Chapter 71: Cold Feathers Descend upon the World, The Silent Restructuring under the Absolute Polar Light
Inside the B.E.N. Underground Level 7 Strategic Command Center.
Deep within the cold alloy corridors, the air circulation system—once hailed as the pinnacle of high-tech engineering—emitted a dull, rhythmic, and heavy drone. The air still carried the lingering scent of cigar smoke and the white foam of premium champagne, left behind just minutes ago by the conglomerate executives during their celebratory holographic conference.
"Investigate! Investigate this for me immediately! What exactly is going on?! I don't want to hear any—"
Yet, at this exact millisecond, all the clamour, arrogance, and flickering telemetry data were forced to a grinding halt.
Zzzt—Zzz—!!!
In the center of the hall, the ultra-gargantuan circular master control screen—maintained by quantum entanglement technology and boasted to be absolutely un-jammable—flared into a piercing hue of ghostly blue without warning. Immediately following that, the signal was severed completely. The screen did not dissolve into traditional static; instead, it transformed into a bizarre, hollow, and absolutely freezing deathly white silence.
"Warning! Atmospheric pressure anomaly! The gravitational constant is being physically extracted!"
The specialized technical officer in charge of the core power bay hammered frantically at his keyboard. However, the moment his fingertips brushed the alloy panel, his entire body was instantly seized by a wave of numbness spreading from his hands. The data logic on the computer screen cleared at a speed of ten-thousandths of a second. The command characters representing the defensive network warped into a jumbled mess of corrupted code across his retinas.
"What is happening? Even the backup long-wave communication for 'Leviathan' is down?"
The B.E.N. four-star Army General stationed at the base bolted upright. Due to the violent movement, the row of specialized medals pinned to his chest—representing the supreme glory of the old era—clattered sharply against one another.
Yet, before his hand could even touch the sidearm at his waist, the laws of gravity inside the entire command hall suddenly inverted. Dozens of elite suicide agents, hacker analysts, and officers currently on combat standby felt their vision warp violently. On the verge of slipping into complete unconsciousness—their alveoli about to rupture from the extreme pressure differential—the space directly ahead of the hall was cleanly gouged out like a piece of paper.
When the excruciating pain forced everyone to pry their eyes open once more, a figure was already quietly suspended above the central metal platform.
It was a young black-vested girl, looking so pure she carried no trace of mortal warmth, and as intricately exquisite as an ice-carved porcelain doll. She wore an ill-fitting, oversized black trench coat, its sleeves neatly rolled up several times to reveal a pair of lily-white, slender, and bloodless arms. Her face was flawless, casting a translucent quality under the glare of the cold lamps. Yet, what caused everyone to plunge into an ice cellar at this precise instant were her eyes.
Her left eye was a deep, pure gold, its pupil narrowed and constricted into the icy vertical slit of a predator, radiating the ruthless gravity of an adjudicator over all creation. Her right eye was an abyss of phantom green, where two miniature storm cyclones spun at extreme velocity, reflecting the crisscrossing, blood-colored red threads of worldly karma.
Inside this Level 7 command center buried deep underground—built to withstand direct nuclear strikes—not a single soul knew who this young girl was. She looked like an assassin who had stepped straight out from a high-dimensional canvas of the Divine Realm, carrying none of the temperature of a living human.
Fengxi looked down from her high vantage point at the group of mortal elites, who were currently clutching their throats as their faces convulsed violently from suffocation.
"Invaders, eliminated."
Her voice was incredibly light. Her tone carried no anger and no mockery; it was merely the coldest, most objective statement of fact.
Under the terrified stares of the B.E.N. officers, Fengxi slowly raised her pristine, jade-like right hand. Facing the empty void, she pressed her five fingers downward with flat, deliberate slowness.
BOOM————!!!
There was absolutely no need for chemical gunpowder to ignite.
The moment her fingers pressed down, the atmospheric density and gravitational logic that maintained human respiration within this sealed space were completely and forcibly cleared. The centripetal wind-blades, whipping at over two hundred kilometers per hour, were no longer natural gales; they had become transparent spatial shearing lines forged from gravitational variance.
They followed the steel structures, ventilation shafts, and metallic corridors of the base, spiraling outward into the deepest recesses of the earth's crust with absolute zero dead-zones. The "Leviathan" suicide agents—wielding non-electronic high-pressure hydraulic crossbows and encased in the latest generation of high-strength composite metal exoskeletons—did not even have time to form the instinctive thought of pulling their triggers. In the face of those transparent vacuum shearing lines, the alloy armor they took such pride in—built to withstand point-blank heavy machine gun fire—proved as fragile as rotten paper soaked in water for three days, torn to shreds instantly.
Splat! Splat!
No screams characteristic of humans echoed through the hall. Inside the domain of absolute vacuum, sound waves had lost their medium for propagation. There was only the muffled, deathly noise of flesh and bone imploding and vaporising under the extreme internal-external pressure differential, alongside the sharp snapping of metal pipes fracturing in the void.
Where the wind swept, it was never an evenly matched battle, but a one-sided annihilation. These military generals and intelligence operatives—who on regular days held the power of life and death over foreign nations and orchestrated black-market liquidations—had their bodies violently torn apart and blown away by the vacuum wind pressure.
The hydraulic lines of the exoskeleton armor instantly sprayed piercing oil and a sky full of blood mist, which then froze into short-lived, reddish-brown ice crystals within the void, triggered by the absolute low temperature radiating from Fengxi's perimeter.
Blood mist flew and engine oil splattered. Yet, phenomenally, any flying dirty water, severed limbs, or fractured alloy bullets were forcibly ground into powder the millisecond they neared the three-foot absolute domain surrounding Fengxi. Not a single speck of dust could stain her porcelain-doll face, which remained pure and clean.
Fengxi's heterochromatic eyes swept over the scattering of mutilated remains and twitching corpses. Within the phantom-green abyss of her right eye, the ledger of Sato's memories flashed continuously.
"This location... has been cleared," she murmured softly.
However, as she looked at the shattered remains on the ground, her brow furrowed slightly. Her instinct as a Divine Messenger made her hesitate—this time, she was unsure whether she should preserve the intact physical bodies of these individuals. One of her purposes for coming out this time was to act as a cleaner, but she was uncertain whether there were still tortured animal spirits within the Divine Realm or on the Blue Planet who required a "body exchange" with humans to attain rebirth.
Within the ten-thousandth of a second of her hesitation, a distinct burning sensation suddenly flared at the back of Fengxi's neck.
Roar—
An ancient dragon's roar exploded within her spiritual sea, carrying a trans-dimensional desolation and heat wave, cutting directly into Fengxi's brainwaves. It was the physical manifestation of the Golden Loong—currently resting alongside the Will of the Balance back in the void of the Divine Realm—sending a high-dimensional transmission across the red thread of karma:
"Do not fret. These mortals have committed heinous crimes. Though their flesh is filthy, the karmic energy of sin within their spiritual bones remains. Bring them back intact to the Divine Realm; The Great One has Her own arrangements. Just as I once did."
The Golden Loong's voice carried a trace of disdain for mortals, along with a matter-of-fact tone regarding past divine duties.
Hearing this, the golden vertical slit of Fengxi's left eye flickered slightly, instantly understanding the Golden Loong's meaning. It was referring to that initial period when the "probabilistic collapse rate" of the Blue Planet had just begun to manifest, and the laws of the world were in utter chaos. During that era, the Golden Loong had used its colossal divine frame to traverse entire continents, rushing everywhere to collect the human corpses of those who had maliciously tortured, hunted, or poisoned wildlife in the old world.
Those scumbags had believed that death would wipe their slates clean. They had no idea the Golden Loong had packaged their physical shells and residual souls together, bringing them back to the high-dimensional Divine Realm for The Great One, who sat high upon the Divine Throne, to handle personally.
Fengxi nodded, responding softly within her spiritual sea: "Understood, Lord Golden Loong."
Indeed, in that world of the Divine Realm filled with sacred power, time was stationary and rules were absolute. Once these resources were brought back, they required no mundane maintenance, let alone the lowly physical necessities of mortals. She only needed to fulfill her duty as a "swift blade," physically erasing these defilements from the mortal world and tossing them to the Divine Realm.
Fengxi suspended quietly in the center of the silent master control hall, the hem of her trench coat swaying slightly in the returning thin air. Looking at this room—which once represented the apex of human power and technology but now resembled a broken slaughterhouse—a dense, un-dissolvable wave of emotion suddenly welled up from the depths of her soul, which belonged to Zhizhi.
"So... in this world, the weak truly have no right to live well."
This murmur was exceedingly blunt, carrying a coldness that saw right through the disguise of civilization. Her thoughts began to rewind at high speed, returning to that hazardous period when she still wore the sinful human skin of Sato, yet her consciousness remained that of the fancy rat, Zhizhi.
That day, she had been staying properly inside the VIP intensive care ward of the First Hospital in the city center. But at a certain moment, her red-thread perception suddenly emitted a violent warning—one that felt as if her very soul were being torn apart.
It came from the direction of Mama.
Fengxi—who at that time was still the tiny fancy rat, Zhizhi—had absolutely no time to explain herself to anyone. An extraordinary surge of explosive power erupted from her frail body. She essentially clawed, rolled, and tore her way through the corridor doors of the ward, sprinting like mad across more than half the city. Following streets that were running thick with sewage from the torrential downpour, she raced frantically to reach Tian Shuangxin's side.
By the time she finally arrived at the scene relying purely on a beast's raw instinct, she crossed paths with the "Leviathan" black-market liquidation agents. Those clean-up operatives, encased in high-strength composite metal exoskeletons and armed with specialized capture nets and high-voltage electromagnetic rifles, were cornering the completely defenseless Tian Shuangxin step by step. In the eyes of those men, Tian Shuangxin was not a human being possessed of dignity; she was merely a worthless object to be utilized to extort the "Patient Zero genetic asset."
If not for a critical moment where a strand of sacred residual majesty descended from the Golden Loong above—instantly frying the nervous systems of those operatives with absolute force—both she and Tian Shuangxin would have been reduced to cold corpses that day. They wouldn't have even had the chance to step into the Divine Realm to cry out for salvation.
Yet, at the very end of that harrowing ambush, a dying B.E.N. operative leader used that characteristically arrogant, cold, and blood-soaked B.E.N. dialect to spit out four words through his gritted teeth:
"Patient Zero Gene..."
Those four words instantly sounded the sharpest alarm bells in Zhizhi's mind. Those so-called "elites" hiding on the other side of the ocean, relying on capital and advanced medical technologies to sustain their lives, wanted nothing more than to seize the blessings descended from the Goddess and claim the high-dimensional genetics as their own.
As long as they refused to relinquish this desire—as long as she remained by Tian Shuangxin's side—the "Leviathan" task forces and battalions even more formidable than them would swarm toward the First Hospital endlessly, like flies drawn to the stench of rotting flesh.
To ensure her Mama would never be thrust into such a desperate abyss again, she had to proactively sever her ties with Tian Shuangxin in mortal life. She could no longer stay by her Mama's side. That was her singular, absolute realization at the time.
She looked up at the high heavens, as if doing so would allow her to gaze upon that pure land. She had to become Fengxi. She had to become a cold, efficient Pillar of the Long Nation capable of draining a kilometer of air in a single second. She had to become the most terrifying "cleaner" to walk this earth.
Only by distancing herself further and slaughtering with absolute ruthlessness would those insects hiding in the dark recesses of the earth never dare cast their sights toward that ward in the First Hospital, which was filled with the sweet fragrance of strawberries.