Wei's journey north was a silent pilgrimage through a dying world. The Art of the Star-Stepping Phantom was a technique of profound subtlety. There was no rush of wind, no blur of motion. He would simply perceive the invisible seams in the fabric of space, the faint, shimmering lines that bound reality together, and take a step. The world would fold around him, and he would emerge hundreds of miles away, the only evidence of his passage a faint, quickly fading ripple in the spiritual energy of the air.
He traveled for weeks, crossing vast mountain ranges, sprawling empires, and desolate plains. The lands grew colder, the spiritual energy thinner, the signs of life more scarce. He was leaving the vibrant heart of the continent and heading towards its dying northern limb. He felt no fatigue, no hunger, no thirst. The Pill of Eternal Sustenance he had consumed had turned his body into a perfectly self-contained system, drawing the minuscule amount of energy it needed from the void itself. He was a ghost, untethered from the needs of the living.
After a month of relentless travel, he felt it. A wrongness on the horizon. It was not a physical barrier or a change in the landscape, but a subtle, sickening disharmony in the very laws of the world. The spiritual energy here was not just thin; it was frayed, like a rope that was slowly unraveling into individual threads.
He stopped, standing on a desolate, windswept peak, and looked north. Before him lay the edge of the Void Corruption.
It did not look like a land of death. It looked like a land of nothing. The mountains ahead seemed to lose their sharpness, their edges blurring as if seen through frosted glass. A patch of forest would be vibrant and green, and then, a few feet away, it would simply cease to be, replaced by a patch of dull, featureless grey that was not stone, not dust, but the complete absence of texture and detail. A river flowed towards the corrupted zone, but it did not stop at a bank; the water itself seemed to lose its cohesion, its color and movement fading until it became a motionless, grey smear.
As he took a step forward, a profound sense of vertigo washed over him. The law of gravity under his feet felt... unreliable. The law of light seemed to bend at odd, unnatural angles. It was a feeling that would have driven a lesser cultivator mad, their spiritual sea thrown into chaos by the breakdown of the very rules that governed their existence.
But as the external laws began to fray, the 'Rune of Unchanging Self' inscribed upon his soul flared with a soft, internal light. A profound sense of stability anchored him. While the world outside was losing its definition, the reality of 'Wei' remained absolute and inviolable. He was an island of unchanging law in an ocean of unraveling chaos.
He began to walk, stepping from the world of the real into the world of the unreal. The ground beneath his feet felt both solid and intangible. The air was silent, not because there was no sound, but because the very concept of sound was weak here. He was in the belly of the beast, and his academic curiosity burned with a cold, intense fire.
He spent days walking through this twilight landscape, his spiritual sense extended, not to feel, but to analyze. He was not a warrior here; he was a diagnostician, studying the symptoms of a dying world. He noted how the corruption was not uniform. It spread in slow, creeping veins, following what seemed to be the lines of spiritual energy that crisscrossed the continent. It was like a cancer, attacking the world's meridians first.
On the third day, he encountered something new. It was not a Curse Beast, not a resentful spirit. It was a distortion.
It appeared before him without a sound, coalescing from the grey nothingness. It had the vague, shimmering outline of a massive, winged serpent, but its form was unstable. It seemed to flicker in and out of existence, its body a kaleidoscope of mismatched textures—patches of shimmering scales next to patches of rough bark, a feathered wing next to one made of flowing water. It had no eyes, no discernible features, only a gaping maw that was a perfect, spherical hole of absolute blackness.
Wei stopped, his mind racing. This creature was not alive in any sense he understood. It was a localized paradox, a knot in the unraveling fabric of reality. It radiated no life force, no spiritual pressure, only a profound sense of wrongness.
He acted with the caution of a man handling an unknown poison. He sent one of his Venom-Quenched Soul Needles, coated in a simple but potent neurotoxin, flying towards the creature. The needle did not hit. It did not miss. Halfway to its target, the needle simply ceased to be, erased from existence by the passive aura of the beast.
Wei's eyes narrowed. Brute force was useless. Direct attacks were useless. The creature did not defend; its very nature negated the concept of his attack.
The reality-warped serpent opened its black-hole maw and let out a silent scream. A wave of pure erasure shot towards Wei. It was not an energy blast; it was a wave of nothing. Where it passed, the featureless grey ground was wiped clean, leaving behind a patch of even more profound emptiness.
Wei did not erect a barrier. He simply took a single step, using the Art of the Star-Stepping Phantom to appear a hundred meters to the left, the wave of nothingness passing harmlessly through the space he had just occupied.
He now understood. He could not attack the creature, and he could not defend against its attacks. To fight it on its own terms was to lose. He needed to change the very nature of the battlefield.
He stood still, his mind a fortress of cold logic, and simply observed. He watched the creature flicker and warp. He analyzed the rhythm of its distortions. He realized that while the creature itself was a paradox, it still required a point of reference to exist. It was a distortion of reality, and therefore, it needed reality to push against. Its existence, while chaotic, was anchored to the few remaining stable laws around it.
He had a theory. A dangerous, insane theory.
He opened his inner world and retrieved the single, perfect drop of 'Void-Bane', his spatial toxin. He did not coat a needle with it. He did not intend to throw it.
He waited for the creature to launch another wave of erasure. As the wave shot towards him, he once again used the Star-Stepping Phantom art to move. But this time, he did not just dodge. He appeared directly beside the creature, a mere ten feet from its unstable, flickering form.
Before the creature could react, he flicked his wrist. The single drop of 'Void-Bane' flew, not at the creature, but at an empty patch of ground directly beneath it.
The effect was subtle, yet absolute. The drop of Void-Bane touched the ground, and a single, infinitesimally small point of reality was erased. It was not an explosion. It was a silent, perfect deletion.
For a fraction of a second, a true vacuum, a hole in the very fabric of existence, was created.
The reality-warped serpent, which had been anchored to the stable laws of that specific patch of ground, suddenly lost its footing. Its anchor point was gone. The result was catastrophic. The creature, a paradox without a frame of reference, could no longer maintain its own cohesion.
It let out another silent, agonizing scream. Its flickering form began to unravel, not violently, but like a tapestry being un-spun. The mismatched textures of its body dissolved, the scales, bark, and water separating and fading into nothing. The black-hole maw collapsed in on itself. Within five seconds, the terrifying creature had simply ceased to be, its own paradoxical nature tearing it apart once it was untethered from the real world.
Wei stood in the silent, empty landscape, his breathing steady. He had not overpowered his enemy. He had not poisoned it. He had simply kicked the chair out from under it. It was a victory of pure, unadulterated theory.
As the creature's essence faded, a single, small object clattered to the ground, the only thing left of its existence. It was a small, metallic token, half-erased and corroded by the corruption. Wei picked it up. He could just make out the faded engraving on its surface: a soaring eagle before a snow-capped mountain. It was the sect emblem of the Sky Eagle Sect, one of the great northern powers that the Sect Master had said had fallen a century ago.
Wei stared at the token, the final pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. The creature had not been a random monster. It had been a cultivator, a powerful one, warped and transformed by the Void Corruption into a living weapon of unreality.
He looked north, into the deeper, greyer expanses of the corrupted lands. This place was not empty. It was a graveyard. And the ghosts here were not the simple, resentful spirits of the valley. They were the twisted, reality-devouring remnants of fallen heroes and vanquished masters. His mission had just become infinitely more dangerous.