Chapter 468: Retracting Authority

--The tip of the Bone Spike has already reached three centimeters from Lu Yu's left neck side.

Storm fragments whirl at high speed around the two, cutting countless fine blood lines. On Zhang Yuanqing's remaining half‑face, the curve of his mouth has become an expression no human could make.

He can see.

In the phosphorescent green fire refracted from the Bone Spike's tip, the two dark red glows in the boy's pupils are rapidly contracting.

Lu Yu is dodging.

But it's too late.

The storm has twisted his limbs. Zhang Yuanqing's skeletal body, reduced to white bone, clamps his scapula with ten finger bones, two shinbones entwine his waist, and the whole skeleton, like a drowning person, locks the prey tightly.

The Bone Spike presses against Lu Yu's skin and pushes forward.

Two centimeters.

One centimeter.

Half a centimeter.

Zhang Yuanqing laughs out loud. The laugh is forced out of a throatless skeleton, shredded by the storm into broken gasps, sounding like a gambler who just won the final hand cashing in chips.

"I saw......"

In his Du Yan, the eerie green flame burns to the extreme, and deep within the pupil no longer reflects the boy's face but the gray, rain‑soaked sky beyond the courtroom dome, belonging to the mortal world.

"I see Judgment Day—".

The Bone Spike pushes forward the last half‑inch.

Then, it stops.

Heavy rain.

Seven kilometers away, in Jiang Hai City's Financial District, atop an unfinished skyscraper, the wind speed nears level twelve.

The rain falls horizontally.

Chu Che stands on the outermost steel beam, his leather shoes planted on the slick I‑beam surface without slipping. The wind lifts the hem of his Doctor's Lab Coat, rattling, and rain beads cover the lenses of his gold‑rimmed glasses, yet the eyes behind the lenses are dry, calm, even lazy.

His right hand is spread open.

In his palm floats a translucent virtual panel. Streams of dense data flicker across it, and at the center is the core interface of the Weird Editor.

Below the icon, a line of small text blinks.

【Sub Authority·Adam|Status: Overloaded Running|Karma Balance: 0.7%】

Chu Che watches the numbers, his mouth corner twitching.

It's not a smile.

It's a habitual expression after reviewing the last medical record and preparing to sign the discharge form.

"Well performed."

His voice is mostly swallowed by the storm, yet his diction remains clear. It sounds as if speaking to someone, yet also as self‑talk.

He lifts his left hand, his slender index finger and thumb gently pinching together.

"However, it's time for the scene to wrap."

Snap his fingers.

The sound is faint—so faint that the level‑twelve gale tears it into fragments, not reaching even a meter away.

But beneath the hillside villa half a kilometer away—

The whole world has changed.

Zhang Yuanqing's Bone Spike stops at 0.3 centimeters outside Lu Yu's carotid artery.

It isn't blocked.

It just can't be pushed further.

Like a full‑speed engine, at an unknowable instant, being…

All the forces—Karma flowing within the bone armor, resentful fragments swirling in the storm, dim green phosphorus flame burning deep in the eye sockets, the humming Rules resonance between the vertebral joints—

All the power—Karma flowing in the bone armor, resentful fragments swirling in the storm, the eerie green phosphor fire burning deep in the eye socket, the resonating rules humming between spinal vertebrae—

No omen. No transition. No gradient curve of power attenuation as expected.

There is no omen. No transition. No gradient curve of power decay as expected.

The previous second overflowed, the next second dried up.

Like a water‑filled balloon punctured at the bottom—water gone, leaving only a sagging rubber skin.

Zhang Yuanqing's Bone Spike still holds its thrusting posture, but the sensation at the tip tells him that the white bone, tempered by Karma to be sharper than a scalpel—now its hardness is no different from a chewed chicken bone.

In his Du Yan, the eerie green flame has extinguished.

No gradual dimming. No flicker. It went out directly.

Deep in the eye socket remains only a cloudy, blood‑veined ordinary eyeball belonging to a 39‑year‑old alcoholic middle‑aged man.

The eyeball trembles.

Zhang Yuanqing's mouth was open, but his vocal cords no longer layered resonance of two hundred and thirteen tracks. What squeezed out of his throat was the genuine voice of a middle‑aged man—hoarse, dry, with a throat seasoned by smoke and alcohol.

Zhang Yuanqing's mouth is open, but his vocal cords no longer overlay 213 audio tracks of resonance. What emerges from his throat is the genuine hoarse, dry, smoke‑and‑alcohol‑tinged voice of a middle‑aged man.

He wants to say something.

This blank is not a stagnation of thought; it is a forced crash caused by the cognitive system encountering information it cannot process.

This blank isn't a thought stall; it's a forced crash of the cognition system encountering information it cannot process.

The power is gone.

He can accept the depletion of power.

He can accept being defeated.

He can even accept death.

【61】 But what he cannot accept is—power is neither consumed nor shattered.

It was taken away.

Like a toy in a child's hand.

If I say give it to you, I give it; if I say take it, I take it, without even a greeting.

The being that bestowed him a divine throne, at the moment he was about to ascend, casually pressed the delete key.

Zhang Yuanqing's eyeballs rolled in their sockets, trying to comprehend this fact.

He couldn't understand.

It's like a carp that has already leapt the Dragon Gate, only to be slapped back into a mud pond while in the clouds; it doesn't even have time to wonder "why," because it never expected a person to be sitting atop the Dragon Gate.

How long was that period?

From the moment Zhang Yuanqing's power was drained to his consciousness forming the judgment "I'm done," how much time passed in between?

0.1 seconds.

Or 0.2 seconds.

So brief that everyone else in the courtroom—Su Ming, Jiang Yuan, Liang Wen, Chen Shao, Xu An—didn't notice anything happening.

The scene they saw was continuous: Zhang Yuanqing's Bone Spike approached Lu Yu's throat, the storm tightened to its limit, then the 2.3‑meter‑tall White Bone Giant suddenly deflated.

Bone armor collapsed. Muscles atrophied. The body visibly shrank back.

Su Ming lay behind the rubble, a single judgment flashing in his mind—

Power exhausted.

Zhang Yuanqing's Karma reserve finally burned dry.

The self‑detonating courtroom collapse combined with the ongoing consumption of the flesh‑storm, even the deepest coffers couldn't withstand this failing method.

Logical.

Completely logical.

No one thought anything was amiss.

But Lu Yu felt something was off.

No.

His brain didn't have time to "feel" anything. His body moved first.

Having lived too long on a doomsday battlefield in a previous life, his body had already encoded "seizing flaws" into the low‑level code of his spinal reflexes.

The enemy's power vanished.

Whether it was due to exhaustion, a mistake, or a meteor striking his forehead— the reason doesn't matter.

What matters is that the ten bone fingers coiled around him loosened.

They loosened just a little.

Perhaps even Zhang Yuanqing didn't notice.

But Lu Yu's body had already begun to accelerate.

His right shoulder dropped heavily, shedding the bone‑finger clamp that Zhang Yuanqing had relaxed by half a millimeter. He twisted his waist, breaking free of the two tibias that had bound his torso.

These two motions were completed within 0.5 seconds, so fast that even his own pain nerves hadn't had time to send the signal "the skin was scraped off by bone for three layers" back to his brain.

His right hand curled inward.

The five fingers pressed together, fingertips converging, the whole arm stretched into a straight line.

It's not a fist.

It's a spear.

The most primitive, most efficient piercing structure the human body can produce.

"No......"

A syllable squeezed out of Zhang Yuanqing's throat.

It wasn't a plea.

It was his brain finally processing the crash data, restoring consciousness from that blank, the first thought that surfaced turning into sound.

But the syllable hadn't fully left his lips yet.

Lu Yu's right hand had already pierced his thorax.

The entry point was two centimeters left of the sternum's center. That spot, which concentrated the remaining bone armor's thickest defense, now resembled nothing more than a flaky pastry.

Five fingers spread inside the chest cavity.

It touched.

A still‑beating heart.

Zhang Yuanqing's.

Not a divine heart. Not an S Ji Weird energy Core. Not a conceptual embodiment wrapped in Law‑bound Bone Armor.

Just an ordinary heart, belonging to a 39‑year‑old human male, slightly enlarged from chronic drinking.

It contracted twice more in Lu Yu's palm.

Thump. Thump.

Then Lu Yu clenched his fingers.

The sound was faint, even drowned by the lingering howl of the storm. Yet everyone saw—on the half‑face that remained of Zhang Yuanqing, his expression froze.

Not fear.

Not anger.

It was bewilderment.

A pure, innocent bewilderment that never figured out "what exactly happened" even unto death.

His Du Yan was still open, but the pupil was already dilating. His lips moved, as if still wanting to say something.

It wasn't said.

The body leaned backward.

The skeletal frame that had been wrapped around Lu Yu loosened, segment by segment falling off, like scaffolding whose screws had been removed. That body, which had once swelled to two meters three, covered with law bone armor and boasted itself as a god, rapidly shrank during its fall— the bone armor shattered and peeled away, exposing the withered, grayish flesh beneath; when it hit the ground, it had already shrunk back to the size of an ordinary middle‑aged man.

Wearing an old shirt washed to a gray hue. Hair silver‑white. Cheekbones protruding. His whole body exuded the smell of cheap alcohol.

A fist‑sized hole in the chest.

The courtroom is collapsing.

Having lost its master's support, the entire Zhun S Ji domain began to disintegrate from the conceptual level. The bony dome shattered into a flurry of snow‑like fragments, the blood‑red floor tiles turned to powder, and the wailing law characters faded and extinguished line by line.

A torrential rain poured in through the cracks of the shattered dome, drenching everyone.

Su Ming was the first to stand up.

His legs were weakening, but he still stood up. The rain washed away the bloodstains and bone dust from his face, revealing a death‑pale visage beneath and a pair of eyes with extremely dark pupils.

Those eyes stared fixedly at a silhouette several meters away.

Lu Yu still stood in place.

The school uniform had long been twisted by the storm into strips of cloth; the upper body was almost naked, shoulders and arms covered with cuts of varying depth. Rain mixed with blood ran down his fingertips, pooling into a small puddle of dark red water.

His right hand hung at his side.

The five fingers still held a pinching posture. Between the gaps, a viscous dark liquid, diluted by the rain, dripped down in strands.

The youth slowly turned around.

Su Ming saw his face clearly.

No particular expression. Not quite indifferent, nor quite relieved. Just the empty calm that follows after finishing a strenuous task.

Lu Yu's gaze swept from Su Ming's face to Chen Shao's side. The man with a slicked‑back hair half‑kneeling in the mud, his Demon Eye's crimson glow dimmed to near invisibility, was looking at him with an extremely complex expression.

Lu Yu's mouth moved slightly.

As if trying to say something.

It could have been "It's over." It could have been "Is the person okay?" Or perhaps he just wanted to swallow a mouthful of saliva to moisten his throat.

No one knows.

Because he didn't speak it.

Lu Yu's body swayed a bit.

His knee bent.

It wasn't a deliberate crouch. The muscles suddenly received a "I can't hold up" signal, and from thigh to calf to ankle, all weight‑bearing structures collectively gave out at the same instant.

In the youth's eyes, the two clusters of dark‑red ghostly light flickered wildly a few times, like a bulb with a bad signal.

Then his body began to tremble.

It wasn't from cold. It wasn't from pain.

It was a tremor seeping out from the bone seams, uncontrollable, with every muscle fiber contracting independently.

Like an engine forced into overclock for too long, after delivering its final output, all components began to fail simultaneously.