Chapter 509 - 280: The Players

The deafening hum of collapsing spatial currents gradually tapered into a hollow, dead silence.

Where towering mountain peaks, shimmering spirit veins, and ancient jade sanctuaries had stood proud only moments prior, there was now only a terrifying, bowl-shaped vacuum.

The very earth had been scraped clean down to its scorched bedrock, smoothed out as if carved by the indifferent thumb of a primordial titan.

From his vantage point upon the forehead of the towering, thousand-meter golden spirit avatar, he looked down with half-lidded, utterly detached eyes.

The yawning vortex folded inward on itself, shrinking from a swirling disc of ravenous annihilation into a pinprick of pure vacuum before snapping shut with a faint, dry pop that barely ruffled his pristine white sleeves.

The ancient libraries holding tens of thousands of jade scriptures, the armories of ancestral spirit swords, the grand mountain gates carved from dragon-bone marble—every physical manifestation of the White Dragon Sect’s legacy had been ground into fundamental particles and erased from reality.

Yet, amidst the smoking, vacant crater of pulverized stone, faint flickers of vital essence still stubbornly twitched.

Scattered along the outer rim of the basin and clinging to fractured crags that had barely escaped the singularity’s event horizon, he sensed several hundred outer disciples and lesser elders lay sprawled in their own blood.

Some had survived purely because they had been patrolling the furthest perimeter outposts; others had survived because their seniors had thrown their own bodies forward to block the gravitational vortex at the final second.

Among them, hovering unsteadily in the sky with his robes reduced to bloody tatters, was Grand Elder Zhao Ming.

His once-immaculate snow-white beard was singed and dripping with thick scarlet gore, and his aged fingers shook violently as they clutched the cracked hilt of his serpentine dragon sword.

Blood poured freely from his nostrils, his ears, and the deep wounds across his chest, but his eyes burned with a hysterical, incandescent fury.

"Demon! Beast! Scum of the heavens!" Zhao Ming’s voice was cracked and raw, a guttural shriek that carried the agonizing weight of a patriarch watching his entire world turn to ash in an instant. "Why?! Why have you done this?! My White Dragon Sect has stood in the Northern Domain for many years, offering sacrifices to the heavens and guarding the northern borders! We have never crossed paths with you! We do not even know your name! Tell me, you butcher, how did we offend you?! What grievance could possibly justify the eradication of our ancestral home?!"

His desperate, furious cries echoed across the hollow valley, bouncing off the barren stone.

Behind him, the few surviving disciples broke down into wild, incoherent weeping, clutching the dust of their obliterated comrades and screaming curses toward the clouds.

That’s right. Their Sect had always remained just!

Why did they suffer like this!?

Haoran just remained silent.

He didn’t offer a single justification. He didn’t recite an imperial decree, nor did he bother to mention that he was from the upper realm and that anyone associated to Chen Feng, he will destroy

Explaining his motives to lower-realm ants was entirely beneath his dignity, especially against people who aren’t even protagonists.

Haoran casually raised his hand, and the Spirit Avatar also raised its hand.

And as the thousand-meter titan of auric light mirrored his fluid, careless gesture, the sky grovelled beneath its movement.

A low, abyssal vibration thrummed through the heavens, bending the ambient light around the colossus’s massive, armored arm.

Then, a pitch black energy sword materialized from the avatar’s raised hand.

The blade was colossal, spanning several hundred meters in length.

It was not forged from ordinary metal or spiritual flames, but from condensed, pure sword intent that drank in the ambient light like liquid ink.

Jagged arcs of dark purple lightning crackled violently along the edge of the blade, hissing as they dissolved the air itself.

Grand Elder Zhao Ming’s breath hitched, the raw despair crushing what little defiance remained in his trembling bones as the shadow of the executioner’s sword blanketed him.

But, at that very moment, the heavy, suffocating killing intent hovering over the basin abruptly fractured.

Haoran frowned and turned his gaze towards the horizon.

Without warning, a tear in the sky opened up several miles to the east, heralded not by majestic celestial music or the oppressive roar of ancient beasts, but by an gaudy, glowing blue array of rotating glyphs that looked utterly foreign to the natural laws of this world.

Out of the spatial distortion slid a massive, wedge-shaped vessel carved from smooth, glowing azure alloy—a flying profound arc that surged forward with completely erratic, jerky propulsion.

Haoran clicked his tongue, the abrupt interruption was an affront to his senses.

His golden eyes narrowed further, his raised hand pausing mid-gesture as he cast his divine perception across the arriving vessel.

The vessel was packed to the brim with thousands of figures leaning precariously over the polished railings.

Yet their spiritual foundations and cultivation level were abysmal, chaotic, and laughably shallow.

Half of them possessed unstable Core Formation bases that looked as though they had been glued together overnight, while the rest were barely clinging to early Golden Core realms with hollow dantians and fluctuating meridians.

They were entirely useless here. Did they accidentally wander off?

Haoran’s cold mind swiftly analyzed the situation. In a clash where Nirvana Rebirth experts were being casually pulverized into paste, a gathering of several thousand Core Formation and Golden Core ants had no tactical significance whatsoever.

Even the lingering aftershocks of his avatar’s breathing should have been enough to rupture their internal organs.

Yet, as the profound arc drew closer, the divine sense of both Haoran and Shen Xun’er picked up the chaotic, clamoring noise echoing from the deck.

The people onboard were not trembling in fear, nor were they prostrating themselves before the towering golden god.

Instead, they are talking using words they couldn’t even understand.

"Holy shit! Look at the graphics on that world boss! Look at the scale! Fuck! Just how much did it cost to make this!?"

"Yo, is that a cutscene?! Wait, can we skip it? I’ve been grinding daily bounties for four hours straight to farm xps, my xp boosts are about to expire!"

"Bro, look at the size of that avatar! That’s gotta be at least a Phase 3 raid encounter! What realm is that dude on its head even in? His nameplate is just flashing purple question marks!"

At that words, everyone focused on Haoran, and just like what was said, all they get was Question marks, not even a name.

This could only mean one thing...this boss was so incredibly way out of their league he couldn’t even be identified using their observation!

But of course, thet weren’t worried about that for now, but instead took in the surroundings.

And they finally saw it, the completely devastated sect, and the barely alive hundreds of survivors.

Their reactions?

"Lmao, look at the sect below them, the whole map just got deleted! The terrain deformation in this new patch is insane! You think this is the White Dragon Sect we are supposed to help?"

"It definitely is! BallsDeep69...fuck, why do you have to choose that name..., whatever, why aren’t you popping your buffs?! Quick! Aggro the big golden guy! I need to test if my fire-proc crits on a spirit avatar!"

"Someone drop a raid banner, let’s tag the boss so we can lessen respawn time and respawn penalties! Get to work, boys! Charge!"

The cacophony of bizarre, nonsensical gibberish bounced across the empty sky.

These cultivators were wildly waving their glowing, mismatched spirit swords, pointing and laughing at the apocalypse as if it were an amusement spectacle, completely devoid of the natural reverence, dread, or survival instinct that every living organism in the cosmos ought to possess.

Haoran was completely dumbfounded, staring at these weird people, and without hesitation... he slashed down at them.

He had no interest in dissecting their deranged mutterings.

Whether they were possessed by heavenly demons, suffering from mass spiritual psychosis, or simply suicidal fools who had completely lost their minds, they were noisy, ugly, and in his way.

At that instant, his Spirit Avatar mimicked his movements and cut them down with its pitch black sword.

With an earth-shattering sweep, the colossal blade of pitch black sword intent cleaved through the sky.

The atmospheric pressure cracked into a roaring sonic boom as the black edge parted heaven and earth, traveling faster than mortal thought.

The gamers on the deck barely had time to shout another line of slang before the shadow fell upon them.

Fwwooosh!

They were incinerated into nothingness.

There was no blood, no shattered wood, and no falling debris.

The pitch-black sword intent eradicated the profound arc on an atomic level.

The azure vessel, the thousands of yelling cultivators, their mismatched weapons, and their bizarre banners were instantly swallowed by the black wave of spatial annihilation.

In less than a single breath, the entire eastern sky was cleared of all obstructions, leaving only a lingering scar of scorched void that slowly stitched itself back together.

It was as simple as swatting a swarm of gnats that had drifted too close to an imperial banquet.

Haoran did not even blink. He casually let his hand fall back to his side, and the towering golden spirit avatar dissolved its black sword into drifting golden motes.

He then turned back to Elder Zhao, and said to Shen Xun’er, "Xun’er, you deal with those disciples below, I will handle these elders."

"Understood, Young Master," Shen Xun’er replied with a cold, elegant bow, her fingers lightly brushing against her sleeves as she prepared to release another wave of spatial destruction upon the weeping remnants in the crater.

But before Shen Xun’er could even follow his command, Haoran noticed a strange, unnatural ripple passing through the ambient space.

There was no spatial array activation, no talisman burn, no ancestral teleportation phenomenon, and no celestial tear.

One millisecond the ground was bare, scorched stone; the very next millisecond, hundreds of living, breathing figures were simply... standing there.

Haoran’s sharp gaze instantly locked onto the crowd, and he blinked, looking specifically confused.

It was them. Those weird people riding that profound ark.

The exact same coarse faces, the exact same mismatched spirit robes, the exact same gaudy iron swords, and the exact same bizarre, chaotic spiritual signatures that he had physically, thoroughly eradicated from reality less than three seconds ago.

Their souls had not returned from the Yellow Springs; they had not reconstructed their bodies through high tier rebirth method or forbidden blood cloning arts.

They had literally popped back into existence like ink dropping onto fresh parchment.

"What the fuck?! That boss has an instant-kill mechanic?!"

"Bro, I told you not to stand in the red zone! I lost ten percent of my current level EXP! That took me three days to grind!"

"Wait, we respawned at the nearest open landmark! Look, the boss is still right there!"

"Run it back! Run it back! Healers, pre-cast your regen wards! Let’s go again!"

Without hesitation, these weaklings actually rushed towards Haoran’s avatar.

Standing atop the golden forehead of his thousand-meter spirit avatar, Shen Haoran, an imperial scion who had cultivated the divine arts of the Shen Clan and witnessed the most profound, ancient secrets of the cosmos, felt his calm, untouchable composure shatter into pure bewilderment.

What the hell?

Is something wrong with these people’s heads?