"Suppress."
A single word. Flat, direct, and completely devoid of any world-shattering magical roars a mortal might imagine. Yet, as this true word dropped—one that even a single-celled organism could intuitively comprehend—the rampaging, ghostly-blue malevolence and blood-red warning light waves five hundred meters beneath the earth froze completely within a ten-thousandth of a second, settling into absolute stillness without any warning.
The sensation felt exactly as if the main power grid had been violently pulled from a machine operating at maximum velocity.
Behind the tribunal, the lead-grey spatial-temporal gravitational barrier that had been sealed tight suddenly fractured with a sharp crunch, tearing open a massive rift easily ten meters wide. Following that, a pair of ancient footsteps—completely lacking the warmth of a mortal fleshly form, yet saturated with the boundless aura of a primal wilderness—stepped slowly and steadily upon the dark grey divine iron floor.
The Beast God.
This was Her first time, in the truest sense since this grand judgment began, stepping onto the mortal dirt and rock of the Blue Planet in Her true physical form, completely stripped of any projections or Divine Realm cloaking.
There were no elaborate, radiant halos of immortals or buddhas surrounding Her frame. There was only a layer of silver-grey karmic chains, dense as a heavy fog, flowing silently by Her side.
"The Great One."
The ancient Divine Beast, the Golden Loong—who just moments prior had been exceptionally tyrannical as it pulverized the multi-legged insect shadow with a single claw—along with the Auspicious Sentinel, the creature of blessing that had shattered the blood pool, simultaneously lowered their proud heads. They spoke in perfect unison toward the silhouette emerging from the mist.
The Beast God's face was blurred, obscuring any distinct features, and it held no redundant expressions whatsoever. She merely nodded Her head slightly. Immediately after, She slowly raised Her arm from beneath Her archaic robes, targeting the ten colossal crystal pillars that were frantically melting the animal souls. She delivered each syllable with absolute clarity:
"Come."
Rumble...
Within the core of the array, the thousands upon thousands of souls of stray dogs, feral cats, and red foxes—whose spines had been fractured and whose spiritual forms had been torn apart by the primordial chains—abruptly ceased their desperate agonizing shrieks in this exact second. The silver-black lines constricting them were forcefully snapped by an absolute, high-dimensional mystical energy. Turning into faint streams of drifting light, they surged forward like swallows returning to their nest, flying one after another straight into the protection of Her broad palm.
In less than a minute, the forty-five thousand animal spirits trapped within this ten-thousand-square-meter tribunal—souls that had been tortured with flesh and blood by the cultists for eighty whole years—were completely drawn into Her hand, secured and safe.
With this task complete, the divine iron chains and crystal pillars that had been rotating at extreme speeds turned entirely into ten pillars of ash-grey scrap iron, having lost their foundational fuel.
The Beast God lowered Her hand. Her gaze, holding an unreadable divine light, stared quietly ahead, tracking the completely deflated, ruined Soul-Refining Furnace. No one knew whether She was observing the movements beyond the heavens, or if She was calculating the upcoming tribulations of the gods.
Thus, deep beneath the earth in the northern region of the Long Nation, this ruined space plunged into a bizarre, prolonged silence. It grew so quiet that the sound of a single needle striking the ground could be heard with perfect clarity.
Fengqi's long hair vibrated slightly within the freezing, residual light of the broken array. She raised her head, her gold-and-green double pupils locking onto the Golden Loong in mid-air. Lowering her voice, she interrogated it once more in plain, unvarnished terms:
"What is this? This is not a power belonging to humanity."
Since the corporate syndicates of the Bald Eagle Nation lacked the capacity to achieve this, who exactly was the mastermind operating behind this grand array?
But the Golden Loong did not provide a reply. Its colossal face, blanketed in dark gold scales, was exceptionally grave. It merely turned its head to look at her, slowly shaking its massive snout before sinking back into a profound silence, letting the deathly stillness of the subterranean chamber stretch through the air.
Just as Fengqi assumed the deities would maintain this endless silence indefinitely, the Beast God standing right in the center of the tribunal spoke.
"Fengqi, We know you harbor doubts. However, the current moment is not the proper occasion."
The Beast God's voice was dead flat, carrying no hint of divine wrath, yet it held an unyielding weight capable of freezing a mortal soul solid.
Fengqi glanced at the ten pillars that had been reduced to scrap iron. She desperately wanted to know the reality of the situation, because everything here was thoroughly beyond what human capabilities could achieve. This indicated that on her future blacklist for clearing the underground syndicates, she was about to face a terrifying blind spot that neither conventional laws nor nuclear warheads could ever touch.
She took a deep breath, tightening her grip around that fragment of the Nightmare Beast's horn, and asked the only baseline question she currently cared about:
"Beast God The Great One, Fengqi wishes to know... will any of this impact my mother and grandmother?"
As long as her only two living relatives remained safe, she didn't care if the sky collapsed entirely.
"It will not."
The Beast God turned Her head, looking directly at the young girl's asymmetrical, bizarre double pupils. She delivered these three words with absolute, unwavering certainty, leaving no room for negotiation or doubt: "We are here, and We shall inevitably safeguard the living souls that deserve protection."
Immediately following this, She shifted Her gaze, looking down at the dense, iron-black mystical chains at the basin of the pool that were driven like spikes straight into the geocentric earth-pulses of the Ancestral Loong. She continued to speak:
"This underlying array of the evil cult—had We not drawn near in person, even We would have failed to perceive it."
Hearing these words, Maomao and the Auspicious Sentinel [Kirin] down on the ground shuddered violently. For even the supreme, peerless primordial deity to be unable to detect it before drawing near in Her true physical form meant that the cloaking mechanisms of this grand array and the status of the entity who aligned it reached a level so towering it made even the Divine Beasts recoil in horror.
"Consequently, We shall bestow upon you the 'Array-Breaking Pupils' to assist you in uncovering and annihilating such constructs. Are you willing?"
Fengqi did not harbor a single trace of hesitation. She stepped forward, her military combat boots clicking sharply against the fractured, black obsidian rock floor. Her oversized black trench coat whipped aggressively within the residual, violent storm of malevolence echoing across the tribunal. Her expression was calm yet intensely earnest.
"My Great Beast God, you need only command. Fengqi is entirely at your disposal."
"Good child."
A microscopic trace of deep, fleeting pity seemed to flash across the Beast God's blurred countenance. The exact fraction of a second the words left Her lips, a beam of pure white law-radiance—holding not a single ounce of living yang energy yet feeling unimaginably warm—was forcefully unleashed from Her broad palm. It drew a straight white axis through the air, merging with absolute precision into Fengqi's green right eye, the pupil that represented the netherworld and judgment.
Hum—
Fengqi's entire physical frame locked into complete rigidity.
Within her right eye, deep inside the ghostly-green storm vortex originally used to pulverize malevolent thoughts, a minute, cross-shaped pure gold divine rune split into existence within a ten-millionth of a millisecond following the injection of the white law-radiance.
The grand array, the mysterious runes, and the iron chains.
The precise microsecond these eyes snapped open, all the hidden mystical restrictions that previously sat in the blind spots of the matrix—restrictions that even the Hive could not scan—transformed within her visual field into a grid of crystalline, highly visible karmic gridlines that could be lopped apart with a single strike of a blade at any moment.
"Fengqi, before you depart for your next destination, you may return first to look upon your mother."
The Beast God placed Her right hand behind Her back. She explicitly intended to counsel this child who had only recently inherited the absolute authority of slaughter. Thus, before the girl could anxiously inquire about the underlying causes and scramble to track down the next stronghold, She laid out the reality clearly ahead of time:
"You and your mother are bound together by the Sovereign Soul-Blood Covenant. Aligning with her side can effectively dilute the karmic burden of the sins accumulating upon your frame."
Fengqi froze slightly. The foul, chaotic memories belonging to Sato—memories of live vivisections and suffocating toxic gases—began to claw frantically against her cerebral membranes once more, the throbbing pain turning her knuckles white in successive waves.
She murmured softly, her voice as minute as a tiny hamster shivering within a freezing wind:
"The karmic burden of sins... does it refer to the agony brought forth by those memories?"
Those filthy human memories that did not belong to her were constantly devouring her sanity like venomous vipers, threatening to warp her completely into a psychopathic monster who knew nothing but butchery.
The Beast God nodded slightly. Her beast-like palm, saturated with a heavy primal aura yet radiating immense warmth, slowly and smoothly crossed the spatial layout, settling gently onto the young girl's head.
"Precisely."
The exact fraction of a second Her palm descended.
Fengqi felt an indescribable, soothing warmth pour straight down through the crown of her head. The moment they encountered this thermal energy, Sato's filthy, roaring voices and the sadistic imagery of his laboratory experiments began to melt, deflate, and recede across a massive area, like snow striking a hot iron branding rod. The violent migraine that had been accumulating inside her skull for days dissolved substantially at this very moment.
Seeing that her pale face had stabilized significantly and regained its sharp, frosty composure, the Beast God retracted Her palm and calmly issued the decree:
"Go."
Immediately after, a beam of pure white law-radiance enveloped Fengqi's entire physical form. Devoid of any redundant transitions, a flash of flowing light erupted, and the young girl's slender silhouette was violently teleported by the grand array within a thousandth of a second, hurtling at extreme speeds toward the direction of the Southwest First Hospital thousands of miles away.
Following Fengqi's departure, only the three ancient Divine Beasts remained within the hundred-meter-tall, ten-thousand-square-meter subterranean tribunal.
Huff—
With Fengqi gone, the violent storm of malevolence vibrating through the void finally settled into a gradual stillness.
From within the spatial rift in mid-air, the Golden Loong extended its massive head with agonizing slowness and heavy gravity. Its colossal face, covered entirely in dark gold scales, halted less than three meters away from the Beast God's divine frame.
It glanced at the ten crystal pillars on the floor that had been turned completely into scrap iron, and then down at the unknown staircase that had been stripped entirely empty.
Utilizing a divine mental transmission, it spoke in an exceptionally heavy tone:
"The Great One, Fengqi serves as the blade of karma, but her existing cultivation realm... is far too low."
The Golden Loong's voice was raspy and rigid, sounding exactly like two rough chunks of iron ore grinding fiercely against one another without a single drop of lubricant:
"This world should consist of more than just this wretched stone before us. These arrays, these primordial geocentric locks, and that multi-legged rat from moments ago... their foundational runes all bear the distinct touch of that entity."
It refused to let the Auspicious Sentinel ask, and it barred Fengqi from investigating, precisely because it understood the reality better than anyone else.
The ancient, hidden hand buried beneath the earth—spanning across eighty long years—did not belong to some mortal corporate syndicate on the Blue Planet that knew nothing but counting paper bills.
It belonged to an entity who was also a primordial deity!
An apocalyptic, supreme god born in the primordial eons, whose absolute status and divine authority were towering enough to stand completely on equal footing with the Beast God, The Great One, Herself!
Within the Golden Loong's dark gold vertical pupils, all tyrannical murderous intent had completely transformed into a deathly silent vigilance. According to its deductions, this Soul-Refining Furnace—hidden in the darkness for eighty years and constructed through human greed—was far from the only one.
Inside the Bald Eagle Nation, the Green Pheasant Country, and down within the bottomless trenches at the deepest layers of the ocean—in every single dark corner of the Blue Planet that human law and technology could never touch—there were inevitably countless identical polar orbital matrix arrays nailed deep into the earth!
The myriad spirits were all children of the Beast God. Every single drop of blood and every shred of spiritual destiny drawn from these animals served as the foundational source utilized by The Great One to maintain the cognitive awareness of the Blue Planet's living souls, keeping it from dissolving into nothingness.
And now.
That entity—a deity who shared the exact same primordial status—was utilizing these subterranean tribunals scattered across the Blue Planet, manipulating this network of outer-circle human cultists to continuously and frantically absorb and plunder the absolute foundations of destiny belonging to the planet's myriad spirits!
This was a war of gods. A clash between supreme deities played out in a dimension entirely unknown to mankind, fought specifically to seize the core fuel of the entire planet.
The Beast God stood right in the center of the cold powder covering the floor, listening to the Golden Loong's raspy mental transmission. She still provided no reply. She merely turned Her head, using a gaze that had witnessed thousands of eons of ragnaroks to cast a single look at the endless void passing through the absolute ceiling of the tribunal, leading out into the cosmos.
Humanity was still frantically fleeing in sheer panic over the tens of billions in corporate assets being frozen inside the Room B.
Yet, the most terrifying, apocalyptic iron pincers of the New Era had already closed silently and mercilessly around the throat of this blue stone.