The Decaying World

A gentle breeze blew, transforming into wisps of tangible, grayish-blue currents.

Drifting within the currents were tiny specks of purple starlight.

These were the traces of Star Power dispersing into the air.

Lin Hui looked down from on high, his eyes fixed coldly on Emperor Lock below.

"It seems I’m not too late."

His hand rested lightly on the Ruyi Sword Hilt at his waist.

"Lin Hui... We chose not to deal with you, yet you dare to invade this place... It seems sparing you all these years was our mistake." Emperor Lock’s voice was low as countless chains coiled back around his body.

Facing Lin Hui felt completely different from facing his previous opponents.

For one thing, that Sky-Splitting Sword attack moments ago had already reached the level of the Breaking Realm.

What truly shocked him was that this man wasn’t even two hundred years old...

"Deal with me?" Lin Hui laughed. "If not for my distaste for conflict and the troubles holding me back, do you think you could have imposed your Limit last time?"

At the time, most of his energy was focused on the Wind Calamity and Qimei, so he didn’t dare use Disaster Energy on a large scale.

"Arrogant!" Emperor Lock raised his hand, and countless chains gathered there to form a giant black Horse-Cutting Saber.

"Let’s see if you have the strength to back up those words!"

Before the last word left his lips, he had already vanished.

WHOOSH!!

The next instant, he appeared before Lin Hui and slashed straight at him!

Soundlessly, Lin Hui dodged the slash with a slight turn of his body, evading it by a hair’s breadth.

The power in the blade was so concentrated that almost none of it radiated outward, leaving Lin Hui completely unaffected.

The slash missed, passing by his face and unleashing a massive wave of corrupting black energy that struck the ground behind Lin Hui.

BOOM!

A gash over a thousand meters long and of unknown depth split open in the ground.

"Again!" Emperor Lock drew back his saber and slashed once more.

SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!

A flurry of frenzied afterimages of the blade grazed past Lin Hui’s sides like a violent storm, but not a single slash made contact.

This overwhelming difference in speed made Emperor Lock anxious.

He could find ways to compensate for other disadvantages, but when it came to speed...

In an instant, he entered a state of divine speed. The third eye on his forehead burst with colorful light as it snapped open.

At his current Realm, his divine speed was far, far greater than that of the other Fog People.

Almost simultaneously, the afterimages of his Horse-Cutting Saber exploded in speed, unleashing a savage barrage of hundreds of thousands of slashes per second.

This attack left no room to dodge.

But bizarrely, Lin Hui stopped dodging. He simply stood his ground, his form blurring slightly.

Then, a hair-raising scene unfolded.

Every one of Emperor Lock’s slashes passed right through Lin Hui’s body, as if he were slashing at nothing but an illusory shadow.

’It’s no use!!’

’I can’t lock on to him!! I can’t touch him at all!!’

Emperor Lock was filled with an indescribable horror.

’The figure before me... it might just be a phantom! It has no physical body.’

’I’m just being fooled, tricked!’

’He hasn’t returned at all. He’s still far away, and this appearance is just to stall for time and rescue the others!’

But just as this thought arose, he saw the Longsword in his opponent’s hand being slowly unsheathed.

"What’s wrong? Is the gap between us so great you’ve deluded yourself into thinking this is all an illusion?"

"!?!" Emperor Lock shuddered, a tingling numbness like an electric shock surging up his spine and spreading through his entire body.

He desperately tried to retreat.

But it was already too late...

SHING!!

There was no swing of the sword, no afterimage of the blade; he didn’t even see his opponent move.

Lin Hui just remained floating in place.

A great RATTLE echoed—the crisp sound of countless chains shattering at the same instant.

At that moment, all the chains on Emperor Lock’s body were shattered by an invisible blade, turning to dust and scattering on the wind.

The chains vanished, revealing his true form beneath: the body of a blade.

"You...!?" Emperor Lock couldn’t understand how he had possibly lost.

’We both fused with Disaster Energy, so why is there such a massive gap between us!?’

’I don’t understand!?’

’I don’t understand at all!?’

Feeling a faint pain emanating from his blade-body, he knew that his own edge had been damaged by that invisible attack.

He dared not be careless. Instead of looking for Lin Hui, he focused all his effort on unleashing his innate Evil Energy as an Evil Soldier!

"Limitation!!"

His Heart and Spirit trembled as his entire bladed body erupted with an intense, violet-black light.

The light illuminated the surroundings, forcing a dense web of black chains into view from the Void.

These were the very chains he had released to seal this entire area.

Activating them again now was simply a matter of tightening all the chains once more.

This was the so-called "Limitation."

Tightening again and again, restricting again and again.

But this time, his unfailingly effective Limitation was inexplicably much slower.

Only then did Emperor Lock discover to his horror that, at some unknown point, a patch of lustrous white crystal had begun to rapidly spread up from the end of his hilt.

An indescribable, pure, and righteous power was spreading from the bottom up, perfectly sealing all of his energy fluctuations.

Both his corrupting aura and his innate Evil Energy.

"Wait!!"

Emperor Lock’s bladed body trembled as he tried to act, but it was too late.

The crystallization spread rapidly upward, covering his true bladed body.

He made one last attempt to resist and break free, but the moment he moved, his bladed body shook violently, forcibly suppressed by a terrifying, bizarre, and mysterious power.

CRACK.

As the last of the crystal covered him, Emperor Lock’s entire blade was frozen solid into a vertical crystal pillar, left suspended in mid-air.

Lin Hui slowly drifted past his side, landed, and stood firm.

Xia Si and Su Yaping had already led the others away, scattering from the original spot.

Two members of Yuanhe’s squad were already dead. The remaining five, along with the veteran experts from various nations who had been fighting from the shadows, had all scattered and were now far away.

Between the commotion of Lin Hui’s arrival and the power of Emperor Lock’s slashes, they had no desire to be caught in the crossfire and become innocent casualties.

On a small patch of flat ground near the exit tunnel.

Yuanhe, Xia Si, and Su Yaping joined forces, deploying a barrier from a formation relic that completely sealed them off from all corrosive contamination.

The Sparrow Person, Xiao Jinghan, didn’t hide inside. Instead, he beat his wings and hovered above the group, staring in shock toward Lin Hui in the distance.

As the one with the strongest perception on the team, he had withdrawn from the battlefield ahead of time and fled a great distance, which was the only reason he avoided being whipped to death by one of Emperor Lock’s chains.

"Emperor Lock... Is it really over just like that?!"

He found it hard to believe that the mighty Emperor Lock, who had imposed his Limit upon the world three times, could be sealed so easily by Daoist Master Qingfeng.

"The Daoist Master is just too strong..."

Su Yaping said gravely.

"But didn’t we calculate this beforehand? Emperor Lock isn’t the true Fog Emperor. The Fog Emperor is the core, the most powerful source of this threat! Now, we’ll see who wins: the Fog Emperor or the Daoist Master!"

Xia Si watched Lin Hui in silence. She had given up the thought of challenging him head-on many years ago. It was a goal that was simply impossible to achieve, no matter how one imagined it.

So... she chose...

"Senior Sister Xia, could you tell what kind of technique the Daoist Master just used to trap Emperor Lock?" Su Yaping asked.

At their side, Yuanhe and the Sparrow Person, Xiao Jinghan, also turned to look. They clearly wanted to know what technique it was as well.

"It’s a sealing technique," Xia Si replied in a low voice. "The Daoist Master never taught us this technique. I only know that it’s an incredibly strong seal. Once formed, almost no one can break free. And... there are almost no cases of anyone who has been sealed ever being released."

She recalled the crystallized sea monsters she had seen sinking into the ocean near Black Cloud.

They were examples of beings Lin Hui had casually sealed before they slowly sank into the depths.

According to their observations, the seal would only dissipate automatically once the sealed creature had completely perished.

And some monsters with extremely strong life forces have yet to be released, even now.

They had also tried to break the seals themselves, but no one could leave so much as a scratch on the crystal’s surface.

"The Daoist Master is truly a peerless genius. He must have created this powerful and unique technique himself within the last few decades." Su Yaping’s eyes grew even more fervent.

"Next... will be the true, final confrontation..." Yuanhe sighed softly, his gaze fixed on Lin Hui’s figure as he walked to the cliff’s edge.

"A pity that Sister Zhang and Tong Shen won’t live to see it..."

"I have to ask, are you all planning to just stay here and watch? No intention of running?" Xiao Jinghan said, exasperated, from overhead. "The final battle is about to start. Do you really think that we, who couldn’t even defeat Emperor Lock, can survive a single stray shockwave from the Fog Emperor if we stay here?"

"Run!!" Without another word, he turned and flew toward the tunnel.

The others snapped out of it, glanced at the relic barrier, and turned to run.

But they hadn’t gone far before Xia Si and Su Yaping stopped at almost the same time and turned around.

"Why aren’t you leaving!?" they asked each other, their voices transmitted almost in unison.

"Even if I die, I want to see what the pinnacle of the Martial Dao truly looks like!!" An odd sort of reverence was written on Su Yaping’s face.

"I want to see the final outcome," Xia Si said calmly. She wasn’t afraid of death; she just couldn’t accept it... By now, the resentment and hatred she once held in her heart had long since transformed into a different, more complex emotion.

It was a knot in her heart, something akin to an obsession.

If Lin Hui were to die in this battle, perhaps she would be free from now on, her future wide and open. But she might also lose her reason to live entirely.

The constant temptation of Hui Jing was already an unbearable burden. If not for her obsession with Daoist Master Lin Hui, her spirit would have long ago twisted, and she would have been corrupted into someone else entirely.

If she were to be truly corrupted, she would probably choose to end her own life first.

Seeing the two women stop, Yuanhe, who had been leaving, also came to a halt.

He looked back, his expression complex as he stared at the sealed form of Emperor Lock in the sky.

With the recent return of his malicious intent—though only a tiny fragment remained—his spirit had finally become whole again.

His greatest purpose in coming here had now been achieved.

But...

Gazing at Lin Hui on the cliff’s edge, and then at Xia Si and Su Yaping who refused to leave, he found his own feet had unknowingly come to a complete stop.

’This will be the most epic battle the world has ever seen. If you leave now, you might never get to witness such a scene again. Can you really leave, just like that?’

The malicious intent whispered its temptations in his heart.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!