Zhou Qi's figure vanished from where he stood, replaced by a searing white bolt of lightning, composed purely of ultra-high-density plasma, its brightness comparable to a small star!
It tore through the sky, instantly spanning a distance of ten thousand meters.
Only a straight, sizzling, scorched-smelling, superheated ionized trail remained in the air, like a mark left by a Heavenly God using a red-hot iron pen in the sky.
Before the lightning's tail-end had fully dissipated, Zhou Qi's figure appeared like a phantom on the cold metal throne in the main base's core command room.
The hem of his robe fluttered slightly, and residual ionized particles flickered a few times in the air before completely settling.
He sat down heavily, the cold touch of the throne transmitting through his clothes.
Closing his eyes, his consciousness sank deep into his Sea of Consciousness, where the nascent power of thunder roared like a newly tamed wild horse, restless and potent.
It surged and merged with the mountain-like massiveness of the Titan Dragon Body, the all-consuming heat of the Stellar Dragon Breath, and the nimble versatility of elemental control.
Further away, in the direction of the Evolution Furnace, eight thousand waves of Soul fluctuations, intertwined with pain and longing, crashed against his perceptual barrier—that was the blood and fire transformation the Demon people were undergoing.
......
On the other side.
Blue Star, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.
Here, it is Earth's deepest scar, the graveyard of sunlight.
Over eleven thousand meters underwater, the pressure reaches more than one ton per square centimeter, enough to flatten the hardest alloys into thin sheets.
Eternal, ink-like darkness is the sole ruler.
The temperature is near freezing, dead silent, with only absolute darkness and Soul-crushing pressure.
Occasionally, a faint, flickering blue-green or eerie blue light, like a will-o'-the-wisp over a tomb, silently glided through the darkness:
A gigantic siphonophore, almost transparent and emitting an eerie red glow from symbiotic bacteria within its body, slowly extended its deadly, light-emitting tentacles;
A giant amphipod with a translucent shell and compound eyes reflecting a dim glow under faint bioluminescence, scraped its slender appendages against the cold rocks, searching for scarce energy;
A flat-bodied deep-sea ray, with its abdomen shimmering with a faint blue light, glided along the seabed like a ghost…
These lives are miracles nurtured by darkness, and the only fragile heartbeats of the silent abyss.
Absolute stillness.
Billions of years of time seemed to freeze here.
Zzzz... Ommm—
A point of pure white light, without warning, flashed into existence in the Void Realm about a hundred meters above the pitch-black seabed.
It was as tiny as a speck of dust, yet extraordinarily dazzling, like a scorching spot burned onto boundless black velvet.
Immediately after, this tiny light began to expand wildly, defying the laws of physics.
It was as if a drop of scorching lava had fallen into congealed ice oil, instantly triggering a violent reaction.
1 millimeter…
1 centimeter…
10 centimeters…
1 meter…
10 meters…
50 meters…
100 meters…
200 meters!
The expansion abruptly halted when it reached a diameter of approximately two hundred meters.
A massive, perfectly round, sickly white light hole, its edges blurred and constantly writhing like they had been corroded by strong acid, like a giant, festering wound, hovered in the abyss.
The light it emitted was not warm.
Instead, it was a cold, penetrating, deathly white, imbued with a strong sense of spatial distortion.
It illuminated the rugged underwater mountain ranges below, the greyish-white silt accumulated over millions of years, and the jagged black basalt columns, rendering them ghastly pale and every detail visible.
It was like a shadowless lamp in a morgue, completely exposing this ancient dark tomb to unnatural light.
"Light!"
This sudden, brutal "sun" brought destructive panic.
Creatures that relied on their own faint bioluminescence for survival, navigation, and mating felt as if the depths of their Souls had been scorched by the intense light!
A giant siphonophore, in the midst of extending its tentacles, suddenly retracted them into a ball, the fluorescence of its symbiotic bacteria instantly extinguishing, like a startled mimosa, its entire body curling up and plummeting into deeper darkness;
The giant amphipod emitted a silent, high-frequency screech of scraping carapaces, frantically digging at the rocks beneath it, attempting to bury itself underground;
The eerie blue deep-sea ray, as if lashed by a whip, violently contorted its body, stirring up large amounts of silt, and slammed into the nearest rock crevice at an unprecedented speed.
Creatures without vision, benthic worms and shellfish that relied on water current perception and faint electromagnetic induction, also felt the substantial sense of spatial tearing and Soul-freezing pressure contained within the light; they frantically writhed, retracted into their shells, secreted mucus, and burrowed into deeper sand.
Within a thousand meters around the light hole, except for cold rocks and churning dead water, it instantly became a forbidden zone for life.
Inside the light hole, it was not calm, but rather churning with viscous, Chaos, pus-like milky-white energy flows, which spun, collided, and exploded frantically, forming countless vortices and lightning-like energy beams.
The light hole began to flicker and pulsate violently.
Each surge of light was accompanied by a silent spatial tremor that shook the very Foundation of the entire trench.
Shockwaves, like solid rings, rapidly propagated through the dense seawater, stirring up silt accumulated on the seabed for billions of years, forming turbid "dust storms" dozens of meters high.
The entire trench groaned, and gravel from the rock walls tumbled down like hail, crashing onto the seabed below.
The edges of the light hole were even more stretched, twisted, and torn.
Space was forcibly pried open like cheap cloth, with tiny, pitch-black spatial fragments constantly peeling off and annihilating at the edges.
The scene was as if an unimaginably large claw from another dimension was violently tearing open a rift in the world's barrier, attempting to force its true form into this fragile world.
Whoosh—Ommm… Ommm…
A low, heavy hum, as if from the very beginning of the Universe, filled with endless Chaos and malice, penetrated the obstruction of tens of thousands of tons of seawater, directly resonating deep within all existence.
The flickering frequency of the light hole reached a frenzied peak, and the extent of the tearing at its edges was horrifying, indicating that this fragile gateway was on the verge of complete collapse.
Just at this critical moment, that world-destroying trans-dimensional will suddenly paused.
It was as if it had hit an invisible wall of sighs, or as if its overly massive body was stuck in a narrow passageway.
The suffocating pressure rapidly receded and converged like a retreating tide.
The flickering of the light hole noticeably weakened, the light stabilized, and the churning Chaos energy flow inside also seemed to calm down somewhat, like a critically wounded giant finally getting a moment to breathe.
However, just one heartbeat before the light stabilized and the Chaos energy flow subsided—
Whoosh—!!!!!