The black light was a blur of lethal precision. The moment the proposal left Zhang Xian’s lips, the beam transfixed him. His body didn’t just fall; it split down the center with a sharp, metallic crack.

BOOM!

Instead of a spray of blood, a shower of brass gears, enchanted springs, and jagged alloy shards rained onto the valley floor.

“A puppet?” The hooded assassin hissed, his voice a cocktail of disbelief and rising fury. Tricked again. When did the boy switch? How?

His Nascent Soul divine sense surged outward like a tidal wave, scouring every pebble and blade of grass. He searched for a heartbeat, a ripple in the spiritual essence, or the telltale heat of a living body. He found nothing. It was as if Zhang Xian had simply ceased to exist.

“Damnation!” the shadow snarled, his face twisting beneath his hood. “A high-level concealment art? Or a one-time escape talisman?”

His gaze snapped to the site of the explosion. A fist-sized sphere of dark gold hovered in the air, etched with runes so complex they seemed to writhe like living insects. It was a core unlike any he had seen in his centuries of cultivation.

Instinctively, the assassin fired a beam of white, corrosive essence at the orb. The light—capable of melting high-grade spirit steel—merely hissed against the gold surface. Sizzle. The orb shimmered, its runes glowing with a faint, mocking light.

“What?” The shadow’s frustration reached a boiling point. His life-essence corrosion was his trump card, yet it couldn’t leave a scratch on a mere puppet core?

Suddenly, the sphere flared. It gathered momentum in a heartbeat, streaking toward the sky like a falling star in reverse.

“Stay!” the shadow roared. He flicked his sleeve, launching a sapphire-blue spiritual net. The mesh expanded mid-air, intercepting the fleeing core with pinpoint accuracy.

The sphere thrashed like a trapped bird, pulsing with desperate energy as it slammed against the blue cords. It stirred ripples across the net’s surface, but the Nascent Soul’s binding was too strong. Finally, the orb’s glow dimmed, and it fell silent within its cage.

The assassin stared at the prize. A part of him burned to pull it close, to dissect the secrets of its construction. But he remembered Zhang Xian’s endless, “Whale”-tier bankroll of tricks. The boy is a cockroach, he thought. This is likely a booby-trap. One touch, and it detonates with the force of a mountain.

He kept the net floating at a safe distance, his focus shifting back to the center of the storm. Long Zhi’s silhouette was a jagged ghost amidst the falling bolts.

A poisonous mixture of humiliation and rage simmered in his chest. He was a third-level Nascent Soul grandmaster. He had orchestrated a perfect trap and even suborned a peer to distract the Emperor. And yet? Zhang Xian had vanished from under his very nose, and Long Zhi was effectively shielded by a localized apocalypse. It was a farce.

Unable to find his target, the shadow let out a stifled snort of disgust. His form blurred and bled into the air, vanishing into the gray fog.

Deep beneath the valley floor, Zhang Xian leaned against a cold, damp rock wall. He had pulled his aura into a tight, microscopic point. Three feet of solid earth sat between him and the boots of a killer.

During his earlier monologue, he had secretly signaled a burrowing puppet to carve out this bolt-hole. The machine was purely mechanical; as long as it didn’t use spiritual power, it was no more detectable than a common mole.

Zhang Xian had an Earth-Grade Concealment Talisman plastered to his chest, and he was currently circulating the [Returning Dust Submerging Abyss] technique. It was a Mystic-Grade skill he’d picked up from a system reward—not the most powerful, but a masterpiece of practicality. He’d mastered it specifically for these “slap-in-the-face” escapes.

When the second bolt of lightning had shattered the spatial prison, the shadow had been momentarily stunned by the backlash. In that split second, Zhang Xian had used a Wind-Step Talisman to swap places with a wooden decoy and dive into the hole. By the time the assassin realized he’d killed a doll, the trail was cold.

Now, Zhang Xian sat in the dark, not daring to breathe. He knew the shadow was still up there, lurking like a spider. The real fight would start the moment the lightning stopped.

He began to steady his racing heart, checking on his only remaining asset. Through the system’s proximity lock, a translucent screen flickered in his mind.

[Long Zhi, 93-point Daughter of Destiny. Current Favorability: 2.]

“Only two points?” Zhang Xian nearly choked. “I gave that ice block Earth-Grade medicine and a literal lightning sword, and she gives me two points? She’s a glacier.”

He felt a sudden, profound pity for the transmigrator who had spent a century chasing her. God rest his soul. Even the most devoted simp would give up on this one.

RUMBLE!

The cave ceiling groaned, showering him in dust. He could feel Long Zhi’s aura through the earth. The first four bolts had been child’s play for her; her mutated Thunder Root acted like a lightning rod, absorbing the brunt of the assault.

“As expected of a protagonist,” he muttered. “She’s probably got this.”

But then the fifth bolt struck. Long Zhi’s aura plummeted.

The sixth followed, then the seventh. Her presence in his mind began to flicker like a candle in a gale—weak, intermittent, and dangerously close to snuffed out.

“Crap! I jinxed it!”

He watched the Favorability screen like a heart monitor. As long as the number stayed there, she was alive. But as the eighth bolt thundered above, her aura vanished completely. The connection went dead.

“No, no, no…” Zhang Xian’s heart sank.

Just as he reached out to the system for a final confirmation of her death, a spark of resolute power ignited above. It didn’t just flicker; it surged upward with the ferocity of a rising dragon.

The pills. He realized with a grin. She had swallowed the Earth-Grade Spirit Recovery Pill. She was forcing her broken meridians to knit back together, gathering every scrap of her foundation for the finale. She wasn’t just preparing for the Heavens; she was preparing for the man in the mask.

K-RACK—!!!

A sound louder than the end of the world tore through the valley. The earth buckled, and the cave walls cracked. The final judgment—the Ninth Bolt—had arrived.