Chapter 596 - 367: Azathoth

The icy gale howling across the sky above Sky Reaching City seemed to freeze in place, choked by the utter impossibility of the spectacle unfolding at the cloud line.

Huo Yue’s breath hitched in her throat, her crimson robes whipping violently as she watched Lin Yun hover there with his arms folded behind his head, sporting that arrogant, infuriating smirk.

Every fiber of her pride as a wielder of the Heavenly Flame screamed in outraged fury.

No, just that. Her heart was burning with fury! How dare this person insult the man she loves? He deserves to die!

Huo Yue gritted her teeth and quickly reacted, creating another flame lotus and threw it towards Lin Yun, but just like last time, he just stared at it and...

Snap.

...casually snapped it out of existence.

A crisp, effortless sound of two fingers meeting broke the silence.

The second five-colored lotus—a brilliant, spinning construct woven from the compressed agony of five celestial flames, radiating enough heat to vaporize a mountain range—did not detonate.

It did not explode into a magnificent shockwave, nor did it scorch the sky.

The moment Lin Yun’s thumb brushed his middle finger, the raging flames simply turned transparent.

The vibrant crimson, emerald, gold, white, and violet hues faded like smoke caught in a hurricane, dissolving into nothingness before a single ember could brush against his blue robes.

The atmospheric pressure stabilized instantly, the boiling ozone returning to cold mountain air as though the flame had never existed in this timeline at all.

"How boring." Lin Yun shook his head.

But then, Haoran moved, Azathoth in his hands.

He left no gap between her strike and his own, his figure blurred through the fabric of the sky, skipping across the dimensional seams in a straight, terrifying line of obsidian intent.

Azathoth appeared directly above Lin Yun’s skull, descending in a vertical, cleaving arc fast enough to split the horizon.

The dark Tang Dao carried the crushing mass of a dying world, the edge screaming with the sharp sword intent to cut.

Yet, there was no spray of gore.

Lin Yun merely raised his right hand, his index and middle fingers casually parting by an inch, snapping shut like a pair of iron tongs.

CLACK.

The razor sharp, pitch black edge of Azathoth that could cleave a Supreme Emperor into ribbons, was stopped dead between the tips of Lin Yun’s pale, uncalloused fingers.

Not a single spark flew, not a single gust of wind was pushed aside.

The terrifying kinetic momentum and the crushing weight of Haoran’s strength simply vanished into an invisible void, absorbed into the unyielding law of Lin Yun’s domain.

Lin Yun blinked, "Tough sword. I was planning on breaking it in two."

He peered at the dark blade held firmly between his fingertips, genuine surprise flickering in his nonchalant gaze.

His fingers tightened, exerting a terrifying, reality-warping hydraulic force that should have crushed any saintly weapon into metallic powder.

Yet Azathoth merely hummed, cold and indifferent, its obsidian metal refusing to crack, bend, or surrender a single speck of its edge.

At that moment...

WHOOSH!

Capitalizing on the momentary distraction, Huo Yue tore through the spatial current, descending directly behind Lin Yun’s blind spot!

In her grasp manifested a colossal heavy dark and crimson ruler, etched with ancient fire-veins that burned with pure burning fury.

She gripped the hilt with both hands, throwing the entire weight of her body and the swirling momentum of her five flames into a vicious, downward strike aimed straight at the crown of Lin Yun’s skull!

CLANG!

The dark crimson weapon struck his black hair—and it was as if she had swung a brittle willow branch against the foundation of the heavens!

A horrifying, instantaneous kinetic reversal detonated along the heavy ruler.

The weapon did not just bounce, the universe itself seemed to reject the notion of Lin Yun receiving harm, reflecting three hundred percent of the kinetic force directly backward into the wielder!

The heavy dark crimson ruler ripped violently upward out of her trajectory, wrenching her wrists until the joints popped painfully, throwing her slender frame backward through the air like a discarded kite!

She tumbled across fifty meters of sky, her boots skidding against the empty air, her breathing ragged, her eyes widened in shock as she stared at the man’s unblemished, undisturbed hair.

Not a single strand had been cut, and not a speck of dust had been shaken loose.

In the center of the sky, Haoran’s golden eyes narrowed into thin, lethal slits as he wrenched Azathoth backward, slipping the blade out from between Lin Yun’s fingers, stepping back three paces into the cold draft.

His expression did not show anger, nor was there fear; only a chilling, calculating stillness that recognized a fundamental anomaly in the laws of the universe.

This was not a defense born of cultivation, armor, or saintly body refining arts.

This was a conceptual weight—, a law of invincibility that operated on a local territorial mandate.

He remembered faintly, from the memories of his cousin, there was a time where novel protagonist were invincible as long as they stay within a specific range.

He believes that this Lin Yun was one.

Without hesitation, Haoran immediately took out a bottle from his storage ring containing a single drop of pitch black blood.

Click.

The small, pristine bottle of pure white suet jade appeared between his pale fingers.

The container was wrapped in dozens of golden sealing talismans, inscribed with archaic sealing characters meant to suppress supreme horrors.

Even through the dense jade and the celestial talismans, the container leaked a faint, freezing, necrotic miasma that made the surrounding sunlight twist into unnatural, sickly green shades.

Inside the translucent bottle, a solitary droplet of pitch-black liquid hovered, swirling with a thick, oily, unnatural vitality, defying gravity and logic alike.

Huo Yue, seeing that blood, instantly remembered that uncomfortable feeling she felt back when Haoran fought that Giant during the war in the Eastern Region years ago.

A visceral shudder traveled down her spine, raising goosebumps along her arms.

Years ago, on that scorched, ruined battlefield where mountains of titans had fallen, she had stood miles away, watching a shadow drop from the heavens.

She remembered the suffocating, sanity eroding dread that had filled her mouth with the taste of copper and sour rot—an ancient, formless wrongness that had made her own flames shiver and tuck themselves away into her dantian like frightened beasts.

She instantly turned solemn, "Imperial Flame Transformation, Secret Art: Ignition!"

She did not hesitate. Recognizing the terrifying stakes of what Haoran was about to unleash, she pushed her own body to the absolute limit to provide whatever support she could muster!

BOOOOOOM!

The five heavenly flames abandoned the surface of her skin, diving deep into her primary meridians and wrapping around her golden core like five screaming dragons!

Her veins lit up beneath her fair skin, glowing with incandescent emerald, gold, and crimson luminescence.

The backlash charred her channels, but her teeth clamped down on her lip, holding the agony inside.

Her cultivation aura, which had sat firmly at the peak of the Nascent Soul realm, shattered its bottleneck in a blinding eruption of flame!

The spatial pressure around her roared, tearing the clouds into glowing embers as her spiritual realm forcefully breached the barrier into the Spirit Ascension realm.

And without another word, she attacked.

"Flame Splitting Wave!" Huo Yue roared as she slashed her ruler, creating a sharp wave of flames towards Lin Yun.

She swung the dark crimson ruler with a ferocious, double-handed sweep!

A crescent shaped wave of condensed five color Heavenly Flames, easily three kilometers meters wide and sharp as a divine scythe, tore through the sky!

It left a howling trench of scorched space in its wake, screaming toward Lin Yun’s waist with enough raw cutting power to sever a mountain range in twain!

Lin Yun turned towards her and raised his other hand to flick it away.

His face bore the same lazy, condescending smirk.

To him, whether she was a Nascent Soul or a Spirit Ascension expert, whether she wielded five flames or fifty, within this domain, every attack was simply numbers to be zeroed out by his system.

His left wrist began to twist, his pale fingers rising to dismiss the flaming crescent into nothingness.

But at that moment, Haoran dropped the blood into Azathoth.

Pop.

The cork was shattered.

The single droplet of pitch black, primordial blood fell from the lip of the suet jade vial.

It struck the flat, obsidian surface of Azathoth’s blade.

Drip.

Lin Yun froze.

The smirk on the City Lord’s face vanished as the raised hand meant to flick away the five colored wave of fire stopped dead in mid-air.

Every single hair on his body stood straight up on end!

A primal, ancient instinct, an ancestral terror buried deep within the genetic memory of every living organism since the dawn of the cosmos, screamed an alarm so loud that his eardrums throbbed!

His breath caught in his throat, his mouth filling with the foul, oily taste of ash, wet dirt, and sour iron.

The very air around him didn’t just turn cold; it lost its meaning, rotting from the inside out.

GRRRRRRR-KRRRRRR-THUUUUMP.

It began not as a sound, but as an impossible, sickening vibration in the foundation of the soul.

It was a wet, bloated, and ancient horror—a rhythm like a colossal, dead heart beating inside a mountain of putrid flesh buried beneath a frozen sea.

From the unseen depths of the void, a discordant, maddening music echoed: the screeching of bone flutes carved from dead stars, the wet slurping of blind, ravenous maws chewing on the concept of time, and the incoherent, droning murmurs of idiot entities dancing in the mindless chaos beyond the edge of existence.

The sound scraped against sanity like dull copper nails dragging over the surface of the mind, whispering blasphemies in dead tongues that made the eyes want to bleed and the brain turn to soft, rancid grease.

The sky groaned.

The sunlight turned a dirty, diseased shade of sickly ochre, and the clouds curled inward, rotting into black slime before they could disperse.

He turned his gaze back at Haoran, and saw that his sword was starting to drip dark liquid that coated his arm, and slowly coated the right half side of his body.

The dark drop of blood had not washed away; it had been greedily swallowed by the obsidian steel!

Azathoth was convulsing.

The dark Tang Dao vibrated with an unnatural, wet hum, weeping rivers of a thick, pitch-black sludge that bubbled and hissed like boiling pitch.

The oily fluid crawled up the hilt like living leeches, wrapping around Haoran’s pale fingers, sinking through the leather, through his skin, and directly into his veins!

The black rot surged up his forearm, staining his flesh a hideous, glistening obsidian!

It devoured the fine black and gold silk of his imperial sleeve, melting the cloth into living, rubbery sinew that spread across his right bicep, his right shoulder, and crept up the right side of his neck!

The golden hair on the right side of his head turned bone white, then rotted away into greasy, twitching dark fibers that drifted in the dead air!

Along the black, glistening flesh of his right arm and torso, the skin tore open along hundreds of wet, jagged seams!

Hundreds of milky yellow, unblinking eyes peeled wide—some pupil-less, others with vertical, goat-like slits, rolling frantically in their sockets, weeping cloudy yellow mucus that dripped down his fingers!

Between the cluster of eyes, small, circular mouths lined with rows of concentric, needle-thin shark teeth opened and snapped shut, clicking their jaws in frantic, starving hunger, whispering incoherent, wet chants that drove the surrounding spiritual energy into madness!

From his right shoulder blade and the side of his ribs, three thick, slick black tentacles burst through his flesh!

They whipped and coiled through the air like drowned serpents, covered in suckers that housed tiny, gnashing teeth, leaving trails of black, reality corroding slime suspended in the frozen sky!

The noble, pristine Young Master of the Shen Clan—the golden-haired dragon whose countenance was renowned across the heavens—was now divided down the center.

His left side remained that of an immaculate, beautiful immortal youth in black and gold; his right side was a living, breathing nightmare dragged straight from the primordial sewers of the Blind Idiot God!

"You... what... what are you?" Lin Yun spoke.

His voice cracked into a hoarse, trembling whisper.

The swagger was gone.

The casual arrogance was shattered.

His hand, which had stood invincible against ancient emperors and world-ending flames, shook visibly at his side.

The blue system interface hovering before his retinas was glitching violently, flashing frantic, incoherent strings of question marks and crimson error warnings that screamed of conceptual corruption beyond known parameters!

Haoran smirked, and all the mouths on his right side mirrored the action.

The left side of his handsome lips curved into a cruel, leisurely smile, while dozens of wet, tooth-filled mouths along his blackened arm, neck, and shoulder parted in unison, revealing rows of needle-like teeth that dripped with dark venom.

"I’m Azathoth."