Beyond the Timescape

Chapter 101: Doomed

The sighs and lamentations of the Vajra Sect’s Old Ancestor were naturally invisible to Xu Qing.

At this moment, Xu Qing was expertly navigating the local Scavenger Camp, purchasing a ramshackle wooden hut to serve as his temporary forward operating base.

While the Scavenger Camp technically enforced strict residency requirements for outsiders, true power rendered all rules obsolete.

Once Xu Qing allowed the lethal, hyper-dense spiritual energy of a Qi Condensation third-layer cultivator to bleed into the air, the deed to the hut was secured without a single bureaucratic hurdle. Predictably, his display of purchasing power immediately drew the attention of two local, ill-intentioned scavengers.

Their severed heads were promptly and professionally mounted on spikes outside Xu Qing’s front door.

Just like that, the entire Scavenger Camp seamlessly accepted his presence. As the days bled into weeks, any initial suspicion evaporated. Xu Qing’s daily routine was indistinguishable from the local baseline.

Whether he was executing bounties, taking field missions, purchasing low-grade White Pills, or simply walking through the camp with the hyper-vigilant, paranoid gait of a man who expected an ambush at any second—every action perfectly aligned with the psychological profile of a veteran scavenger.

Gradually, he faded into the background noise of the camp. The wilderness was vast, and drifting scavengers seeking temporary shelter were a common anomaly.

Operating under this flawless cover, Xu Qing initiated daily, highly covert reconnaissance patrols of the Vajra Sect’s perimeter. During these patrols, he frequently observed Vajra Sect disciples descending the mountain to blow off steam and exploit the scavengers in the camp.

Their arrival was always met with suppressed rage from the locals, who were forced to swallow their pride and adopt sickeningly obsequious smiles.

Xu Qing recognized a few of the disciples.

They were the same grunts he had encountered during his arson and poison sabotage run months ago.

Despite their arrogant swagger as they paraded through the camp, Xu Qing’s cold, analytical gaze easily pierced their bravado. He could see the deep-seated terror and existential panic lurking behind their eyes.

As the weeks passed, Xu Qing’s intelligence net expanded. The Vajra Sect had recently relocated, meaning every logistical move they made was heavily scrutinized by the local scavenger networks.

Within half a month, Xu Qing had compiled a comprehensive tactical dossier on the Vajra Sect’s current operational status.

“Their total active personnel count has dropped below one hundred.”

“Four of their seven Elders have officially defected. Only three remain. Factoring in the Sect Leader, the Old Ancestor’s command structure is reduced to four high-level assets.”

“They have formally submitted as a vassal state to the Departed Path Sect and currently operate under their political umbrella…”

Sitting cross-legged in his dark hut, Xu Qing methodically analyzed the intelligence. He possessed absolute patience. He was hunting a Foundation Establishment elite. Even though his internal combat algorithms calculated a high probability of victory, he had never actually engaged one in a deathmatch.

His paranoia remained absolute. Despite the favorable intelligence, he didn’t launch a preemptive strike. He simply continued to wait.

Another half month passed. Then, while eavesdropping on a pair of descending Vajra Sect disciples, Xu Qing intercepted a highly classified operational detail that caused a lethal glint to flash in his eyes.

“The Old Ancestor is becoming completely paranoid… Every time he brings a guest up the mountain, he forces us to run these endless patrols through the Scavenger Camps, deliberately leaking operational intel just to bait a trap. What’s the point?”

“I know, right? It’s been half a year, and that kid hasn’t shown his face once. And it’s getting ridiculous—the Old Ancestor invites a ‘friend’ up, the guy leaves, and three days later he’s dragging another one up here. Our disinformation patrols are way too frequent. It looks desperate.”

“What are we supposed to do? It’s a direct order from the Old Ancestor. You want to tell him no?”

Xu Qing had been ghosting the two disciples through the darkness. Hearing this exchange just as they breached the mountain path, his expression remained perfectly blank. He melted back into the shadows and returned to the camp.

Over the next few days, his internal threat assessment spiked. His reconnaissance patrols became exponentially more meticulous.

Exactly one and a half months after establishing his forward base, the tactical window finally opened.

At dusk, while maintaining a deep-cover observation post near the Vajra Sect, Xu Qing tracked a brilliant rainbow arc tearing through the sky, launching from the mountain peak and rapidly accelerating away toward the horizon.

Faintly, he could sense a localized energy signature on the peak—an escort seeing the guest off.

Xu Qing’s eyes narrowed, masking the sudden, violent surge of killing intent within them. He immediately broke cover, returned to his hut, and began a systematic, final inventory of his weapons, poison reserves, and talismans.

He stared out the small window at the darkening sky, and waited.

Simultaneously, outside the main hall on the Vajra Sect’s peak, the Old Ancestor watched the fading rainbow of his departing Fellow Daoist. He let out a long, exhausted sigh. Political protocol dictated he couldn’t hold guests hostage indefinitely. Turning back toward the grand hall, his mind was already frantically calculating the logistics of securing his next temporary bodyguard.

“The timeline is closing. The Pill’s structural integrity is stabilizing. Once it finishes rendering, I consume it, violently hammer open my thirtieth Dharma Aperture, and ignite my first Life Flame. The moment I unlock the Mystic Brilliance State… I will finally be able to breathe.”

Muttering his desperate calculations, the Old Ancestor stepped into the hall and vanished into the shadows.

Outside, the last light of dusk bled out of the sky. The temperature plummeted. A bitter, howling wind ripped across the Red Plain, tearing through the Scavenger Camp with escalating violence.

The dirt streets were frozen solid, preventing the wind from kicking up dust storms. Instead, it weaponized the loose debris, sending trash tumbling through the alleys with a harsh, scraping clatter. The freezing wind brutally lashed the emaciated children huddled against the camp walls.

It felt less like weather and more like an invisible volley of razors, intent on culling the weak from the herd.

Soon, the snow began to fall. Fat, heavy flakes drifted down from the black sky, rapidly carpeting the Red Plain in absolute white.

It was a catastrophic blizzard.

The snow quickly compounded, burying the frozen ground. For the scavengers who couldn’t afford shelter and were forced to sleep in the alleys, the sudden drop in temperature was a death sentence. They shivered violently, their eyes dull and clouded with the absolute, numb certainty of impending death.

This winter was anomalously brutal. The casualty rate was going to be horrific.

Stepping out into the howling blizzard, Xu Qing locked the door of his wooden hut.

He looked up at the churning black sky, feeling the absolute, freezing apathy of the world against his skin. He pulled his collar tight against the wind. His cold gaze swept over the freezing children huddled in the alleys. He remained completely silent for a long moment, then began to walk forward.

He didn’t close his front door.

Inside the hut, the residual thermal output of the dying bonfire clashed with the freezing ambient air, sending thick, white plumes of steam rolling out into the alley. The sudden burst of warmth drew the immediate, desperate attention of the freezing children. For a fraction of a second, the dead, hollow look in their eyes was replaced by a frantic, burning hope.

Xu Qing didn’t look back. He accelerated, his silhouette blurring into the driving snow. As he pushed his speed to the absolute limit, he seemed to phase out of reality, becoming a localized phantom riding the storm straight toward the Vajra Sect’s mountain gate.

Deep within his core, his Qi and blood were a roaring inferno. The Sea Transformation Scripture was pushed to maximum operational capacity. A brilliant, terrifying purple light bled from his pores, surging upward to violently coalesce above his head.

The massive, spectral projection of a heavenly blade was rapidly synthesizing in the air above him.

As he closed in on the final approach vector, Xu Qing looked up at the Vajra Sect through the driving snow.

The localized blizzard violently refracted the moonlight. Instead of casting normal, dappled shadows, the snow acted as a massive, fractured lens, violently concentrating and redirecting the lunar light directly onto the Sect’s infrastructure, rendering the target coordinates in absolute, high-definition clarity.

The illuminated Sect reflected in Xu Qing’s eyes. His gaze turned into a physical manifestation of pure, absolute slaughter.

In the next microsecond, Xu Qing violently launched himself into the sky!

The high-grade flight talisman strapped to his leg detonated with blinding light. His body became a hyper-cavitating streak of kinetic energy, punching a hole straight through the blizzard as he shot toward the mountaintop hall at supersonic speed.

He breached the airspace directly above the grand hall in a fraction of a second.

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t issue a challenge. He raised his right arm and executed a devastating, downward cleave directly into the roof of the temple.

The moment his arm swung down, the sky behind him detonated.

The colossal, spectral projection of the heavenly blade violently tore its way into reality, dominating the firmament. The apocalyptic blizzard slamming into the blade couldn’t even cause the projection to flicker. Radiating an overwhelming, suffocating purple light, the heavenly blade mirrored Xu Qing’s physical strike, shrieking through the atmosphere and plunging directly into the main hall.

From a distance, the projection was easily hundreds of feet long. It was a weapon of mass destruction. As it plummeted, the sheer kinetic pressure it generated threatened to physically bifurcate the entire mountain.

The impact was instantaneous.

A world-ending explosion shattered the night. The entire mountain violently shuddered. The grand hall’s structural integrity was instantly compromised. The roof caved in, and the entire building violently split down the center, cleaved perfectly in two.

Through the massive, smoking chasm dividing the hall, Xu Qing spotted his target.

The Vajra Sect’s Old Ancestor was frantically backpedaling, his face contorted in absolute shock as he desperately tried to disperse the residual kinetic shockwave of the strike.

The Old Ancestor looked up, his eyes locking onto Xu Qing hovering in the sky above. But before the old man could utter a single syllable, Xu Qing brought his arm down for a second strike!

Having breached the absolute limits of Qi Condensation, Xu Qing’s mastery over the temple-derived blade art had evolved exponentially. He could now seamlessly chain multiple projections.

Because he had spent the entire approach vector charging his core, there was zero cooldown.

Instantly, a second, equally massive heavenly blade materialized behind him and plummeted toward the reeling Old Ancestor.

The second detonation was cataclysmic.

The purple blade crashed down. The Old Ancestor let out a guttural, desperate roar, throwing all his Foundation Establishment power into a desperate block.

BOOM!

The remains of the grand hall were instantly vaporized into a cloud of splinters and dust.

The Old Ancestor screamed in agony. The sheer, compounding kinetic trauma of absorbing two consecutive orbital strikes violently destabilized his internal Qi and blood. He was violently blasted backward, skidding over three hundred feet across the ruined courtyard. He desperately threw his arms out, violently manifesting the spectral projection of a towering, multi-armed, wrathful Vajra behind him to anchor his stance and stabilize his aura.

His pristine hair was a chaotic, tangled mess. A thick line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

The first two strikes had completely bypassed his Foundation Establishment defenses and triggered a massive, primal threat response.

“Fellow Daoist! What is the meaning of—” The Old Ancestor screamed, his mind frantically trying to process the impossible combat output of the assailant. He was desperately trying to buy time to verify his terrifying hypothesis.

He never finished the sentence.

His face violently contorted in absolute horror. He abandoned his defensive stance and threw his entire body weight into a desperate, maximum-velocity backward leap.

He was a fraction of a second too slow.

Unnoticed by anyone, perfectly camouflaged against the dark cobblestones and the driving snow, Xu Qing’s shadow had been rapidly advancing across the courtyard during the bombardment. The moment the Old Ancestor paused to speak, the shadow violently launched itself onto the old man’s body, its two-dimensional mass rapidly expanding to constrict him.

The Old Ancestor’s reaction speed was terrifying. He violently twisted his torso to evade the full wrap, but the shadow managed to graze his left arm.

Instantly, a hyper-dense, highly corrosive wave of Mutagen flooded the limb, turning the flesh a sickly, necrotic blue-black. Absolute, paralyzing horror gripped the old man’s heart.

High above, Xu Qing stared down at him with eyes devoid of all humanity. He didn’t say a word. He simply raised his arm and unleashed the third, fully charged heavenly blade.

The sky ignited in a blinding purple flash. The colossal blade cleaved through the blizzard, slicing the very air apart as it plummeted toward the reeling Old Ancestor.

BOOM!

The towering Vajra phantom behind the Old Ancestor unleashed a deafening roar, raising its spectral arms in a desperate attempt to block the strike.

The impact was absolute. The Vajra’s arms violently shattered.

The Old Ancestor violently vomited a mouthful of blood, his physical body blasted backward once again by the sheer kinetic transfer.

But he was a true Foundation Establishment elite. Even though his foundation was built on inferior, backwater scriptures, the qualitative gap between Qi Condensation and Foundation Establishment was absolute.

Despite absorbing three direct orbital strikes and surviving a point-blank assassination attempt by an anomalous shadow entity, he was only moderately injured.

Skidding to a halt, he violently snapped his head up, his eyes entirely bloodshot, and glared at the hovering figure in the sky. He ground his teeth together, his voice dripping with absolute venom.

“It’s you… you’re that little rat!”

Simultaneously, the surviving disciples of the Vajra Sect poured out of the surrounding barracks in a state of absolute, screaming panic. The Sect Leader and the remaining Elders rushed into the courtyard, their faces draining of all color as they looked up at the sky.

Hovering amidst the driving blizzard, bathed in the fractured moonlight, Xu Qing looked down at them. His long hair whipped wildly in the wind. The ragged, bloodstained scavenger gear only amplified the absolute, suffocating Killing Intent radiating from his core.

He looked exactly like a Reaper from the underworld, descended to enforce the absolute edict of death.