy, was funneled downward, into the foundations of the Citadel itself. There, guided by the System's impossible precision, it began to weave a new formation—not one of brute force, but of delicate, cosmic interference. It was a spider weaving a web designed to catch not flies, but luck itself.
This was the true nature of his strategy. It wasn't just about stealing opportunities; it was about making the very air his enemy breathed slightly thinner, making fate's whispers to him slightly harder to hear.
His musings were interrupted by a subtle shift in the energy around him. It wasn't an alarm. It was a variance—a harmonic dissonance in the Citadel's newly tuned qi flow. A presence, expertly hidden, was attempting to skim along the weakened edges of the Umbra Aegis, a minnow trying to slip through a momentarily wider net.
[Unauthorized spatial fluctuation detected. Bearing: Sector 7, near Breeder Containment.]
[Energy Signature: Nascent Soul Realm (Stage 5). Camouflage Art: 'Phantom Veil of the Seven Shadows'. Cultivation Base: Stable, Water-attribute.] [Origin Cross-Reference: 99.8% match, Hidden Su Clan techniques. Intent: Covert Reconnaissance. Target Designation: Breeder #001 'Su Wan'.]
[Threat Assessment: Low (Direct Combat). High (Intel Leak, External Interference in Breeding Program).]
The Ancestor's smile didn't fade; it sharpened. The Su Clan. Su Wan's natal family. He'd expected them sooner or later. This was perfect. His new array needed calibration. A live test subject of decent power would do nicely.
He didn't move. His consciousness simply expanded, merging with the Citadel's newly energized foundations. To the intruder—a seasoned elder from the Hidden Su Clan named Su Bo—everything seemed normal. His 'Phantom Veil' was holding. He'd felt the brief fluctuation in the Citadel's defenses and seized the chance, slipping through a microscopic gap. His mission was simple: confirm Su Wan's status. The Lu Clan's sudden aggression and the silencing of their daughter's usual spiritual missives had raised alarms. He was a ghost, a whisper.
He condensed his form into a ripple of refracted light, sliding along the corridor leading to the opulent chambers even his spiritual sense could tell were heavily guarded. He could feel her aura now—a potent, serene, yet strangely altered Yin energy. It was Su Wan, but… more. And there was another presence with her, younger, also bearing the heavy imprint of the Citadel's dark power.
He reached a point where the corridor offered a sliver of a view into the chamber through a decorative lattice. Inside, he saw them. Su Wan, seated in meditation, her beauty ethereal, a soft silver light emanating from her. And another stunning young woman, in the robes of a maid, pouring tea with a subservience that spoke of absolute control. His heart clenched. She was alive, seemingly well-treated, but the air of captivity was palpable.
It was then the environment changed.
The air around Su Bo solidified. It wasn't an attack; it was the space itself rejecting him. His 'Phantom Veil' shattered without a sound, exposing him—a man in grey robes frozen in a stance of covert movement, his face a mask of utter shock.
The Ancestor's voice filled his mind, not as a sound, but as a law written directly onto his soul. "You tread where you are not welcome. You gaze upon treasures that are not yours."
Su Bo's Nascent Soul trembled within him. This pressure… it was beyond anything he'd felt. It wasn't the peak of Nascent Soul. It was something… transcendent. Soul Transformation? The rumors were true! Panic surged, but centuries of training took over. He gathered his power, his Water-attributed qi准备 to unleash a desperate, area-denial technique to cover his retreat.
But the energy refused to obey. The very qi in the air around him was no longer neutral. It belonged to the Citadel. It belonged to Him. It was like trying to swim upstream in a river that had suddenly decided to flow uphill.
"You are an error in my design," the voice continued, a chilling monotone. "A flaw to be corrected."
The punishment was not violent; it was analytical. Su Bo felt a consciousness of immense, alien intelligence focus on him. It wasn't looking at him; it was analyzing the structure of his cultivation, the cohesion of his soul.
Then, the pressure focused on his dantian. On his Nascent Soul.
He felt a touch—not physical, but spiritual—on the core of his being. It was the lightest, most terrifying sensation imaginable. His Nascent Soul, the culmination of his life's work, his hope for immortality, was being examined.
Then, it was unmade.
There was no explosion, no pain. It was a process of utter negation. The carefully condensed spiritual energy, the consciousness that was Su Bo, was unraveled. Its component parts were identified, categorized, and systematically dissolved back into the ambient qi from which it came. It was the opposite of creation. It was a deletion.
The light vanished from Su Bo's eyes. His body, now an empty biological shell, remained standing for a moment before collapsing into a heap of meaningless matter.
The entire event had taken less than a heartbeat. Silent, clean, and absolute.
In the chamber, Su Wan's eyes snapped open. She hadn't heard anything, but she'd felt it—a sudden, silent vacuum in the world's energy, a cold, precise nothingness where a powerful life had been a moment before. She met Chu Ling's wide-eyed gaze. The maid had felt it too, a shiver of existential dread. They both looked towards the doorway, seeing nothing, but knowing everything. The message was received, colder and sharper than any blade: their world was a sealed garden. Looky-loos would be pruned without a sound.
The Ancestor, in the Nexus Chamber, watched the last of Su Bo's energy be absorbed by the nascent Destiny-Severing Array. The formation glowed a fraction brighter.
[Unauthorized Presence Erased. No data leak.]
[Energy harvested: Nascent Soul (Stage 5). Converting…] [Destiny-Severing Array Calibration: +15%. Efficiency now at 87%. Estimated Luck Reduction on Target Ye Fan: -0.03% per cycle.]
[Karma Point +10. Minor Realm Progress +1%.]
He returned to his leyline map. The garden was secure. The spider's web was now slightly stickier. And far away, in a secret realm, Ye Fan, having finally secured the Jade Heart Fruit, felt another inexplicable, cold shudder of loss, a feeling his beautiful master in the jade pendant once again dismissed as pre-breakthrough jitters. The storm on his horizon was building, and he didn't even know the sky had changed.