Chapter 465: Arrival

That black silhouette was faster than the sound.

Su Ming's barrel hadn't fully aligned with his own temple when his peripheral vision caught a dark afterimage plummeting at extreme speed.

It didn't come in through the courtroom's entrance.

It smashed down from the black fissure torn in the dome, at an almost vertical angle.

The wind pressure arrived first.

A ferocious gust of air descended, overturning the remaining rubble shield before Su Ming and pushing the half‑emerged body of Liang Wen back into the mud; Jiang Yuan's final Poker Card was sucked away by the airflow, flipping seven or eight times in the crimson air, its landing spot unknown.

Then came the sound.

It wasn't a thud of landing. It was an impact sound, like a cannonball accelerated to its limit embedding solidly into the blood‑red floor tiles at the courtroom's center.

The entire courtroom trembled.

From foundation to dome, from rock pillars to bone walls, every structure emitted a sharp metallic groan simultaneously. Su Ming's teeth clenched, and his body bounced half a meter along the ground before stopping.

Smoke and dust, laced with blood, burst outward.

Crimson mist churned, filling the entire space beneath the judgment platform. Zhang Yuanqing's three‑meter bone saw hung in midair, its blade less than two meters above Su Ming's head.

But it stopped.

Zhang Yuanqing looked down.

The smoke and dust dispersed slowly. First emerged was the outline of someone kneeling on one knee. Short, thin, wearing a gray‑blue standard school uniform, the pant legs soaked in mud.

Then the hand.

A pale, slender hand, fingers spread, palm up, steadily supporting the saw blade.

The high‑frequency vibration of the teeth vanished the instant it touched the palm. The three‑meter blade, the blade formed of hundreds of human bone fragments, and the mineral crystals along the edge studded with death‑sentence documents—all froze.

As if paused.

The bone saw remained motionless.

The boy's palm did not bleed. The teeth, which should have cut iron like mud, were wrapped in a dark film invisible to the naked eye; the blade sank about half a centimeter into the flesh, but could not be pushed any further, not even a half‑millimeter.

Two hundred and thirteen resentful souls emitted an uneasy restless sound.

The green light above the judgment platform began to flicker irregularly.

Su Ming's pupils contracted sharply.

What he first saw was the back of that gray‑blue uniform. The collar exposed an overly white nape, and the curvature of the spine pushed out a tiny ridge beneath the fabric.

He recognized the uniform.

Qiu Ce Yuan. Elementary Division.

Su Ming's brain spent 0.3 seconds processing the information, then crashed outright.

What...?

Lu Yu?

On the east side of the courtroom, Chen Shao's face, pressed in the mud, snapped upward. His still‑bleeding Demon Eye strained to focus, cutting through the roiling red mist, locking onto the kneeling figure.

Gray‑blue uniform. Black short hair. Slender shoulders.

A transfer student of Qiu Ce Yuan.

Chen Shao's mouth opened slightly. No sound came.

He had considered ten thousand possibilities: Federation secret forces, overseas mercenaries, Wei Gong's hidden trump card, even Sai Men.

Only one he hadn't considered—a teenager.

Above the judgment platform, Zhang Yuanqing's green flame flickered three times in his eye sockets.

His confusion lasted less than a second. S Ji's perception scanned the boy's entire body, a flood of data surging into his cerebral cortex.

Then he smiled.

"Oh?"

A hoarse voice fell from above his head.

"The court is adding a witness at the last minute? If not on the summons list, according to procedural justice, your action constitutes—"

He didn't finish the sentence.

Lu Yu stood up.

His movements were slow. One knee stayed on the ground, his left foot steadied first, then his torso unfolded segment by segment. From crouch to standing required only these simple motions, yet everyone in the courtroom who could still keep their eyes open felt a chill run down their spines in those seconds.

Because the aura had changed.

It had changed completely.

Lu Yu—

was gone.

Those standing here had no trace of youthful innocence in their eyes.

Deep within their pupils churned an extremely ancient thing—cold, violent, the kind of lofty contempt that appears when watching ants struggle in a puddle.

Su Ming had seen that gaze before.

In the depths of the Weird Domain. On the faces of those who had already lost their humanity. On—

On Sai Men.

Lu Yu didn't glance at anyone in the courtroom.

His gaze fixed solely on Zhang Yuanqing atop the judgment platform, a faint curve at the corner of his mouth. That curve wasn't a smile, but a confirmation.

Confirming the prey was within range.

Zhang Yuanqing's green flame flared violently. His instincts sounded an alarm. As a former forensic doctor, his sense of "death" was pathologically acute. Yet the aura emanating from the boy before him now was stronger than any threat he had ever encountered in his life—alive or dead.

It was not hostility.

"Who are you?" Zhang Yuanqing's tone finally changed. It was no longer the measured, unhurried courtroom pronouncement, but carried the tension of a blade being drawn.

Lu Yu gave no answer.

He lowered his head and glanced at his right hand, which was holding the bone saw.

Then his five fingers closed.

Not swift. It even had a somewhat careless flavor. Like a person casually crushing a paper cup.

Crack!

The sound wasn't loud. But throughout the entire courtroom, it was a hundred times clearer than all the roars, collisions, and explosions just now.

Because what shattered was the bone saw.

Zhun S Ji. The Karma of two hundred thirteen resentful souls condensed. Hundreds of human bones hinged together. A mineral blade studded with death‑sentence verdicts.

Was crushed by a hand.

Fragments slipped down through Lu Yu's fingertips, some bone shavings, some dark‑green crystal debris, and some law‑text remnants that hadn't dissipated—those characters struggled in midair, flickered twice, then went out.

The courtroom fell silent.

Deeper, more thorough than the earlier "Zhang Yuanqing alone decides" silence. The previous silence was fear. This silence is—

—All people's cognitive systems have overloaded.

Jiang Yuan knelt amid the broken bones, mouth agape, forgetting to close it.

He watched with his own eyes as his thirty‑seven Shadow Soldiers couldn't even leave a white mark on the bone‑armor surface. He watched Qin Zhixia's Ignorant Light Blade, offered in a lifespan‑burning sacrifice, bounce back unchanged by justified defense. He watched Chen Shao's psychic field get crushed by a single kick.

Then a school‑uniformed boy, with his bare hands, snapped the artifact that even met the S Ji threshold.

That… what those who just fought for their lives were, what does it mean?

Chen Shao's Demon Eye stopped rotating.

It didn't stop by itself; the brain's computational power allocated to the Demon Eye was all diverted to process the impossible scene before him. He lay in the mud, eyes wide open, the crack in his right eye still oozing blood, yet he felt no pain at all.

Only one thought swirled in his mind.

This kid—when he was at the Qiu Ce Yuan—when he risked his life protecting Chen Yao in the B-09 Weird Domain—

How many hidden cards did he have?

Qin Zhixia was embedded in the shattered rock pillar, the wreckage at the break of her left arm still sparking. Half of her eyes were smeared with blood, leaving only her right eye to see. Yet with just that one eye, she scanned Lu Yu from head to toe.

The bone‑saw fragments hadn't fully landed when the air above the judgment platform ignited.

Zhang Yuanqing's law bone armor began to tremble visibly. His lips pulled back, revealing two rows of teeth that glowed white within the dim green flames.

It was no longer the forensic‑style procedural smile of before.

It was offended.

Since he incarnated as "Adam", since he sentenced everyone to death in this courtroom—no being has ever dared to look at him with such a gaze.

He is a man who will become a god.

And the shaggy school‑uniformed kid standing below, the way he looked at him just now—like looking at a leaping clown.

A low, rumbling roar rolled from Zhang Yuanqing's throat.

It was no longer a human timbre. It was the resonant vibration of two hundred thirteen resentful souls emitted simultaneously, mixed with the crackle of law verses shattering, rebounding from every bone wall of the courtroom, stacking, amplifying, becoming a low‑frequency shockwave that shifted one's internal organs.

The crimson Karma on the courtroom floor surged outward from Zhang Yuanqing in an explosive burst.

The bone armor expanded.

Zhang Yuanqing's stature surged from 1.8 m to 2.3 m. The law bone armor extended from torso to limbs, new bone plates sprouted from flesh, edges tinged with blood and still‑steaming muscle fibers. Two curved bone horns grew on either side of his head, their surfaces etched with dense verdict texts.

The dim green flames in his eyes burned through the eye sockets, spreading along the bone horns to the crown, trailing two ghost‑fire‑like flame tails.

He slowly spread his arms.

The courtroom responded. All law characters on the bone walls simultaneously lit up crimson, the highest alert. The two hundred thirteen resentful souls were no longer background noise; they surged from floor fissures as tangible forms—semi‑transparent, twisted specters of workers whose lives were claimed by a mining disaster—crowding beneath Zhang Yuanqing's feet, spreading into a phosphorescent green sea of grievance.

The entire courtroom's temperature rose forty degrees in three seconds.

The air was thick with the smell of scorched ash, blood, and the sulfurous sting of burning mineral dust, a blend so intense it made one's alveoli ache.

Zhang Yuanqing looked down at the slender boy beneath him.

His voice was no longer human. Two hundred thirteen tracks overlapped, resonating at a frequency that could shatter glass on its own.

"Those who block the divine path—"

The courtroom's dome cracked again under the sound, bone fragments wrapped in crimson ash fluttering down.

Zhang Yuanqing's mouth split to his ears.

"Devour him alive and skin him!"

Two hundred thirteen resentful souls shouted in unison, piercing screams that tore eardrums, turning into a phosphorescent green torrent that rolled toward Lu Yu from all directions.

And Lu Yu simply stood there.

The hem of his school uniform was lifted by the gust, revealing a still‑healing scar on his waist.

He raised the hand that had just crushed the bone saw.

Its palm still clung to a few green crystal fragments.

He flicked the fragments away.

The motion was casual, like brushing dust off one's pants after recess exercises.

Then he looked up, gazing at the all‑covering sea of resentful souls.

His lips moved slightly.

No sound.

But Su Ming, who was closest, read two characters from the change in Lu Yu's lip shape.

"Come."