Beyond the Timescape

Chapter 44: Cause and Effect

As the middle-aged cultivator’s death rattle faded into a grotesque, gurgling scream, the Vajra Sect Patriarch—currently scouring the ruined city for Xu Qing—snapped his head up.

Foundation Establishment cultivators possessed horrifyingly acute senses. The moment the distant shriek registered, the Patriarch’s expression darkened. He launched himself into the sky, stepping onto the empty air and hurtling toward the source of the commotion.

He paid the roaming Mutant Beasts no mind. He was a Foundation Establishment powerhouse; unless he stumbled into a true Anomaly or a monolithic horde, he was untouchable. Even the dense, corrupting Mutagen clinging to the ruins was a minor nuisance. With his cultivation base, he could endure the forbidden zone’s ambient toxicity for up to a month without serious consequence.

Locking onto the direction of the scream, the Patriarch drew a deep breath and funneled his cultivation into his vocal cords. His roar echoed across the dead city like thunder:

“Pin the brat down! I am coming!”

His speed exploded. From a distance, he resembled a dark meteor carving a jagged path through the night sky.

Simultaneously, at the site of the massacre, the surviving Vajra Sect Elder made his choice. The moment Xu Qing turned his cold, dead eyes toward him, the Elder retreated without a shred of hesitation.

He heard the Patriarch’s roar, but loyalty ended where pointless suicide began.

He would gladly accept the Patriarch’s punishment later. The sheer density of Xu Qing’s murderous aura, the surgical brutality of his strikes, and the absolute lack of human hesitation in his eyes terrified the Elder. He wasn’t going to risk his neck.

He slapped a flight talisman onto his chest. In the blink of an eye, he rocketed backward, clearing hundreds of feet in a single breath.

Xu Qing narrowed his eyes. He heard the Patriarch’s distant, booming command, but it didn’t slow him down. He lunged forward, snatching his iron spike from a corpse. He reached for his own flight talisman to give chase—

Then, he froze.

The color drained from his face. His breath caught in his throat. Without a second of hesitation, Xu Qing aborted the pursuit, violently reversing his momentum to sprint in the exact opposite direction.

High in the air, the fleeing Vajra Sect Elder suddenly felt the temperature plummet. An unnatural, bone-deep chill washed over him.

He turned his head.

A colossal figure had manifested beside him in the sky.

It had no face. Where features should have been, there was only a curtain of long, wildly thrashing black hair. Beneath the blank visage was a towering, grotesque body draped in a flowing white skirt.

The White-skirted Faceless Woman.

Suddenly, the fabric of her white dress writhed. Hundreds—thousands—of human faces pressed outward against the cloth, stretching the fabric as they opened their mouths in unison. A chorus of miserable, soul-shattering weeping erupted, flooding the ruins with an infinite, crushing eeriness. High above, the moon bled out, turning the color of oxidized iron.

Next to the towering Anomaly, the hovering Vajra Sect Elder looked like an insect.

Under the weight of thousands of weeping faces staring directly at him, the Elder’s body seized. He began to tremble violently. His facial muscles contorted, snapping against his will, and tears began to stream down his cheeks. He began to weep.

But behind the tears, his eyes were wide with pure, undiluted terror. His body was betraying him.

His cries harmonized with the wailing chorus of the skirt. The moment his voice perfectly matched their pitch, thick strands of white mist violently erupted from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, plunging directly into the Faceless Woman’s body.

In a fraction of a second, the Elder was reduced to a desiccated, mummified husk. Devoid of life, the corpse plummeted from the sky and shattered against the cobblestones below.

On the white fabric of the skirt, a new face pushed its way to the surface. It was the Vajra Sect Elder. His expression was dead and blank, but his mouth hung open, adding his voice to the eternal, weeping choir.

Xu Qing saw it. The arriving Patriarch saw it. Both men shuddered.

Xu Qing swallowed the terror clawing at his throat, forcing his legs to pump faster, sprinting deeper into the ruined city.

The Patriarch, however, slammed to a halt mid-air. His scalp prickled with primal dread. He didn’t dare move a muscle.

The White-skirted Faceless Woman was walking toward him.

The Patriarch knew the rules of the forbidden zone. When facing an Anomaly of this magnitude, sudden movement was a death sentence. He hung in the air, his heart hammering wildly against his ribs, paralyzed by fear.

The colossal woman drifted past him, her weeping chorus slowly fading into the distance.

Only when she was completely out of sight did the Patriarch exhale a shaky breath. But beneath his terror, a knot of confusion formed.

This is the second time I’ve encountered this thing… he thought, his eyes narrowing. Why do I get the feeling it’s actively running interference for that little bastard?

“Bizarre,” he muttered through gritted teeth. He looked toward the quadrant where Xu Qing had vanished. The kid was a walking anomaly himself; he had to be exterminated immediately. The Patriarch reignited his cultivation and shot forward in pursuit.

Night in the ruined city was a symphony of horrors. The darkness was alive with guttural roars, wet chewing sounds, and hollow laughter. Under the crimson moonlight, the shattered architecture cast shadows that looked like crouching demons.

Xu Qing sprinted through the nightmare. He was accustomed to the ambient horror of the ruins, but his skin still crawled. He could feel the weight of unseen, malicious eyes tracking his every move. The stares manifested as a physical chill, seeping through his clothes and biting into his flesh.

As the cold intensified, Xu Qing passed a familiar landmark—the collapsed wall where he had hunted the mutant vulture days ago.

He glanced at an abandoned, half-sunken carriage in the mud. His pupils shrank to pinpricks.

The blood-soaked cloth doll that always hung from the carriage shaft had moved.

It was no longer hanging. It was sitting upright on the driver’s bench, its back facing him.

Xu Qing didn’t break stride. He pushed his legs harder, fleeing the area.

Moments later, the Vajra Sect Patriarch arrived at the same intersection. He scanned the ruins warily and spotted the carriage.

The blood-red doll was sitting on the bench. But now, it was facing forward.

Its stitched, mismatched eyes glowed with a dull, sickly light. It was dripping wet, radiating a palpable aura of malice as it stared directly at the Patriarch.

The Patriarch’s pupils contracted. The hair on his arms stood up. He immediately slowed his pace, carefully and quietly backing away from the carriage step by step until he crossed the invisible boundary of its territory. Only then did he exhale and resume his pursuit.

He was done playing games. He realized the boy was uniquely dangerous and possessed an unnatural method of detonating the ambient Mutagen. The Patriarch decided to stop closing the distance. Instead, he would use his superior Foundation Establishment senses to track the boy from afar, waiting for the safety of dawn before moving in for the kill.

It was an embarrassing strategy—a Foundation Establishment master tiptoeing around a mere Qi Condensation rat—but in the forbidden zone, pride was the fastest way to get killed. Paranoia was survival.

Ahead, Xu Qing sensed the shift in tactics.

He had already calculated his counter-ambush. He had primed his shadow manipulation, and his palm was slick with sweat around a Black Pill. He was just waiting for the Patriarch to close the gap.

He knew his traps wouldn’t kill a Foundation Establishment cultivator. But they would severely maim the man and trap him long enough for Xu Qing to escape. Xu Qing would take heavy damage in the exchange, but fleeing while genuinely critically injured would sell the deception, making his ultimate trap much more believable.

But the Patriarch wasn’t taking the bait. He was hanging back, matching Xu Qing’s pace with infuriating caution.

Fine, Xu Qing thought. The plan doesn’t change.

He accelerated, altering his trajectory to head directly for the center of the ruins: the City Lord’s Mansion.

As he drew closer, the environment shifted. The Mutagen in the air grew thick and viscous, but strangely, the howling packs of Mutant Beasts were nowhere to be seen. The area was dead quiet.

Trailing behind, the Patriarch noticed the sudden absence of wildlife. A primal alarm blared in his mind.

He looked at Xu Qing’s shrinking back, then at the looming silhouette of the City Lord’s Mansion in the distance. He stopped dead in his tracks.

He wasn’t just pausing. He was actively retreating.

Xu Qing hadn’t anticipated this level of cowardice. He was still three hundred feet from the mansion, and the Patriarch was already bailing.

“Too late to back out now,” Xu Qing hissed.

He whipped his arm in a wide arc, hurling a massive handful of Black Pills into the air.

To guarantee the bait was taken, Xu Qing had thrown half of his entire remaining stockpile. The pills scattered across the cobblestones and detonated simultaneously.

BOOM.

The explosion didn’t produce fire; it produced a localized singularity. A massive vortex of concentrated Mutagen ripped through the street. The air warped and screamed as toxic energy flooded the zone, turning the atmosphere into a blurred, hallucinogenic nightmare.

The Mutagen concentration spiked to apocalyptic levels.

Watching from afar, the Patriarch was baffled. What is he doing? Xu Qing was standing dead center in the toxic cloud. Even if the boy didn’t instantly mutate into a monster, the sheer density of the beacon he had just created would draw every Anomaly in the city right to him. It was spectacular suicide.

As the Patriarch tried to parse the logic, the earth beneath his feet violently heaved.

A world-ending roar erupted from the City Lord’s Mansion, three hundred feet away. The sheer acoustic force of it shattered the surrounding ruins into dust.

The ground shuddered. The blood moon above wavered like a reflection in disturbed water.

The Patriarch’s face drained of color. Pure, unadulterated panic seized him. He scrambled backward, his eyes locked in horror on the mansion.

Flocks of emaciated, humanoid creatures with black, flaming wings were exploding out of the mansion’s roof like bats from a cave. They radiated horrific levels of Mutagen, their mere presence warping the air around them.

But they weren’t the main event.

With a deafening crack of tectonic plates shifting, the City Lord’s Mansion completely collapsed, swallowed by a massive sinkhole.

From the depths of the abyss, a withered, mummified monstrosity began to pull itself out.

It was over a hundred feet tall, resembling a dead, petrified tree given humanoid form. And what was currently exposed was only its upper half.

The titan swung its massive arms. From the tips of its ten fingers, hundreds of rotting, fleshy vines shot outward like harpoons, slamming into the earth to anchor its weight.

Several of those vines speared into the cobblestones just yards ahead of the retreating Patriarch.

Using the vines for leverage, the colossal horror began to haul the rest of its bulk out of the pit.

“What the fuck is that thing?!” the Patriarch screamed, his composure completely shattering. He burned every ounce of his cultivation, flying backward in a blind panic.

But the nightmare was just beginning.

The flock of flaming, winged humanoids had originally swarmed toward the Mutagen vortex Xu Qing had created. But upon diving into the cloud, they immediately aborted. They shot back out, shrieking in confusion, before their hollow eyes locked onto the brightest remaining source of spiritual energy in the area.

The Vajra Sect Patriarch.

“Where did the kid go?!” the Patriarch roared as the winged horrors shrieked and dove at him.

Despite his incredible speed, the swarm engulfed him. The Patriarch was forced to turn and fight, unleashing the full, devastating power of a Foundation Establishment cultivator.

His strikes shattered the winged creatures into bloody mist. But the gore simply knitted itself back together mid-air, reforming the monsters in seconds before they resumed their relentless assault. And all the while, the colossal titan was slowly, agonizingly pulling itself free from the earth.

Trapped in a life-or-death struggle, the Patriarch had no idea where his prey had vanished.

At the very edge of the Mutagen vortex, hidden entirely within a narrow fissure in a collapsed wall, Xu Qing crouched in total silence.

During his initial scouting of the city by tracking bird flight paths, he had found two true safe zones. One was his cave. The other was this crack in the wall. This was the exact spot he had hidden in after suffering a grievous chest wound while stealing the cultivation manual from the mansion.

He hadn’t chosen it as his permanent camp because it was dangerously close to the City Lord’s Mansion. But in the apocalypse, birds—for whatever miraculous reason—seemed to possess a biological radar for “blind spots.” These areas weren’t magically shielded, but they acted as cognitive dead zones, frequently overlooked by both beasts and Anomalies.

Of course, a blind spot was only useful if there was a brighter target nearby. If the Patriarch hadn’t been there to draw aggro, Xu Qing’s little stunt would have been his grave.

Watching the Patriarch fight for his life against the regenerating swarm, and seeing the titan heave itself out of the pit, Xu Qing took a slow, steadying breath.

Then, he moved.

He lunged out of the fissure, sprinting toward the beleaguered Patriarch. Mid-stride, he hurled another fistful of Black Pills directly at the older man.

Over a dozen pills sailed through the air and detonated around the Patriarch’s defensive perimeter.

The ambient Mutagen in the area was already at critical mass. This final bombardment shattered the ceiling.

Instantly, the malicious gazes that had snapped back to Xu Qing when he left his hiding spot were violently redirected. Every Anomaly, every mutant, and every horror in the ruined city turned their heads toward the overwhelming beacon of toxicity surrounding the Patriarch.

A second later, the horde charged.

The Patriarch let out a scream of absolute, blinding fury.

Xu Qing didn’t look back. He ducked low and sprinted in the opposite direction, utilizing the massive distraction to vanish into the ruins at top speed.

The Patriarch wanted to run, but the winged swarm had him pinned. Every time he tried to break away, he was dragged back into the melee. His panic morphed into a cold, crushing despair, fueled by a hatred for Xu Qing so deep it burned his soul.

Miles away, Xu Qing’s boots pounded against the cracked pavement. He had cleared the danger zone around the mansion and was making a beeline for the outer city walls. He was going to make it.

Then, the air turned to ice.

A soft, mournful weeping drifted through the ruins.

The White-skirted Faceless Woman was walking down the street, heading directly toward him.

When Xu Qing first saw her, she was a block away. He blinked, and she was standing right in front of him.

She moved with impossible, reality-bending speed. Xu Qing had no time to react, no time to dodge. His breathing hitched as his pupils contracted to pinpricks. The unnatural cold seized his muscles, locking him in place. His mind went entirely blank, frozen by an ancient, paralyzing terror.

The thousands of faces pressing against her white dress wailed in a symphony of agony. The sound drilled directly into Xu Qing’s mind, a psychic shockwave that began to forcefully contort his own facial muscles. His lips trembled; his eyes watered. He was seconds away from joining the weeping chorus and becoming another face on the fabric.

But then… something shifted.

A cluster of faces on the skirt suddenly stopped crying.

They stared blankly at Xu Qing. Slowly, the agony melted from their features. Their lips curled upward, forming gentle, serene smiles. They opened their mouths, mouthing words that produced no sound.

The peace spread like a contagion. More and more faces ceased their wailing. Eventually, over half of the trapped souls on the massive dress were silent. They all looked down at the paralyzed boy, their expressions radiating a profound, tragic warmth.

In unison, thousands of silent lips moved, forming two distinct syllables.

Xu Qing stood frozen, his mind struggling to process the impossible sight of the smiling damned.

Before he could comprehend it, the Faceless Woman simply stepped to the side, drifting past him and continuing her slow, endless march through the ruins. As she faded into the dark, the weeping slowly resumed.

The paralysis broke. Xu Qing gasped, his chest heaving as he violently spun around.

He stared at her retreating back. In the pitch-black ruins, her white dress looked like a solitary, flickering flame.

Those faces… he thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. I knew them.

He recognized them. Especially one in particular.

It was the old man from the apothecary. The man Xu Qing had carried through the ruins to the incinerator, ensuring he received a proper cremation so he could finally rest in peace.

Xu Qing stood in the quiet street, watching the Anomaly disappear. He finally understood.

He lowered his head and bowed deeply to the empty dark.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

It was the exact phrase the smiling faces had mouthed to him.

Thank you.