Chapter 3083: The Battle of The New Era (1)
Yin then turned his attention to the sealed gate at the end of the hall. He walked towards it, the runes on its surface flaring with desperate, dying light, trying and failing to repel him.
He placed a hand on the cold, ancient surface. "It’s time to come home," he whispered.
The gate did not open. It dissolved. The powerful seals unraveled into nothingness before his touch.
From within the revealed darkness, a figure stepped out. It was Yin. Another Yin. This one looked exactly like him, but his aura was slightly different—wilder, more chaotic, filled with the rage and frustration of endless imprisonment.
This Yin looked at the free Yin standing before him. There was no surprise, only a deep, ancient hunger.
"Has the time come?" the newly freed Yin asked, his voice a hoarse echo of the other.
The original Yin smiled. "It has."
Without another word, the Yin who had just been freed nodded. His form then dissolved, not into nothingness, but into a concentrated stream of pure, black aura—the essence of Uncreation that had been trapped for eons. It streamed forward and was absorbed into the original Yin.
The original Yin shuddered slightly as the power flooded back into him. His aura, already at the universe’s ceiling, deepened, becoming even more absolute, more terrifying. The void in his eyes seemed to grow deeper, the cycles within them moving faster.
He was now three-quarters whole. The power he now wielded was unimaginable.
Yin didn’t stay here further. With a step, he appeared outside the God Tomb.
Suddenly, he paused as he could feel the shift in the cosmos, the tremors of another power of equal magnitude moving with purpose.
Rip—
The space before him shimmered, not with light, but with a paradoxical fusion of existence and its opposite. From the distortion, a figure stepped out.
It was Yun Lintian’s body, but the aura it radiated was unmistakably Nian Shi’s—cold, ancient, and now terrifyingly balanced. The mismatched eyes, one of void, one of genesis, locked onto Yin. A faint, cold smile played on his lips.
"Finished with your preparations?" Nian Shi’s voice was calm, almost conversational, but it carried the weight of dead stars. He gestured vaguely towards the God Tomb behind Yin. "Digging up old toys?"
Yin looked at him deeply, his own universe-filled eyes reflecting the dual nature of his opponent. A playful smile touched his lips, a stark contrast to the infinite cycles of creation and destruction within his gaze.
"It seems you are eager to try out your new power," Yin said, his voice a soft echo in the vastness. "The thrill of ascendance is a potent drug, isn’t it? To feel the fabric of everything bend to your will."
He paused, the playful tone shifting to one of mild, almost academic curiosity. "But tell me, Timekeeper, have you considered what will happen once our battle truly begins?"
Nian Shi let out a low, derisive laugh. The sound was alien coming from Yun Lintian’s features. "Why would I care? If everything is unmade, I will simply create it again. Better. Purer. Without the flaws of the previous design. The universe is clay in my hands now. Why does the fate of the current iteration concern me?"
His words were the ultimate expression of arrogance, born from the absolute power he now wielded. He saw himself not as a guardian, but as a sculptor, and the existing universe was a flawed block to be smashed and remade.
Yin’s smile widened, a chilling sight. "Of course you can rebuild it. The power you hold certainly allows for that." He tilted his head slightly. "But why are you so certain that you will be the one left standing to do the rebuilding?"
The question hung in the space between them, a challenge not to power, but to assumption.
Nian Shi’s cold smile remained, but a flicker of impatience crossed his features. He raised his hand, palm open. Around it, the air—or the absence of it—shimmered. Vibrant, life-giving energy swirled in perfect, seamless harmony with a deep, silent nothingness. It was a display of control so absolute it made the very concept of reality seem fragile.
"Because of this," Nian Shi stated, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper. The answer was simple, arrogant, and undeniable. He held the power of both origin and end. He believed himself the culmination of all possibility.
Action replaced words. Nian Shi made the first move.
It was not an attack in any conventional sense. He didn’t thrust a palm or unleash a beam of energy. He simply looked at a distant, thriving nebula, a nursery of newborn stars millions of light-years away, and willed it to become something else.
The law of that region of space was rewritten instantly.
The vibrant clouds of cosmic gas and dust didn’t explode or collapse. They... bloomed. They transformed into a gargantuan, celestial flower of impossible geometry and radiant light, its petals made of solidified music and its fragrance the sensation of pure joy.
It was a act of creation so whimsical and yet so terrifying in its casual disregard for natural law.
Yin watched, his expression one of mild amusement. "A pretty trick," he commented.
Then, he responded.
He didn’t look at the flower. He looked at the space between himself and the flower. He imposed a new law upon it: the Law of Forgotten Journeys.
Instantly, the light from the magnificent flower could no longer reach anywhere. The joy it radiated, the music it emitted, became trapped in an infinite, lonely journey through a void that led nowhere.
The flower still existed, but it was utterly, profoundly isolated, its beauty made meaningless because it could never be perceived or affect anything ever again. It was a masterpiece of irrelevance.
This was the level of their battle. They were not throwing punches or energy blasts. They were rewriting the fundamental operating system of reality itself in real-time.
However, the sheer magnitude of their wills, clashing against the fabric of reality itself, could not be contained solely in the realm of abstract concepts. The kinetic energy of their conflict, the raw force of two absolute powers opposing each other, began to manifest in the physical universe with cataclysmic results.
BOOM!
The space between them, once a passive void, began to churn. It wasn’t like a storm; it was the birth of chaos itself. Space fractured into shimmering, non-Euclidean patterns.
Time splintered, creating overlapping pockets where seconds lasted for centuries and millennia passed in a blink. The very stuff of reality groaned under the strain...