Beyond the Timescape

Chapter 42: The White-Clothed Faceless Woman

Xu Qing witnessed this scene the moment he stepped into the forbidden zone. His pupils constricted as a suffocating sense of lethal crisis exploded in his mind. Every fiber of his being trembled uncontrollably.

The source of this terror was the tall, red-robed old man rapidly closing the distance from the horizon.

*Foundation Establishment!*

The name of this cultivation realm flashed through Xu Qing’s mind.

The sheer magnitude of this Pressure was staggering. Even from afar, its weight bore down on him like a physical blow.

The newcomer’s identity was self-evident.

The Vajra Sect Patriarch.

The massive phantom looming behind the old man—a wrathful Vajra radiating the majesty of a heavenly soldier—made Xu Qing’s eyes sting just by looking at it.

It evoked the same helplessness he had felt back in the slums when he first laid eyes on Qi Condensation Rogue Cultivators.

The sensation was identical, but magnified a thousandfold.

A single glance was enough to lock him in the Patriarch’s sights. Even if he closed his eyes, the towering figure would burn itself into his mind.

This mental image seemed to sear his consciousness, causing a dull ache in his head.

In a sense, this was already a form of spiritual injury.

However, Xu Qing was no stranger to this feeling, having repeatedly controlled his shadow. Moreover, his recent progress in mimicking the divine statue’s single slash had tempered and strengthened his spirit. So, despite the headache, it did not hinder his movement. He pushed himself to run even faster.

As he sprinted through the forbidden zone, he raised his right hand and pulled out a handful of Black Pills, tossing them behind him one after another.

Upon hitting the ground, the Black Pills exploded. The seven-leaf herb juice coating their surface evaporated, and the released black medicinal dust rapidly spread in all directions, forming a vortex that drew the surrounding Mutagen toward it.

From a distance, with over ten Black Pills thrown by Xu Qing, the Mutagen gathered so densely it resembled a tidal wave, surging from all directions.

The thick-browed middle-aged man, who had been about to chase into the forbidden zone, halted abruptly, his expression shifting. He dared not get too close for the moment.

These Black Pills were the failed products from Xu Qing’s attempts to refine White Pills. At the time, he felt it was a waste to discard them, as they weren’t entirely useless. Keeping them had proven timely.

As Mutagen surged from the surroundings, the area behind Xu Qing became astonishingly saturated with it. His figure, enveloped in the ever-gathering Mutagen, raced forward at full speed.

Not long after, a thunderous roar echoed as the rainbow light from the horizon reached the edge of the forbidden zone. The Vajra Sect Patriarch within it, his eyes flashing with killing intent, did not pause for even a moment. With a boom, he charged straight in.

The two Vajra Sect Elders behind him gritted their teeth and followed.

Thus, the three figures plunged into the dense Mutagen. Though they quickly emerged, they were met with more Mutagen, this time mixed with copious amounts of poisonous fog.

“Patriarch, this kid is treacherous!” the middle-aged cultivator with a mangled left foot hurriedly warned.

The Vajra Sect Patriarch snorted coldly and blew out a breath. A storm formed, rumbling outward in all directions, instantly dispersing the surrounding fog.

Without slowing in the slightest, he grabbed the two Elders and shot forward, accelerating in pursuit of Xu Qing’s direction.

However, dusk had already passed, and night was rapidly descending. The chill in the air intensified, and the Mutagen permeating the area grew even thicker.

If they continued flying here, the Vajra Sect Patriarch himself would be fine, but the thick-browed Elder, already injured, would inevitably suffer if this went on.

Thus, the Vajra Sect Patriarch spoke coldly.

“You two follow from behind. I’ll go capture this brat first!” As he spoke, he circulated his cultivation. The Vajra behind him roared at the sky, its body rapidly swelling to over thirty zhang in height. Like a giant, it took massive strides forward, each step covering dozens of zhang—equal to its own height. The Vajra Sect Patriarch stood atop the giant Vajra’s head.

From a distance, without sufficient spiritual perception, one couldn’t see the Vajra phantom. All that was visible was the Vajra Sect Patriarch standing as if floating in mid-air, moving farther and farther away.

“The Patriarch is mighty!”

The two Elders behind him were thrilled. They were certain that with the Patriarch personally taking action, the brat was as good as dead.

“I believe the Patriarch will soon return with that little bastard’s corpse.”

They were confident.

But as time slowly passed, after one hour, the expressions of the two Vajra Sect Elders shifted. As they hurried forward, they exchanged glances, seeing doubt and surprise in each other’s eyes.

At the limit of their vision ahead, the Patriarch’s figure had long vanished, clearly having chased extremely far.

Yet, they couldn’t understand how a mere Body Refining Qi Condensation cultivator could possess such speed and capability that the Patriarch still hadn’t resolved the matter.

They were puzzled, and the Vajra Sect Patriarch was even more so.

Now, far from the two Elders, the Vajra Sect Patriarch wore an ugly expression as he watched a young figure in the distance madly dashing away at an astonishing speed.

The boy’s speed, while still lagging behind his own, wasn’t by much.

And whenever he threw a punch, the resulting giant fist shadow, combined with the Vajra’s fist below, would shoot across the distance. Xu Qing’s body would then glow with a protective barrier to counter it.

Amid the explosions, the protective barrier would shake and crack, but the boy inside would use the force to accelerate even faster.

Meanwhile, with nightfall, the already dense Mutagen continuously gathered along the path Xu Qing took, making the surroundings even colder.

All of this made the Vajra Sect Patriarch wary, forcing him to detour at times. This inevitably hampered his speed, requiring more time to catch up.

“Damn it!” The Vajra Sect Patriarch’s face darkened. In the distance, Xu Qing’s face was pale, his eyes bloodshot, and the veins on his forehead bulged as if about to burst.

His left hand was clenched tightly, blood vessels protruding in a horrifying manner.

In his palm was a scorpion tail.

After the battle with the Fire Crow, he still had remnants of the scorpion tail. Now, even The skeletal remnants of the scorpion tail, salvaged from his brutal clash with the Fire Crow, remained lodged deep within his palm. But even as the stinger buried itself fully into his shredded flesh, the guttering toxins within were too depleted to fuel a sustained overdraw of his latent potential.

The poison could no longer ignite his blood; it could only grant him a fleeting, jagged burst of speed.

Clutched in his right hand was a tattered, nearly unrecognizable talisman—a grim trophy wrested from the corpse of Captain Lei’s sworn enemy.

But now the talisman was nearly dissipated, and Xu Qing clearly knew that the scorpion tail toxin’s boost was rapidly weakening, about to lose effect.

Fortunately, at such speed, he had already glimpsed the familiar ruined city in the distance.

Getting closer and closer.

Finally, just as the scorpion tail boost faded, Xu Qing’s speed slowed. But he gritted his teeth and, with a desperate leap, under the eerie moonlight of the night sky, his figure instantly vaulted onto the city wall.

This place… was Xu Qing’s intended destination.

He couldn’t confront the Vajra Sect Patriarch and the two Elders behind him. So, Xu Qing’s plan required the right timing, terrain, and circumstances!

The timing was the Mutagen of the forbidden zone.

The terrain was the familiar city.

The circumstances were the eerie entities within the city and the mutated beasts in the city lord’s mansion.

By leveraging these, he believed he had a chance to escape.

The moment he landed, as his speed slightly decreased, a piercing whistle came from behind. A giant fist shadow materialized out of thin air, traversing the distance to appear behind him, aiming a fierce punch from afar.

Boom!

The talisman’s protective barrier shattered instantly.

Xu Qing spat out blood. His internal organs trembled, some even cracking, leaving him severely wounded.

The intense pain blurred his vision, but he still gritted his teeth and charged forward into the city, frantically navigating the familiar streets.

After a few leaps, his figure vanished within the city.

Not long after, a whistling sound approached outside the city. The red-robed Vajra Sect Patriarch arrived abruptly.

His expression icy, he rotated his right wrist.

That earlier punch was the maximum range he could strike. Although the talisman treasure had blocked it, preventing him from completely obliterating the enemy, he was confident that a Qi Condensation cultivator, enduring the residual force of his punch after the talisman’s collapse, would be either dead or gravely injured.

So, he flickered and entered the city. But the moment the Vajra Sect Patriarch stepped into the ruined city, his expression suddenly changed. He heard crying.

A chilling aura spread from the street where Xu Qing had disappeared.

In the darkness, under the eerie moonlight, amidst the cold, a female figure slowly walked into view from the distant street.

From afar, she appeared small, but as she advanced, she grew larger and larger, eventually surpassing the height of the surrounding buildings without slowing, reaching over ten zhang tall.

She was clad in a trailing white dress, a cascade of impossibly long, ink-black hair spilling down her shoulders. But beneath that hair… her visage was a smooth, horrifyingly blank canvas. Utterly devoid of features.

Instead, the true nightmare writhed upon her garments. Countless human faces protruded from the white fabric, stretching the material from the inside as they wept in perpetual agony.

The chorus of their despair bled together, twisting into a soul-rending, blood-curdling wail that swept across the desolate ruins. Driven by some macabre instinct, the faceless woman in white began a slow, unnatural stride directly toward the spot where the Vajra Sect Patriarch stood.

With every languid step she took, the suffocating cacophony of weeping swelled, drowning the dead city in an ocean of despair.

The sight violently seized the breath from the Vajra Sect Patriarch’s lungs. Even a powerhouse of his caliber felt a primal tremor rattle his heart. He recognized this anomaly, and that very knowledge bred a suffocating, profound dread within his marrow.

Without a fraction of hesitation, he aborted his trajectory, violently shifting his momentum to steer well clear of the anomaly.

Yet, the thirst for Xu Qing’s blood still burned in his veins. He refused to abandon the ruined city, opting instead to infiltrate through a different quadrant.

That little rat is only in the Qi Condensation realm. The odds of him surviving a cataclysm of this scale are astronomically low. Even so, the Patriarch’s eyes narrowed into slits of venomous killing intent. But until I see his rotting corpse with my own eyes, I will not know peace.

Decades of cutthroat experience screamed that his initial instincts were flawless. A monster like that boy… if a blood feud wasn’t resolved today, letting him live meant digging his own grave. Given time, that teenager would inevitably return to swat him out of existence like a common fly.

Thus, slipping into the city’s labyrinth from a new angle, the Vajra Sect Patriarch initiated a meticulous, predatory sweep. He would have the boy—alive and kneeling, or as a mangled corpse!

While the Patriarch prowled the ruins, Xu Qing had already melted back into the shadows of his previous subterranean cave. He collapsed into a cross-legged posture, his chest heaving violently like a broken bellows until he leaned forward and vomited several mouthfuls of clotted, black blood. Only after expelling the necrotic stagnation did a faint trace of color seep back into his deathly pale face.

Wiping the crimson smear from his chin, Xu Qing peered through a jagged fissure into the desolate ruins above, his gaze dark and glacial. After a suffocating silence, he ground his teeth together and plunged into deep meditation, forcibly circulating the Sea Mountain Technique through his battered meridians.

The harrowing escape and the absolute visceral overexertion of his physical limits had acted as a brutal crucible. Now, as the raging energies settled, his cultivation base—long hovering at the precipice—finally fractured the bottleneck.

The seventh layer of the Sea Mountain Technique! Without a shred of hesitation, Xu Qing seized the momentum and drove his cultivation toward the breakthrough.

Mastering the sixth layer had already birthed the phantom of a fledgling Kui beast within him. Drawing upon that primal manifestation, he had managed to butcher an eighth-level Qi Condensation expert like the Camp Master by burning his full strength. An opponent at the ninth level would still be a grim challenge, however.

This realization only fueled the burning anticipation in his chest. What terrifying martial supremacy would the seventh layer unlock?

The Sea Mountain Technique is unnaturally potent in my hands… It must be the Purple Crystal. It’s aggressively mutating my foundation! Xu Qing had suspected this truth for some time.

Drawing a ragged, steadying breath, he swallowed the searing agony radiating from his chest, sealed his eyes shut, and sank completely into the void of cultivation.