Chapter 3
The lackeys took a step back unconsciously.
"Because the only one whose strength I acknowledge is number one," Huan Zheng continued, "as for number three… ah, he's just a character who likes to spit along with all his singing."
But before those words could truly fade from the ears of his listeners, Huan Zheng's body began to tremble.
Not because of poison, not because of wounds, but because of a vibration originating from the core of his cultivation.
Slowly, the tips of his fingers turned into faint glowing mist, like dawn beginning to evaporate in the morning.
"Teleportation," muttered a cultivator in the back line, "he predicted this—he prepared his escape from the very beginning!"
Huan Zheng smiled faintly, his eyes beginning to close.
"Goodbye, you self-righteous fools," he said softly.
But suddenly, another voice cut through the silence—the voice of the man in red robes, who had remained silent until now, stepping forward with his arm raised high.
"My subordinates," he commanded, his voice flat like a gravestone, "chant: One Land, Two Skies, Three Authorities."
At once, thousands of cultivators recited those three phrases, and the world changed.
The sky above Huan Zheng suddenly split into three layers, the ground beneath him trembled as if being expelled from the womb of the earth, and authority—something unseen yet felt like a giant hand—crushed his entire body from the inside out.
"What—?"
Huan Zheng's eyes flew open.
Not out of surprise, but because he felt something he had never experienced in his entire life: the foundation of his cultivation cracking.
One by one, the levels of cultivation he had built over the years began to rot.
Not collapsing, not shattering—but rotting, like fruit suddenly eaten by worms from within, turning black and hollow.
The Humanity Level—the peak above all peaks—underwent permanent decay.
He could no longer feel the Supreme Dao power that once flowed abundantly through his veins.
The Vast Cosmos he once controlled like the palm of his hand vanished, leaving only a cold emptiness.
The Heavenly Longitude, where he once leaped across dimensions, crumbled into dust within his consciousness.
"No… this is impossible…" Huan Zheng whispered, his voice for the first time carrying a tremor akin to fear.
Yet amidst that destruction, one light remained.
The Star of Humanity.
The small stone given by someone he had never expected still pulsed within his chest, becoming the only foundation untouched by the curse of One Land, Two Skies, Three Authorities.
"The Star of Humanity…" he murmured, "the only thing left…"
He exhaled, then let out a faint laugh—a bitter laugh that tasted sharp on his tongue.
But the madness was not over.
The chant continued to resonate.
Thousands of voices rose and fell like a death hymn, and each note carried a new vibration that made the decay spread further.
Huan Zheng could feel it.
That darkness began to creep from the boundaries of his dead cultivation levels, approaching the Star of Humanity that still pulsed innocently at the center of his chest.
"Soon…" said the man in red robes, his eyes cold and expressionless, "your Star of Humanity will rot as well. And you will become an ordinary human—without power, without protection, without anything."
In a moment that felt like half an eternity, Huan Zheng made a decision that only someone standing at the edge of death would make.
He dug out all the foundations of his Stars—Lower Star, Common Star, Singular Star, Supernatural Star—and burned them into a single push to leap across universes.
"You want to turn me into an ordinary human?" he roared amidst the echoing chant of One Land, Two Skies, Three Authorities.
"You will never see that day!"
Blood burst from his mouth, no longer red but pitch black mixed with golden light shedding from the foundations he sacrificed.
His body began to turn into mist—not a beautiful, controlled teleportation, but a desperate one, like a bird shedding all its feathers just to escape fire.
The man in red robes frowned, then shouted, "Increase the intensity of the chant! Do not let him—"
But his words were cut off.
Because before them, Huan Zheng had vanished.
All that remained was a faint streak of light shooting through the split layers of the sky, leaving behind the stench of blood and scorched air.
"He… he escaped?" whispered a female cultivator, her voice trembling.
The man in red robes slowly shook his head, his eyes narrowing toward the point where the light disappeared.
"Not entirely. His Star of Humanity has almost rotted—ninety percent. He will no longer be able to use most of his power."
On the other side of the universe, in a world that once served as a refuge for fleeing goddesses, the sky suddenly tore open without warning.
Not like a door opening, but like cloth ripped apart by a rough hand—its edges jagged and smoking.
From that gap, a human body fell.
Not floating, not flying, but plunging freely like a stone thrown by an enraged giant.
That body—Huan Zheng—was half-conscious, his awareness drifting between dream and reality, between pain burning through every nerve and a cold emptiness like death itself.
"I… am still alive?" he muttered, his voice barely a vibration in his dry throat.
He tried to gather Qi, but what he found was only emptiness.
The Common Star, Singular Star, Supernatural Star—all had rotted away, leaving only the Lower Star pulsing weakly at the base of his chest like a dying candle.
"Damn…" he hissed, and his body struck the atmosphere of that world, burning from friction, before streaking like a small meteor toward the land below—specifically, toward a camp called Xuelan.
In the dusk sky above Xuelan Camp, Ling Xu was soaring—having just learned to control Qi after so long crawling on the ground, and for the first time, he felt like a bird freed from its cage.
His white, multicolored-streaked hair fluttered wildly in the wind, and in his chest, the Star of Humanity pulsed joyfully like a child discovering a new toy.
"Finally," he whispered with a faint smile—the most sincere smile he had formed in the past three years, "at least I can—"
But his words were cut off by something slamming into his body from the side.
Not wind, not a bird, but a solid object that was hot and smelled of blood.
"What—?!" Ling Xu cried before he felt his body lose balance, spinning in the air like a dry leaf, then crashing hard onto the ground—right beside another body that had fallen not far from him.
"That hurts… you idiot!" Ling Xu hissed while clutching his throbbing head. He turned, and there, with a face pale as a corpse, lay Huan Zheng—a 24-year-old man in tattered robes, black blood everywhere, and breathing like someone drowning in dry air.
"A human?" Ling Xu said, his eyes narrowing sharply.
"You're human?! How dare you crash into me, you bastard—"
But before his anger could peak, Huan Zheng opened his eyes—a pair of dying eyes, with black veins spreading from the lids to the eyeballs like the roots of a rotting tree.
"Don't… waste your energy being angry," Huan Zheng said, his voice barely a whisper from shattered lungs.
He tried to sit up, failed, then leaned against a large rock—and in that moment, Ling Xu saw something horrifying.
Huan Zheng's skin began to grow moss.
Not ordinary moss, but greenish-black moss growing at a speed visible to the naked eye, creeping from his wrists to his arms, from his neck to his cheeks, as if devouring its owner from the outside in.
"What… what is this?" Ling Xu asked, for the first time his cold tone trembling.
Huan Zheng did not answer.
Instead, he screamed.
To be continued…