“Wa!”
Chen Ping spewed a torrent of blood. Countless ribs in his chest snapped, his body hurled backwards like a tattered sack, carving a deep furrow across the ground until it finally slammed into the wall at the far end of the hall.
His aura instantly turned deathly feeble. The Dragon-Slaying Sword slipped from his grasp and clattered nearby, emitting an unwilling hum.
“It’s over…”
Yan Nantian’s heart sank, despair written across his face.
Even Chen Ping had been defeated, crushed so utterly. Who could possibly stop the Soul-Devouring Venerable now?
Was Yama Heavenly Sect truly doomed to fall today?
The disciples of the sect were ashen-faced. Many collapsed to the ground, trembling uncontrollably.
The Soul-Devouring Venerable gave a satisfied nod and ordered the burly man, “Enough play. Finish him quickly.”
The burly man obeyed. He advanced with heavy steps, walking slowly towards Chen Ping, who now lay motionless.
He raised his foot. Terrifying power and that strange temporal fluctuation gathered upon it, ready to crush Chen Ping’s skull with a single stomp.
The shadow of death descended.
Chen Ping lay amid the cold ruins, his consciousness growing hazy, pain flooding every part of his body. Yet deep within his sea of consciousness, every detail of the previous exchanges replayed at frantic speed, especially that infinitesimally brief moment of time reversal.
“Reversal… not acceleration, not deceleration… it is regression… it is inversion…”
“My time-slowing merely influences flow, altering speed… but his directly interferes, overrides, resets…”
“What is the essence of time? A flowing river? A string that can be plucked? Or… a membrane that can be folded, spliced, overlaid?”
All his previous insights into the origin of time, combined with the direct impact of this higher-tier law he was now experiencing, collided, intertwined, and fused wildly within his mind on the brink of annihilation.
He seemed to see the surging river of time, countless branching and converging timelines, the subtle yet inseparable links between past, present, and future.
“Slowing merely reduces the flow in one segment of the river… whereas reversal forcibly sends a small section of water surging upstream…”
“The power required to achieve that, the comprehension of origin, far exceeds mine… yet… all laws share the same source. Their essence is identical…”
“He overwrote my law, resetting a local point in time… then… if I can see through the exact ‘point’ he resets, intervene the instant before it is reset, or… make my own law impossible to overwrite…”
The burly man’s foot, capable of shattering mountains, rose high with the aura of death, poised to descend!
Yan Nantian closed his eyes, unable to watch.
Liu Xue struggled to rise, only to collapse again, her beautiful eyes brimming with despair and tears.
At that critical moment, hanging by a thread!
Chen Ping’s previously unfocused eyes suddenly blazed with light as brilliant as the stars!
It was the radiance of one who had glimpsed profound truth and pierced through illusion!
He saw it!
As power gathered on the burly man’s foot and the time law began to ripple, preparing once more to unleash localised time reversal, Chen Ping clearly “saw” the precise temporal node about to be reset!
“So… that’s how it is!”
Enlightenment flooded his mind like divine grace.
His understanding of the origin of time broke through its bottleneck in this instant, reaching an entirely new realm!
At the same moment, within the origin space inside his body, a star burst into dazzling light.
Chen Ping no longer tried to “slow” or “oppose” the enemy’s time reversal. Instead… he merged with it, synchronised!
In the split second before the burly man’s foot descended, in the instant just before the time-reversal law activated!
Chen Ping mobilised every last shred of remaining spiritual power within him, along with the transformed power of time origin. Rather than releasing it outward, he drew it inward, contracting it tightly around himself, especially around the small area of space protecting his head and vital points.
