Chapter 59
Joy.
Not the sweet joy of a child discovering candy in their pocket, but a terrifying joy—one born from the realization that the two of them, who once could only run, hide, and hope, now stood atop the soon-to-be corpses of the gods who had once acted as executioners. That they were no longer victims, but executioners who took pleasure in their work.
"A golden opportunity, Liu Xin," said Huan Zheng, his voice returning to its lazy tone—because after a single breath that destroyed thousands of universes, he felt entitled to be lazy again—but beneath that laziness lay something Ling Xu had never heard before: the tone of a man eager to devour.
"We can devour the entire civilization of these Gods at once, Liu Xin. Not one by one, not village by village, not city by city, not universe by universe—but everything, now, in a single breath, in a single blink, in a single lazy motion of the hand."
He raised his hand—the same hand that once had only been used to yawn and scratch an itch that never existed—and pointed toward the horizon where fire and flesh still rolled endlessly like a restless ocean.
"We can ascend to the Branching Vines, Liu Xin. Perhaps even the Leaves and Fruit. Perhaps even—"
He did not finish his sentence, because he did not need to.
Ling Xu already understood.
And without waiting any longer, without needing to glance at each other or whisper or nod, the two of them began to absorb.
Not with Ling Xu's fully opened third eye, not with Huan Zheng's endlessly multiplied Foundation of the Head Humanity, but with their entire existence—with every strand of flesh, every drop of blood, every memory of a mother violated and beheaded, every hatred they had buried in the darkest corners of their hearts.
They absorbed the talents, the potential, the Qi radiation of each cultivator who had been burned yet not reduced to ash, half-cooked yet still pulsing, unable to resist yet still conscious enough to feel what it meant to become prey after so long as hunters.
And in a silence immeasurable by time—because time itself remained frozen, suspended in the air like a breath too afraid to leave the lungs—Huan Zheng and Ling Xu devoured.
Not with the greed of starving beasts, but with a dreadful calm, like two gods of death counting their collection of souls after a war had ended.
Realm after realm they passed through in an instant that could not be called an instant, because no instant existed in a place where time did not move.
From the Supreme Dao Root they had only recently reached—whether days or centuries ago, no one could say—they surged through the Branching Vines, passed the Leaves and Fruit, until finally they stood at the peak of the Dew, the place where Huan Zheng had once stood thousands of years ago before choosing to fall and forget that he had once been one of the three monsters who made the entire cosmos tremble.
"Dew," Ling Xu whispered, his voice no longer warm, no longer cold, but hollow like the space between two deaths, and within his still-open third eye, the reflection of himself shifted endlessly—existent, nonexistent, both and neither—like water that could never be grasped because it always slipped through the fingers.
Huan Zheng, standing beside him, merely nodded lazily. Yet in his eyes, once empty, something else now lingered.
Not pride, for he had stood at the peak too many times to feel pride, but a strange sense of gratitude—gratitude that for the first time in thousands of years, he was not standing alone atop the corpses of his enemies.
"The fire is still burning, Liu Xin," Huan Zheng said after a while—or perhaps after several millennia; no one could distinguish the difference anymore—as he pointed toward the horizon where the flames from his breath continued to lick the flesh spreading everywhere. "I need to extinguish it before everything turns into ash that you can no longer absorb."
He raised his left hand.
Not with the decisive motion he had used to freeze time, but with that same lazy gesture, like someone brushing dust off a table after a meal—and the fire went out.
Not extinguished like a candle blown out, but extinguished like the fading awareness of someone dying, suddenly forgetting why they were still trying to breathe.
Without sound, without resistance, without leaving any trace that it had ever burned.
Where once flames had raged with madness, burning thousands of universes, there now remained only living flesh—pulsating, warm, waiting to be drawn back into the womb that had birthed it.
"Now it's your turn, Liu Xin," Huan Zheng continued, yawning—truly yawning amidst a scene that would have made even the highest gods faint, if they still possessed the awareness to faint—"gather back your unruly children."
Ling Xu did not respond with words.
He simply closed his third eye slowly, like a flower reluctant to bloom in winter, and at that same moment, the flesh that had spread across every corner of reality—having devoured stars, planets, black holes, and entire divine civilizations—began to move.
Not moving away, but returning—to its source, to the womb that birthed it, to Ling Xu's body, which had lost its original two eyes yet now possessed three new ones, each seeing from a different dimension.
The flesh flowed like rivers reversing their course, like time remembering it could move backward, like death deciding to return everything it had consumed.
And amidst that horrifying reverse current, Ling Xu stood still, his small body becoming the center of gravity for all that remained of the divine civilizations, now nothing more than memories wrapped in flesh. And within his heart, between the pulses of the Supreme Dao Dew beating in a rhythm no longer bound by space, time, or causality, he murmured:
"Is this what it feels like to be a God of Death, Zhao Wei? To devour everything, and then return it, as if nothing had ever happened?"
Huan Zheng, hearing this, only smiled faintly—a smile neither warm nor cold, but tired in a way only those who have died and lived again countless times could understand, until they could no longer distinguish between what was real and what was merely a nightmare that never truly ended.
And all those cycles—the extinguishing of flames that burned thousands of universes, the reabsorption of flesh that had devoured entire divine civilizations, the transformation from Root to Dew within a span that could not be measured by numbers or words—occurred beyond any count of one, two, three, or four seconds and beyond.
Quite literally, everything moved at 0 seconds, in a space where time remained frozen, between heartbeats that never occurred because the heart itself had forgotten its function to beat.
Above the expanse of emptiness once called the universe—where stars once sang, planets once danced, and gods once laughed before everything turned into pulsating flesh and was drawn back into the womb of the Cancer plague—Huan Zheng stood with his hands in his pockets, his lazy gaze fixed upon Ling Xu, who remained still as the last remnants of flesh flowed into his body through his gently pulsating third eye.
To be continued…