Chapter 727: Domain Expansion

Qingque slightly lifted her head, and the emerald eyes reflected the canopy of branches that stretched across the sky, as well as the tens of thousands of blood‑red pupils that stared at her simultaneously.

If any normal person were here, this sight would surely knock them out on the spot; in fact, the former me would probably have just lain on the fish's back and played dead.

But she simply inhaled lightly, brought two fingers of the other hand together, pointed the tips downward, and traced an arc on the sea below.

The motion was as slow as drawing an ink stroke on rice paper; azure light spilled from her fingertips, leaving a slender Light Arc along the traced path.

One end of the Light Arc was attached to her finger, the other end descended to the sea; the water at the target point lit up instantly, and azure light radiated outward from that spot, spreading in concentric circles and illuminating the entire sea within her field of view.

Then the illuminated sea burst open!

A colossal whale erupted from the water, its size absurdly massive; when its back broke the surface, the entire sea level sank several meters, and the towering wave it raised surged thousands of meters outward before breaking into white foam.

Its whole body was composed of solid azure light; beneath its transparent skin, a stream of luminous fluid could be seen flowing from head to tail in a continuous circuit. On each side of its body stretched an extremely long Light Wing, trailing debris‑like wake, and its span was wide enough to cast shadows over half the sky.

The whale made no pause after breaching!

It shot upward so fast that the water trailing its back hadn't even drained before being flung into countless droplets.

Mid‑air it opened its massive jaws, the lower jaw flipping down almost vertically, exposing its throat; deep within the pitch‑black cavity, spiral light patterns rotated.

Ah~

The spot it bit corresponded exactly to the inevitable path of the descending branches above; tens of thousands of massive branches were cleanly severed at the waist, the fracture lines as straight as if measured with a ruler. The upper halves continued to tumble in the air, while the lower halves shattered into golden powder that the whale inhaled in a single gulp.

The crackling sounds merged into a chorus, echoing from one end of the sky to the other.

After swallowing the branches, the whale flicked its tail and turned in midair, the pressure from its tail fin thrusting a towering, arcing wave thousands of meters high across the distant sea surface.

The whale's head pivoted to face the trunk of the Golden Giant Tree, opened its mouth again, and took another bite.

A huge chunk was ripped from the trunk, the missing portion hundreds of times larger than the wound Qingque had previously created with the fish swarm.

The golden wooden layer inside the trunk was laid bare, its grain twisted like a tangled network of vessels, emitting a sickly gold‑red hue under the azure light.

All the human faces on the trunk opened their mouths simultaneously, billions of faces screaming in unison, their overlapping cries piercing the air itself.

The giant tree's retaliation followed immediately.

Every movable branch turned toward the whale, countless limbs crashing like a tsunami; each strike on the whale's body carried force enough to tear the fabric of space.

At the same moment the branches began to deform, rapidly twisting and re‑forming mid‑flight; wooden fibers unfurled from within to weave new shapes. Some became massive serpents with seven or eight heads, each head sprouting a barbed tongue.

Others turned into humanoid skeletal structures, joints bent backward as limbs crawled on the air, a row of vertical pupils embedded along their spines.

Some directly transformed into a pure conglomerate of eyeballs, hundreds of eyes packed into a sphere, each eye rotating to focus in a different direction.

These bizarre creatures lunged at the whale simultaneously, opening a variety of mouths to bite.

Where they bit, Bubbles suddenly began to emerge.

Azure, semi‑transparent Bubbles with ultra‑fine light patterns on their surface surged from the wounds, adhering to the monsters' teeth, tentacles, and eyeballs.

The Bubbles spread upward along their bodies; wherever they climbed, the monsters' outlines grew fuzzy, turning from solid to liquid, and from liquid to foam.

The monsters all exploded into Bubbles at the same instant, the sound of the burst as light as crushing a single grape.

All the burst Bubbles reconvened onto the whale's body; each bubble that merged caused the whale to swell a little, its azure light growing brighter, seeping through its skin and tinting the entire sea with a flowing azure hue.

The whale's size had now expanded to several times its former magnitude, its light so intense that every ripple on the sea surface cast a crystal‑clear shadow.

Qingque stood on the fish's back, watching the scene, a slight smile curling at the corner of her mouth.

At that moment, the green fish beneath her sank an inch.

Below the surface, directly beneath her, several ultra‑thin filament‑like branches silently pierced the water, their diameters almost invisible, moving so fast that the surface hadn't reacted before they stabbed to a point less than a foot beneath the fish's belly.

Separated from the seabed root‑net, they clung to the fish's body and pierced upward, with a clear target: to pierce the fish's belly and impale the person standing on its back.

The entire process made no sound, no splash; even the Abundance aura's warning was drowned out by the whale's earlier assault.

By the time Qingque's perception caught them, the tips of those filaments were only a few inches from the fish's belly, and the surface tension of the water had already begun to deform.

Qingque exhaled.

On this chaotic battlefield, the sigh was so faint it was almost inaudible.

"Is that all?"

She raised both hands, and with a snap they came together.

Centered on her, an azure light burst erupted, a spherical light barrier forming between her clasped palms, expanding within fractions of a second to a scale that covered the entire heavens and earth.

The sound of the light barrier sweeping by was extremely faint, like a huge bubble being slowly popped.

The ultra‑thin filaments that were about to pierce the fish's belly froze the instant they touched the light barrier, hanging in midair in their upward‑piercing posture, unable to advance a hair.

The root‑net still gathering power on the seabed simultaneously halted, the swirling silt on the ocean floor froze in the water, each grain's trajectory clearly visible.

All the various monsters in the distance that were lunging at the whale stopped midair, mouths frozen in an open pose, tentacles locked in their forward‑curved extension, and the hundreds of eyes on the eyeball conglomerate frozen before they could focus.

Every object belonging to the giant tree across the battlefield was paused at that instant.

Qingque tilted her head, gazing at the frozen world before her, a thought flashing through her mind.

It seemed to be called—

She slowly uttered four words in sync with the voice inside her.

"Domain—Expand!"

The clasped palms began to rotate slowly, centered on the palms; the left hand turned inward, the right outward, tracing an invisible circle.

The entire heavens and earth rotated with her hands; the dim sky above, shrouded by branches, sank downward, while the azure ocean beneath her rose upward, the sky and earth performing a complete inversion around her as the axis.

The ocean, now hanging above her head, became the new sky, and the sky, falling at her feet, became the new earth.