Chapter 246: A Grand and Beautiful Pilgrimage of Life

Sudden transformation.

No explosion, no thunderous sound.

The entire United Nations Assembly Hall was instantly shrouded in a radiant white light, like starlight.

The light seemed to seep from the air, from beneath the marble floor—sacred, carrying a daze-inducing stillness.

Within the light, countless runes, too faint for the naked eye, flowed and recombined.

Simultaneously, an ancient chant, as if rising directly from the depths of the soul, softly echoed in every mind, etching itself into their thoughts:

“Rejoice in the apocalypse… we shall welcome the Lord’s descent…”

“The gates of hell open; chaos, evil, slaughter pour forth…”

“The Lord shall save His people from this wicked world…”

“And in His heavenly kingdom… we shall attain eternal life…”

The chant was ethereal and solemn, filled with compassion and divinity.

Beneath the holy light, more than two-thirds of the ordinary people in the hall—the delegates, staff, journalists—their expressions of fear, anger, confusion, washed clean like stains rinsed by warm water, swiftly faded.

Their eyes grew hollow and distant; a serene, satisfied smile curled upon their lips, as if they beheld the most blissful, most perfect vision imaginable, lost utterly within it.

Yet their bodies underwent a terrifying transformation, utterly opposite to their expressions.

Where the starlight touched their skin, the once-vibrant epidermis lost its luster and elasticity at visible speed, drying, wrinkling, dimming—as if moisture had been instantly drained from leather.

Plump cheeks sank inward; lips once rosy turned gray-white; bright eyes clouded over with murky haze.

Their bodies were like fast-forwarded a thousandfold—a flower blooming and withering in an instant under a lens, a fresh apple rapidly shriveling and rotting before their eyes. Life was violently yet gently stripped from them.

As their flesh withered rapidly, faintly glowing mist-like streams drifted slowly from their scalps, chests, and even every pore. These were the most primordial energies of life, converging into gentle rivulets, dreamlike and surreal beneath the holy light.

Those who still retained clarity—some awakened and a few exceptionally steadfast ordinary people—were stunned by this scene. They watched helplessly as colleagues, friends, strangers before them rapidly “fossilized,” as those beautiful yet deadly light-mists drifted from human bodies.

They scrambled backward, screams trapped in their throats, turning into stifled suffocation.

All the drifting light-mists, after a brief swirl in the air, as if answering an ultimate summons, traced unmistakable paths, merging into a surging, ever-growing nebula-current, rushing toward the sole target at the hall’s center—

Yang Yi.

Global broadcast cameras faithfully captured this scene of destruction: holy light, chanting, smiling, withering crowds, drifting light-mists converging into a river, pouring toward Yang Yi standing alone on her platform.

This image bore uncanny resemblance to the earlier British Sky Altar incident, and to the “otherworldly absorption video” that had spread across the globe!

Same extraction of life-source, same flesh-fading, same light-mist convergence.

“No—!!!”

Yang Yi’s pupils shrank to pinpricks.

Overwhelming shock and instinctive revulsion instantly suppressed the “hunger” within her; she relied purely on instinct, unleashing a torrent of psychokinesis, ready to tear open space and flee this meticulously laid trap.

But the inhibitor on her chest erupted in red light and alarms, its internal components overloaded, generating a restraining field that synergized with the suppression field now amplified to its limit—like the strongest spiderweb, it halted her impending spatial leap for a single instant.

That single instant of delay.

The life-source current, Huijuleshubairenshengmingjinghua , pure to the extreme, seductive to the extreme, had already surged over her.

“Ugh—!”

An indescribable sensation exploded within her.

Like a desert parched for eons suddenly drenched in rain, like a traveler on the verge of freezing thrown into a hot spring, like the deepest, most hollow craving of her soul abruptly filled… It was the long-standing deprivation within her, the craving for life-energy, a hunger far beyond any addiction on earth—“hunger”—ignited utterly by this feast within reach!

Her fragile sanity screamed alarms: Don’t! Reject it! It’s poison! It’s corruption! It’s life!

But her body and soul’s deeper, more primal instincts roared: Accept it! Devour it! It’s nourishment! It’s transcendence!

Her expression twisted instantly.

Reason and morality burned into agony; instinct and power drowned in intoxication—like two mad serpents locked in mortal combat within her.

She gripped the railing before her with both hands, nails shattering the bulletproof glass; pain forced her to bend over, eyes alternating between agonized struggle and vacant haze.

“Crack!”

The inhibitor on her chest, unable to withstand the clash of internal and external energies, emitted black smoke; its metal casing cracked, then exploded into shards after a brief flash of sparks.

Immediately, the suppression fields hidden throughout the hall overloaded one after another, emitting muffled explosions.

The restraints vanished; the suppressed power burst forth like a dam breaking, roaring from Yang Yi’s body!

Behind her, space twisted and collapsed; a black vortex slowly emerged, rotating, expanding.

The vortex’s edge devoured light, blurring surrounding scenes, radiating an aura of soul-shaking void and ravenous hunger.

“She’s draining our lives!!”

“Demon god! She’s truly a demon god!!”

“Run—!!!”

The brief silence shattered; the hall plunged into hysterical panic.

Screams, wails, shoving, trampling… people fled like headless flies toward exits, desperate to escape this zone of death woven from white light and black vortex.

Amid the chaos, one figure moved against the tide of fleeing crowds, sprinting desperately toward the hall’s center, toward Yang Yi, engulfed by the light-mist river and the dark vortex.

Feng Liancheng’s face was filled with anguish.

“Yang Yi!!” he shouted with all his strength, his voice faint yet stubborn amid the din, “We believe in you! Wake up! Control yourself! Don’t let it consume you—!!”

His cry, a thin but unyielding thread, pierced through the roar of energy surges, faintly reaching Yang Yi’s nearly shattered consciousness.

Several awakened observers among the crowd exchanged glances.

Stirred by Feng Liancheng’s shout, Yang Yi’s body trembled; she struggled to lift her head, toward the direction of the voice.

A blinding bolt of electricity erupted from the hand of one awakened, streaking straight toward Feng Liancheng as he rushed forward!

Yang Yi’s unfocused gaze snapped sharply into focus!

Without time to think, two streams of psychokinesis surged forth—one flung Feng Liancheng and Director Zhou out of the hall, the other struck back instantly.

Even at this knife’s-edge moment, she still restrained most of her power, aiming to cripple rather than kill.

“Puff!”

The electric-type awakened was struck hard, his chest caved in, spurting blood as he flew backward, crashing into and collapsing rows of seats; he twitched twice, then lay still.

Yet this seemed like a signal.

Beneath the hall, a small altar formed of dark-green ritual stones and sacred bones glowed faintly, continuously siphoning life from the United Nations building.

Colin Payne, deputy commander of the Divine Punishment Organization, watching the command on his communicator, spoke calmly: “Begin.”

Twenty awakened individuals, enhanced by Veed, simultaneously activated their ability—Psychic Storm.

This ability did not attack; instead, it flowed like gentle water, slowly enveloping Yang Yi.

Her resistance to the hunger and rejection of the life-source had consumed most of her strength; her mind already slipped into drowsiness, unaware of this force.

At first, only fragments of memory surfaced:

A cold firewood shed, a flimsy, creaking wooden bed, a quilt stuffed with torn cotton, crickets in the corner…

A frozen reservoir in winter, dirty clothes caked with ice, fingers swollen with frostbite, oozing yellow pus…

Hair yanked, head slammed against a wall, blood blurring her vision…

In the dark, a hand creeping up her thigh, those excited, filthy eyes, blood on the sheets…

The sky over Wucheng, her body corrupted and twisted by the Zhiniezu …

The hate-filled protest march in Diego City, banners screaming “Demon”…

Diego saying, “I love you in all your forms,” the Mirror Project…

Director Zhou’s retreating back…

The United Nations’ cold interrogations and accusations…

Faces, withered and fossilized, wearing serene smiles…

Countless murmurs, curses, fears, insults from screens across the globe…

All memory fragments spun in her mind like a black flood, collapsing her already crumbling mental defenses.

The screams, the fleeing, the chaos—now a silent, absurd farce.

Veed’s whisper, laced with pity and mockery, echoed in her mind: “Look at them… are they worth it?”

All struggle, all perseverance, all sacrifice, all… meaning…

Like the climax of a grotesque play, everything crumbled, everything spun, everything lost color and sound.

She heard a voice ask—a voice of “it,” and also her own—asking, for the final time, of this desolation:

What… is the point of all this?

She struggled to grasp an answer, to claw her way out of the swamp of memory fragments, hunger, and light-mist—but found nothing to hold onto.

No answer.

Or rather, the answer lay within the endless hunger and void.

Crack—

The sound of something snapping.

So tired… so tired…

Let it be… let me sink…

She finally closed her eyes, ceased struggling, letting herself fall endlessly…

The hunger she had long suppressed lost its final chains.

The nebula-like life-source mist surged into her body without obstruction, a hundred times faster than before, flooding every limb and vein.

Power rose; the emptiness filled.

Something that had been “Yang Yi” rapidly dimmed.

The last glimmer of “Yang Yi” in her eyes—the fragile, warm firefly of ideals, hope, emotion, principle—went out.

What remained was an abyss of impenetrable darkness.

She did not look again at the chaotic crowd, nor at any specific thing.

She simply raised her right hand, slowly.

Facing the Awakeners who had launched their abilities at her, she gently clenched her five fingers.

The motion was casual, even tinged with a hint of… excitement.

Hum—

There was no earth-shattering sound, only an invisible, intangible force, like an unseen barrier, instantly covering that entire area.

Time seemed to freeze for a single frame.

The next instant.

In that region, all sound, all movement, all signs of life… vanished.

There was no gruesome scene of flying flesh and blood—only a space as if erased by an eraser.

Seats, bodies, equipment… all tangible things were crushed by that mental force into fine powders mixed with dark red, swirling like dust kicked up by a broom.

At the same time, those life sources that had just scattered, along with the life energy forcibly drawn from the altar far away, as if finally finding their home, emitted joyful hums and transformed into a nebula piercing heaven and earth, Fengkuangguanruyangyitinei 。

The anchors Weiss had long set up, covering all human-populated regions on Earth, were simultaneously activated.

In the midnight Yangtze River Delta megalopolis, tens of millions were awakened by starlight holy light seeping from sky and ground.

The holy light, gentle as a mother’s hand, brushed over every sleeping or awake person.

On their faces appeared infantile serenity, as if returning to life’s primordial peace.

Their bodies withered and shriveled at visible speed within the holy light.

…

Mumbai, India.

On the tin roof of a Dharavi slum hut, Grandma Perna prayed for her feverish grandson when suddenly she was enveloped in soft holy light.

Nearby, a wealthy man had just concluded a deal atop a five-star hotel.

The holy light washed over them without distinction of rank.

Both the old woman and the tycoon wore expressions of liberation—wrinkles smoothed, brows relaxed.

From the withered, curled bodies of the poor and the rich alike, rose identical pure light mists.

…

France, Paris.

Starlike holy light rose from the flowing river.

On the Pont Alexandre III, lovers paused their kiss, gazing into each other’s eyes, filled with dreamlike fulfillment.

Their golden hair turned brittle and white; their clasped hands rapidly wrinkled.

From them, from boats on the river, from beneath the Louvre’s glass pyramid, from every corner of Paris, grand life mists rose—like Impressionist brushstrokes, tracing the dissolution of life.

The mists converged; the Eiffel Tower melted like a candle in radiance.

…

Across the globe, countless streams of light mist pierced through space, tracing arcs that defied physics, rising from every continent, every ocean, converging upon the United Nations, toward that storm’s center, in a grand and beautiful pilgrimage of life.

Yang Yi stood at the center where the Life Source hurricane and the dark vortex intertwined, death and ruin beneath her feet, her long hair whipping wildly without wind, her robes flaring.

On her face, not a trace of pain, struggle, or anger remained—only a hint of intoxication and unrestrained bliss.

The dome of the United Nations General Assembly Hall cracked like a spiderweb under the assault of these two forces.

She slowly opened her eyes, glanced around, then smiled.

The global broadcast’s final frame froze on the faint smile at her lips—then the signal cut out completely.