Chapter 812: Collapse

Midnight.

The collapse of the light curtain began at Point Seven, like toppled dominoes.

The scarlet barrier shattered into billions of light points, hanging in the air, slowly spinning, like fireflies bereft of their pull.

East side, the Iron Wall Fortress.

Xu Da and Chang Yuchun led their troops charging through where the light curtain once stood.

There was no obstruction.

Only a vast expanse of wasteland where the fungal carpet was fading.

And on the wasteland, the Qing Empire troops utterly plunged into chaos.

The corrosive beasts' exoskeletons peeled away.

The Walkers collapsed and liquefied.

The Piercers curled up, twitching, until they ceased breathing.

"Nether Energy… is dissipating." Chang Yuchun lifted a fragment turning gray-white with his sword tip.

"No." Xu Da crouched, touching the purple-black fungal carpet that was beginning to fade and curl, revealing the poor but ordinary yellow earth beneath.

"The contamination is receding. Everything the Iron Crow Army built is collapsing."

Inside the Commander Tower.

Chen Wen remained unconscious.

But on his pale face, that deep anguish seemed to be gradually easing.

An indescribable, gentle yet vast "undulation" was emanating from deep within his body.

Zhang Cheng stared intently at the energy gauge monitoring Chen Wen's vital signs; its readings were extremely slowly… rising.

"The lord's vitality… is stabilizing on its own!"

His voice trembled, filled with incredulous excitement.

"Although still weak, the 'alien force' continually eroding his life… seems to have weakened!"

Zhu Yuanzhang stood by the window, gazing at the collapsing light curtain outside and the floating light points.

The omnipresent sense of being watched and imprisoned that had weighed on his heart for a century was receding like a tide.

After a feeling near emptiness of relief came a deeper bewilderment… and… dissonance.

As the light curtain faded, the western vista unfolded unobstructed before his eyes——

Twisted mountains, withered rivers, bizarrely collapsed building outlines.

A world thoroughly ravaged, now bordering the eastern side.

Two utterly different realms are being forcibly spliced together.

"Bo Wen." Zhu Yuanzhang asked softly, his eyes still locked on the strange starry sky outside—there the stars were showing blurry "double images."

"Do you feel… the laws of heaven and earth are 'shaking'?"

Liu Ji's face turned pale as he strained to sense.

"It's not shaking… it's the forcibly distorted 'principle' returning to its original 'order'."

"But the path of return… is filled with conflict and chaos."

He pointed at the double images of the stars in the sky.

"Look, the celestial phenomena are fighting."

Gong Sun Sheng took a deep breath.

"Two rule environments severed for a hundred years are colliding, merging… or rather, vying for dominance."

Just then.

West, the heartland of the Qing Empire.

Central Capital Control Tower.

Huang Taiji stood at the edge of the collapsing observation platform.

Half of his biological carapace was peeling away, revealing rotting flesh.

On the other side, the Nether Energy patterns flared wildly, like dying vessels.

"Master…"

He whispered into the void.

There was no reply.

The collapse of the Nether Energy network was total and utter.

Deprived of that supreme will's infusion and sustenance, his deeply bound body began to backlash.

His right arm "boomed" into a puddle of pus and blood.

Huang Taiji staggered backward.

Inside the tower, the other shamans and technicians were likewise undergoing apocalypse.

Melting, self-igniting, or their eyes glazing empty like puppets cut off from power.

The whole city, the entire Qing Empire, all those deeply bound to the Nether Energy network were dying.

"Heh… haha…"

Huang Taiji laughed hoarsely, full of despairing self-mockery.

"It turns out… we too are 'superfluous growths'…"

"When the system collapses, the husk cannot endure…"

He finally glanced once at the eastern sky, gradually brightening.

He stepped forward and fell from the high platform.

The body disintegrated and dissipated in midair.

At the same time.

Within the Qing State, countless people who bore purple-black markings on their bodies but had not yet completely lost their sanity were undergoing the painful 'Metamorphosis'.

The markings faded.

The mutated organs withered and fell off.

Some died because of it, but more people, in the midst of intense pain, gradually regained clarity in their eyes.

Memories of a century of enslavement and reconstruction surged back.

'Are we... free?' an old man stroked his arm, which had returned to its original color, tears and snot streaming.

But this freedom, watered by endless suffering, lay before them as a dying wasteland world.

The darkest moment before dawn.

The final fragment of the Crimson Light Curtain spun three times in the air, turning into azure smoke.

The barrier vanished completely.

The lights of Northern City to the east and the faint glow of the ruins of Central Capital to the west saw each other for the first time without any obstruction.

They were connected.

But the sight before them left all witnesses silent.

One side was a civilization where order still remained and life had not been extinguished.

The other side was a wasteland thoroughly twisted and on the brink of death.

And deep within that wasteland lay the place where the Nether Energy Core had collapsed.

A 'Rule Void' several li in diameter and bottomless emitted a faint attractive force.

At the edge of the void, space continually rippled.

It seemed as if something far older and more essential, buried deep by ages and pollution, was slowly rising from the world's deepest layer.

Inside the Iron Wall Fortress.

In his coma, Chen Wen's brow furrowed ever so slightly.

In a depth unnoticed by anyone, the deep blue power bound to his life, which he called the 'Heaven's Mandate' or the 'Origin Contract', trembled ever so slightly.

It seemed to 'sense' a certain ineffable 'undulation' coming from that void in the west.

That undulation was not Nether Energy.

It was even older.

It was even more primal.

It seemed... to be the original appearance of the world before it was altered.

But this perception flashed and was gone.

Chen Wen's breath remained weak but steady.

Only the faint, almost vanished deep blue line at his brow, invisible to others, seemed to have condensed into an infinitesimal thread.

Deep within the distant void.

With the extinction of the last spark of Nether-green Will.

A certain vast, silent 'existence' that had slept for who knows how long opened its 'eyes' in absolute nothingness.

It 'gazed' upon a world that had just undergone a fierce 'rejection reaction'.

It gazed upon those tiny existences called 'Variables,' wandering about in bewilderment.

Then it emitted the first silent undulation of its awakening——

That was the world's underlying logic beginning to self-correct——a prelude.

And only now, after the fusion of suffering and hope, has the curtain just begun to rise.