Chapter 597 - 368: Control

The sky above Sky Reaching City seemed to decay with every passing second.

The diseased, ochre twilight cast sickly shadows across the fractured cloud banks.

Down below, the millions of citizens within the crystal battlements fell to their knees, clutching their skulls as waves of nausea and phantom whispers clawed at their minds.

The air was heavy with the suffocating stench of wet rot, sulfur, and ancient bile.

Haoran’s left golden eye burned with cold, detached arrogance, while the countless of milky yellow, unblinking eyes clustered across his pitch-black, writhing right half twitched and rolled in frantic hunger.

SKRRRR!

Haoran moved. He did not step through space; reality simply collapsed beneath his boots, dragging him instantly into Lin Yun’s face!

Azathoth descended in a brutal, downward cleave, weeping thick ribbons of black, boiling sludge!

Lin Yun’s eyes flashed with panicked fury. "I am invincible here! Break!"

He threw his right fist upward, clad in the reality denying mandate of his invincible domain!

The invisible rule of absolute defense condensed around his knuckles like an immovable adamantine wall!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The collision of the obsidian blade and the invincible fist produced a sound like an ancient bell cracking in an abyss!

The shockwave ripped through the cloud layer, shearing away the peaks of three distant mountain ranges in an instant!

Lin Yun’s breath hitched in his throat.

His boots were shoved backward through the air by three full paces!

The invisible defensive barrier around his fist groaned, spiderwebbing with hair-thin, oily black cracks where the rot of the sword ate into the mandate!

’He matched me?!’

Lin Yun’s mind reeled in pure, unadulterated shock. For centuries, since the day his system established this invincible domain, every being who stepped into this territory—whether they were academy master teachers, powerful native experts, or peerless geniuses—had their strikes reduced to zero before his fingertips.

Yet this monster before him, half-boy and half-abomination, had struck with enough primordial and conceptual weight to push him back!

This was the first time that someone could match him in his domain.

"Die!" Haoran’s voice thundered, layered with the wet, chattering whispers of thirty needle-toothed mouths opening along his right collarbone!

Haoran swung his left fist, coated in his golden purple qi while the three slick, rubbery tentacles erupting from his right flank whipped forward like barbed spears!

"Don’t underestimate me! I am invincible!" Lin Yun roared, throwing his left elbow up to block the punch while his right palm swept out to swat the tentacles aside!

CLANG! SPLAT!

Haoran’s fist hammered into Lin Yun’s forearm, the concussive kinetic force rippling through the city lord’s frame, rattling his teeth in his jaw!

Simultaneously, the three black tentacles struck Lin Yun’s defensive barrier, but instead of bouncing off, they ruptured into a deluge of thick, living black liquid!

The black fluid did not splatter like water; it squirmed, it writhed, and it breathed.

"What?!" Lin Yun’s eyes widened.

The liquid clung to the invisible barrier protecting Lin Yun’s chest, rapidly expanding into a pulsing, veiny carpet of slick obsidian sludge!

Along the surface of the black pool, hundreds of tiny, lidless eyes sprouted and blinked in erratic unison, weeping stringy yellow pus that sizzled against the air.

Between the clusters of weeping eyes, dozens of circular, lip-less mouths peeled open, snapping their rows of needle-thin teeth, chattering at deafening, sickening speeds!

"Eat... "

"...devour..."

"..swallow..."

"...drink the light..."

The mouths hissed in discordant, layered chorus, their wet tongues lashing against Lin Yun’s defensive aura!

The sound was not heard through the ears; it echoed directly inside Lin Yun’s sea of consciousness, an unspeakable, mind breaking frequency that tasted of spoiled milk and grave dirt!

Lin Yun felt his stomach violently twist, his vision swimming with grotesque hallucinations of rotting leviathans writhing in the cosmic dark.

The system interface before his eyes sputtered, flashing erratic crimson text.

[Warning: Conceptual Contamination Detected!]

[Foreign Authority chewing on local mandate!]

[Defense holding at 99.8%... 99.6%...]

"Get off me, you disgusting filth!" Lin Yun snarled, terror bleeding into his rage as he drove his palms together, unleashing a concussive burst of pure, domain enforced rejection!

BANG!

The veiny carpet of eye-studded sludge was forcefully blasted apart, scattering into droplets of black rain that hissed as they fell toward the earth!

Lin Yun stepped into the opening, throwing a straight, lethal thrust aimed directly at Haoran’s solar plexus!

The strike carried the conceptual weight of an executioner’s guillotine, meant to crush Haoran’s internal organs into mush!

But Haoran did not dodge.

The right side of his chest suddenly split wide open like a wet trapdoor!

But instead of bone and lung, a gaping, tooth lined maw three feet wide opened in his ribs, swallowing Lin Yun’s incoming fist whole!

CHOMP!

Hundreds of hooked, needle-thin fangs clamped down around Lin Yun’s forearm!

Even with his invincibility preventing his skin from being severed, the sheer, crushing pressure and the freezing, sanity destroying rot of the outer god’s saliva made Lin Yun’s bones ache with profound agony!

"What kind of freak are you?!" Lin Yun screamed, his left hand forming an iron chop to strike at Haoran’s neck!

Haoran’s golden left eye flashed with cruel, vacant bloodlust as he raised Azathoth with his left hand, meeting the chop with the flat of the dark blade, while his right arm—now fully coated in glistening, slimy black hide—transformed into a massive, barbed whip of knotted muscle and gnashing jaws!

WHIP! CRACK! BOOM!

The two clashed blow for blow in the shattered sky!

Fist against blade!

Tentacle against barrier!

Jaw against iron!

Every second saw dozens of exchanges that tore the atmosphere into bleeding ribbons!

Where they traded blows, the air did not simply produce thunder; it produced sickening squelches and metallic groans as the absolute law of the domain repeatedly ground against the primeval rot of Azathoth!

Lin Yun was forced to fight with everything his system granted him, ducking, parrying, and throwing world breaking counters, his breath growing ragged as he found himself completely unable to overwhelm this terrifying entity!

Yet, above the carnage, high in the colder strata of the heavens, Huo Yue was watching.

Her sharp crimson eyes were wide, her knuckles whitening as she gripped her dark red ruler.

Right then, as she watched the fight, she immediately noticed that Haoran seems to start to lose himself, as if every second he stayed in that form, he was becoming more and more like that entity in his sword.

She could see it clearly.

Thin, black veins, like creeping roots of mold, were crawling across his chest, inching past his collarbone toward his left neck!

The calm, calculating arrogance in his left golden eye was flickering, dimming beneath a hollow, vacant abyss of pure, ravenous hunger.

The way he moved was becoming erratic, jerky, and unhuman—his head tilting at unnatural angles, his joints bending in impossible directions as the chattering mouths along his flesh laughed with manic, mindless glee.

He was not just wielding the drop of blood; the ancient, sleeping consciousness sealed within the metal was waking up, gnawing on his soul, threatening to drown the Young Master of the Shen Clan in a sea of cosmic madness!

’If this continues, the Haoran I know will be gone,’ she realized, her heart clenching with cold panic. ’I have to break this stalemate right now!’

WHOOOOOOSH!

She shot straight up through the broken clouds, climbing thousands of miles until she breached the upper atmosphere, positioning herself on the very threshold of the outer void.

She threw her head back, her fiery hair streaming behind her like a river of living magma.

Her five Heavenly Flames erupted from her core, swirling between her upturned palms in a colossal, churning vortex!

"Sun of the Nine Heavens, Stars of the Boundless Void, heed the call of the Imperial Flame!" Huo Yue’s voice rang out, carrying the ancient cadence of an imperial summoning!

HUUUUUUMMMMM!

Across the celestial plane, the distant suns hanging in the firmament seemed to flare!

Vast, invisible rivers of pure stellar plasma and solar radiation were forcefully drawn from the cosmos, streaming down through the void in blinding lances of golden-white light!

The starlight bent, feeding directly into the swirling vortex between her hands!

The ball of fire expanded with terrifying, monstrous speed!

From ten spans wide, to a hundred, to a mile, to fifty miles, until an apocalyptic sphere of multi-colored, roiling starfire hovered above her crown!

The light cascading down from the heavens turned the bruised purple sky into a blinding, burning hot dome of dawn!

The temperature plummeted for a second as the atmosphere was pulled upward, before an unbearable, crushing heat rolled over the mountain basin!

Lin Yun glanced up, his breath violently hitching.

Huo Yue was holding above her head a massive ball of flame that covered his entire city, its surface churned with solar flares ten thousand feet high, crackling with violet lightning and emerald life-fire.

The shadow of the titanic fireball completely swallowed the entire metropolis below!

Lin Yun’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

His system domain was absolute, yes—he was invincible within its radius, and he could extend that protection to the buildings and disciples within the central core.

But the domain’s boundary had a limit!

The vast suburbs, the hundreds of thousands of mortal farms, the outer defensive towers, and the millions of imperial academy natives and students living along the slopes were all positioned outside his own invincible domain.

If that colossal star of fused celestial fire fell, the kinetic blast and the millions of degrees of raw heat would wipe the entire mountain basin clean off the map!

The outer city would be turned into an ocean of boiling glass, leaving him ruling over a barren, smoking crater!

Not to mention Huo Yue was outside his domain.

She hovered in the stratosphere, leagues beyond the reach of his territorial authority.

He could not snap his fingers to snuff her fire; he could not reach out with his invisible fist to strike her down!

In this moment, the great city lord of Sky Reaching City was pinned against his own walls!

ROOOOOOAAAR!

At that moment, a sound that was half dragon cry and half the screech of an ancient void beast tore from Haoran’s throat!

He lunged forward through the distraction, his blade slicing down in a diagonal arc that trailed a wave of chattering, tooth-filled black slime!

CLANG!

Lin Yun raised his left hand, his fingers snapping shut around the obsidian blade bare inches from his cheekbone!

The black sludge hissed violently against his skin, small mouths biting frantically at his palm, but his invincibility held the blade rigid.

Lin Yun’s teeth were bared in a feral, cornered grimace, his single eye bloodshot as he locked glares with the monstrous youth.

Haoran’s golden eye twitched with mad, erratic hunger, his black tentacles coiling around Lin Yun’s shoulders, the mouths whispering maddening curses into his ear, neither of them yielding an inch of ground!

"Lord of Sky Reaching City," Huo Yue called out, her voice booming from the edge of space, magnified by the roar of the descending sun above her hands.

The sound carried the heavy, absolute finality of an executioner about to drop the axe.

Lin Yun paused, looking up once more, "Girl, you... What do you want to do? Are you planning on killing that many people?! Can you bear that karma!?"

Huo Yue simply stared at him, completely unbothered by the threat.

"Cease fighting this instant and withdraw back to your city, otherwise... Don’t blame me for reducing all your city into ashes."