Chapter 433

Chapter 433: The Great Dao Was Simple

When an entire city woke from a long hallucination and realized the “perfectly normal” life they’d been living was built on a lie—realizing their homes had been polluted and seized long ago by bizarre planetary parasitic matter, realizing the whole planet was already a nightmare—the chaos that followed was easy to imagine.

Honestly, waking millions of people like that wasn’t the best approach. If the Yanxing Entity had given them even a little more time, Yu Sheng would have considered having Irene and Mo Ran work together to rouse Ink City in batches, step by step, with proper staffing and comfort measures prepared in advance.

But a Yanxing Entity with intelligence wouldn’t sit back and allow it. Before its ascension form matured, instantly piercing Ink City’s cognitive screen was the only way to rip open a path. As for the chaos afterward… Mo Ran would have to handle it.

The veil tore. Reality crashed in.

Residents snapped back from whatever they’d been doing a moment ago in their “daily life.”

In the artifact workshops on the outskirts, craftsmen stared at old furnaces crusted in thick crystal. Clusters forced their way between seams in the pipes, spreading wildly across the roofs.

At home, civilians waiting out the storm looked up and saw their windows coated in pale growth. The brief spiderweb nightmare still clung to their thoughts, forcing wakefulness in the roughest way possible.

Inside shopping centers, customers sheltering from the wind and rain dissolved into screams. A gigantic crystal tree pierced through entire buildings—branches that, in truth, had already punched through walls and roofs a hundred years ago and become part of the structure.

A mechanized flower-boat, decked out for tourists, lurched through crystal thorns between towers. Terrified cries echoed from the air. The boat had sailed that route hundreds—maybe thousands—of times, but only now did the passengers realize how close they’d always come. Faces that had once pressed to the rail for a better view had been inches from sword-sharp blades.

Panic spread across the city. Most ordinary people, with shallow cultivation and no experience of the unnatural, had no idea what to do. Even cultivators with strong wills felt their dao hearts shake, struggling to hold steady.

Mo Ran stabilized the City Lord’s manor at once, then began contacting every person in charge across the city. Time was too tight to explain the whole truth. All she could do was order every cultivator under Ink City’s authority to steady their minds immediately and maintain order first.

At the same time, she ordered every external route sealed. Starting now, the city would allow no one in and no one out.

Her orders drew confusion and fear, but no one dared question the decree of the Ink Clan head at a moment like this.

Mo Ran’s final order was harsher still: cut off communication between Ink City and every other city on Shu Ji. Intercept all outward channels—civilian long-distance voice transmissions, divine sense letters, everything.

She didn’t know how much it would help. No one knew how many routes the Yanxing Entity’s cognitive contamination could take. But she knew one thing clearly: the moment Ink City woke up, it became the largest anomaly on Shu Ji. Until this was resolved, every voice and every gaze turned toward Ink City was harmful.

Even if it came from worried compatriots.

As for Yu Sheng, after that silent collapse, he felt a gaze from deep within the planet.

A sightline carrying terrifying pressure swept across Ink City. Ordinary people couldn’t sense it, but Yu Sheng felt it clearly. His blood had soaked through the husk the Yanxing Entity left behind in Garrison-3. Now that blood-based connection made him feel Shu Ji’s heartbeat again.

The Yanxing Entity sensed the tear in the cognitive screen.

It realized a city had awakened.

A silver-white nine-tailed demon fox streaked across the sky, carving a dazzling trail of fire through the storm.

Ahead, ancient refining towers wrapped in crystal matter glimmered through the rain. The city protection array, rising with those towers as its nodes, was closing in. Ink Clan cultivators guarded the talisman nodes on the towers, then looked up in shock as the blazing fox flashed overhead.

They’d already received orders from the City Lord’s manor: the riders of the nine-tailed silver fox were allies of Ink City, and all checkpoints were to open and let them through.

It didn’t matter whether they opened or not. Before the array fully sealed, Foxy had already pierced the barrier over Ink City and shot into the storm beyond.

Irene clutched a tuft of fox fur and glanced back at the energy shield closing over the city. She sighed. “It’s a miracle their city protection array still works… when the whole place has been eroded into crystal like that.”

“During metamorphosis, the Yanxing Entity hides itself as much as it can,” Yu Sheng said. “Too many unexplainable abnormalities in the real world increases the risk of the cognitive screen being pierced. So before it becomes an ascension form, it won’t destroy basic functions outright.”

He narrowed his eyes toward the wilderness. “But something like a city protection array doesn’t do anything to the Yanxing Entity itself. It’s normal for it to ignore it.”

Irene blinked. “Doesn’t do anything? Then why did Mo Ran raise it?”

“…To keep people out.”

“People?”

Yu Sheng’s expression darkened. “People from nearby cities. People still affected by the Yanxing Entity, who would rush in to ‘help’ Ink City. They’d bring the contamination back with them.”

Irene went still.

Beside Yu Sheng, Zheng Zhi stared wide-eyed at the endless wilds outside the city.

The land was packed with crystal structures like a forest—countless times larger than the crystal jungle they’d seen at Garrison-3. The whole jungle rose and writhed like a living thing.

“Up ahead!” Zheng Zhi suddenly raised a hand and pointed. “There’s a crack over there!”

Yu Sheng pressed down on Foxy’s head, and she angled into a dive.

But when they were only halfway there, a terrifying fireball rose from the crystal forest.

It blazed like a sun, scorching and violent. The shockwave rippled through the jungle and ground countless crystal trees into dust in an instant. Only then did the delayed roar hit—a thunderous blast that rolled across the sky, suppressing the wind and rain, shoving the curtain of rain outward and tearing clouds apart. For a heartbeat, sunlight even broke through.

In the roar, Yu Sheng faintly heard a voice—painfully familiar—shouting through the blast.

“Eat my Heaven-Overturning Seal!”

The next second, another fireball erupted, even bigger than the last. It wasn’t as insane as Foxy’s earlier orbital headbutt, but it still formed a fat mushroom cloud climbing into the sky.

Another shout followed.

“Eat my Primeval Demon-Subduing Targe!”

Boom!

“Eat my Haotian Demon-Subduing Ruler!”

Boom!

“Eat my Eightfold Purity Seal!”

Booom—

One explosion after another tore through the crystal jungle. Blazing fireballs and shockwaves trampled the earth like savage beasts, battering the storm itself and shredding the clouds.

Yu Sheng stared at the earthshaking scene, completely dumbfounded. Then he slapped Foxy’s head without hesitation. The nine-tailed silver fox turned into a streak of fire and shot toward the destruction like an arrow.

From far away, Yu Sheng saw Immortal Yuan Hao standing in midair.

His white hair whipped in the wind. His long robe flared. He floated with his hands clasped behind his back, while layers of profound immortal talismans spun around him. Behind him, sparks of electricity formed a gigantic formation as large as a city. Within it, wind, rain, thunder, lightning, metal, stone, fire, and earth cycled and transformed, evolving into a self-sustaining loop of heavenly laws.

And between those formations drifted hundreds upon hundreds of treasures.

Long ones, short ones, thick ones, flat ones. Ones with holes punched through the middle. Ones with grooves along the edges. Thousands of treasures whirled behind Immortal Yuan Hao, forming yet another grand array that shifted and rebuilt itself without pause.

Yu Sheng honestly suspected the array’s name was Civil Engineering.

Even Foxy and everyone on her back went still, stunned by the sight. Irene stared for a long time before she finally blurted, “Holy shit, it’s AAA Building Materials Wholesale Master Hao—”

But the most shaken people weren’t Yu Sheng’s group.

Down in the ruined crystal jungle, the battlefield looked like it had been hammered by falling stars. Deep craters yawned everywhere, heat waves rolling from each one. Black-robed cultivators lay dead inside them. And even so, a few had held on—several weakly glowing defensive formations trembled across the ground.

Beneath those failing shields, a handful of heavily injured black-robed evil cultivators clung to life. Even through their strange masks, Yu Sheng could practically see the terror in their eyes—and the madness born from it.

At the instant Immortal Yuan Hao’s attention shifted toward Yu Sheng’s arrival, the one who looked to be in the best condition raised his hand.

A flying sword coated in vicious purple light slid from his sleeve without a sound.

It was clearly his life-bound treasure—something he wouldn’t use unless cornered. Forged with who-knew-how-much blood and effort. Packed with secret arts meant to hide killing intent, break spells, slice souls, disrupt minds, and leave behind bone-gnawing, marrow-rotting—

Immortal Yuan Hao didn’t even turn around.

He pointed downward casually.

A brick slammed down.

Haotian Demon-Subduing Ruler. No special effects. Attack power: one trillion.