The roar rolled like thunder, shaking the already ruined hall until dust sifted down in cascades. Many Yama Heavenly Sect disciples of lower cultivation spat blood from ears and nose, then collapsed unconscious.
The broken bronze armour on his body grated with sharp cracking sounds. Beneath his ancient bronze skin, veins bulged like twisting dragons.
A power far more frenzied and chaotic than before, thick with the scent of countless ages, erupted from him with a boom!
“Ant… I will… kill you!”
His voice was hoarse and stiff, as though he had not spoken in aeons, yet the killing intent within it almost solidified into something tangible!
He was enraged!
To be forced back by a mere human-immortal realm youth he regarded as an insect was the ultimate humiliation!
BOOM!
No longer holding back, the burly man stamped both feet into the ground. The floor exploded like tofu, leaving a massive crater.
His entire body turned into a streak of bronze light, more than twice as fast as before!
Around his fist, the profound fluctuations of time laws shuddered violently. This time it was no longer simple localised reversal. Visible rings of distorted, blurred temporal ripples coiled around his knuckles!
He intended to smash Chen Ping, and the very space around him, straight into the chaos of time itself and annihilate him completely!
Facing this furious strike that could twist space and time and shatter mountains and rivers, Chen Ping’s eyes were calmer than they had ever been.
In that brush with death moments ago, he had glimpsed a fragment of time’s true essence.
Time was not a river flowing in one direction. It was more like a net that could be folded, cut, or overlaid. Slowing, accelerating, even reversal were merely different ways of manipulating this net.
The burly man’s reversal worked by forcibly overwriting one small node of the net with a previous state.
Chen Ping had been powerless before because his net and the enemy’s net were of different qualities; he could not resist the overwriting.
But now he understood.
By synchronising and resonating, he had made his net vibrate at the same frequency as the enemy’s in that instant, preventing the overwrite.
And going further, he had grasped how to actively accelerate the flow of time within his own portion of the net!
“Good!”
Chen Ping shouted clearly. Instead of dodging the fist that could collapse heaven and earth, he stepped forward to meet it!
Yet the way he counter-attacked made every onlooker’s heart stop.
He did not unleash any mighty sword technique. He did not gather vast spiritual power. He simply raised his left hand, index and middle fingers pressed together in a sword gesture.
The instant his fingers rose, the flow of time around him changed abruptly!
In the eyes of Yan Nantian, Liu Xue, and everyone watching, Chen Ping’s movements suddenly blurred, as though someone had pressed fast-forward. He moved so quickly that even divine sense could not track him!
All they saw were after-images!
No, Chen Ping himself had not become faster. His own time had been accelerated!
“Time Acceleration!”
Chen Ping silently intoned.
In the final instant before the burly man’s fist, wrapped in temporal ripples that could overturn creation, reached him, in that sliver of time so narrow ordinary people could not perceive it, Chen Ping’s sword fingers arrived first!
He did not meet the terrifying fist head-on. Instead, he condensed his newly enlightened time power into an extremely fine, extremely concentrated needle of time and struck with perfect precision at the core node on the burly man’s fist where the law fluctuations were most intense, the exact point about to trigger the overwrite and reversal!
Pff!
A sound so faint it was almost inaudible.
Like a pin pricking a soap bubble.
The temporal ripples that could have nullified any attack, the moment they touched Chen Ping’s needle infused with time-acceleration power, burst like a punctured balloon and scattered instantly!
Those profound law fluctuations immediately fell into chaos and lost control!
“What?!”
The fury in the burly man’s eyes was instantly replaced by utter disbelief and horror!
He felt his dominion over time, under what seemed like an insignificant finger from his opponent, forcibly severed?!
How was this possible?!
