Beyond the Timescape

Chapter 75: Killing the Fish!

The night wind cut like a bloodstained sickle, carrying the damp, metallic stench of the sea. It swept through the city’s labyrinthine alleys, an invisible harbinger of death on the prowl.

In the pitch-black sprawl, the anomaly stalked forward. Driven by a primal, predatory instinct, it bled into the city’s shadows, pooling in the darkness and dispersing like a sentient tide. It was a formless dread, carrying enough suffocating malice to crush the hope out of any living thing.

It slithered through the distant, forgotten corners of the sector.

Until it found him.

A figure clad in a gray Daoist robe stood motionless in the gloom. His silhouette seemed forged of cold iron, impervious to blades, radiating an icy hostility that seemed to freeze the starlight above.

A suffocating pressure hung in the air.

For the anomalous shadow, it was like a raging river crashing into the boundless ocean. Like a pack of starving scavengers bowing to the alpha wolf.

Its frantic advance halted. The formless entity grew perfectly still, observing in absolute silence. Slowly, the gray-robed figure turned his head. His eyes were like twin abysses—bottomless, dead, and terrifyingly calm.

The shadow smiled.

As if finding its dark messiah, the entity rejoiced. It swirled around the young man, lifting his long black hair and billowing his heavy robes.

“The wind tonight is a bit strong,” Xu Qing murmured. He turned his gaze back to the distant, lightless structure at the end of the street.

The building resembled a rotting coffin, anchored heavily in the night. This was the safehouse he had tracked the merman youth to. Lacking the capital or status to lease a Dharma Boat, the alien disciple was forced to rent onshore lodgings, holed up with his retainers.

Xu Qing watched the perimeter with predator’s patience. His breathing remained perfectly flat, a slow, rhythmic exhalation that bled its heat into the freezing air.

He waited.

The residual scent of the tracker verified his target was inside. Based on the merman’s behavioral patterns, tonight was the night he usually hunted. Factoring in the severe humiliation the alien had suffered earlier today, his emotional volatility practically guaranteed an excursion.

He needed to vent.

An hour bled away. As heavy clouds choked the moon, a fresh gale howled through the district, battering the coffin-like house. The structure groaned, sounding like a hoarse death rattle echoing in the void.

A silhouette vaulted over the high perimeter wall.

His gray Daoist robes did nothing to mask the sickening reek of rotting fish, nor did the dark hide the venomous malice burning in his gem-green eyes. The wind whipped his oversized robes around his emaciated frame, making the fabric look less like clothing and more like freshly peeled human skin.

It was the merman youth.

His mental state was fracturing. The events of the day had been a catastrophic blow to his pride.

“So what if she’s the Eldest Princess of the Seventh Peak?” the merman hissed through jagged teeth. “Sooner or later, I will cripple you and use your living flesh to breed Netherworld Maggots!”

Driven by his seething rage, he had moved his schedule up. He needed to indulge his urges. His two elder sisters had already arranged the logistical assets for his stress relief. He didn’t want women. He wanted children.

Torturing and slaughtering the offspring of other races was his most heavily guarded vice, yielding the highest psychological dividends.

He stepped into the shadows. His physical form refracted, blurring into the ambient darkness until he vanished completely. Visual and spiritual locks failed instantly; it was as if his existence had been temporarily deleted from reality.

But the chemical marker remained.

Xu Qing tracked the scent without blinking. Soundless as a phantom, he stepped into the abyss and followed.

The gale intensified, the howling wind masking the lethal quiet of the hunt.

Half an hour later, the void violently warped in a dead-end alleyway. The merman youth materialized. The instant his boots hit the cobblestone, his survival instincts screamed. He violently threw himself backward.

Too late.

A massive hydrostatic barrier slammed down behind him, cascading outward to completely seal the alley in a pressurized dome. A low, concussive roar erupted from the water.

A leviathan forged of high-pressure liquid breached from the curtain. Radiating absolute zero temperatures and killing intent, the massive water-whale unhinged its jaws and lunged to consume the merman whole.

The alien’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting. I needed to butcher something today anyway.”

He raised both hands, fingers blurring to form a spell-seal.

But the shadows beneath him suddenly fractured. Black tendrils whipped upward like vipers, slamming into his wrists and binding his fingers together. The spell-seal shattered.

The unnatural darkness didn’t stop. It crawled furiously up his forearms, lunging for his throat. Wherever the shadow touched, acidic agony flared. His skin hissed and melted.

For the first time, pure panic ruptured the merman’s arrogant facade.

Suffocating on the pain, he screamed. The water-whale crashed down on him, its jaws slamming shut.

Just before the crushing pressure annihilated him, a blinding blue radiance detonated from his core. The azure lasers pierced outward like a thousand lances, violently purging the shadows from his flesh while simultaneously shredding the water-whale.

The leviathan exploded into a torrential downpour. The kinetic shockwave hurled the merman backward. Coughing up dark blood, he desperately reached for his Storage Bag to deploy a countermeasure.

But the shadows swarmed again. They clamped down on his wrists, locking his hands in a vice grip as they ruthlessly consumed his flesh.

Terror paralyzed the merman. Before he could process the horror, a streak of black iron shrieked out of the darkness, aimed directly between his eyes.

Trailing the spike was a gray blur tearing through the residual water curtain.

It was a boy. His black hair whipped wildly behind him, his face a mask of absolute apathy, his eyes twin voids of icy certainty. The wind screamed around him, morphing into spectral scythes as if the grim reaper itself rode on his shoulders.

“You!!” The merman shrieked. Cornered by death, he unhinged his jaw and spat a blinding silver light.

The artifact expanded mid-air, morphing into a serrated flying wheel. It violently collided with the black iron spike. The kinetic impact generated a deafening shockwave, deflecting both weapons into the alley walls.

But the clash couldn’t slow Xu Qing.

He closed the distance instantly. The merman’s facial gills flared violently, hardening into jagged, bony spines that tore through his cheeks. Roaring, he spat a glowing blue pearl.

“Die!”

The pearl detonated into a catastrophic pillar of blue energy, engulfing Xu Qing entirely.

The merman grinned through bloody teeth. This was his core innate ability. Unless the target was in Foundation Establishment, or at the very absolute peak of Grand Perfection, survival was mathematically impossible. Confident in his kill, he looked down to purge the shadows eating his arms.

Then the blue light ahead began to tear apart.

His feral grin vanished, replaced by stark, hollow dread.

Within the destructive azure beam, a monolithic silhouette violently rose. Pitch-black and crowned with a single, jagged horn, it radiated the oppressive terror of a demon king. It was armored in rows of cruel spikes.

The Kui shadow!

The phantom let out a soundless, apocalyptic roar. It raised a massive hand and simply crushed the blue light into nothingness.

Directly beneath the demon was Xu Qing. His flesh had been lacerated by the energy beam, but the wounds were already aggressively stitching themselves shut. The killing intent in his eyes finally broke its restraints, flooding the alley with murderous pressure.

Whether during the merman’s initial credit-stealing or the skirmish at the shop, Xu Qing had kept his assets hidden. The mutated shadow had remained dormant. The Kui had stayed hidden. His monstrous regeneration had been concealed.

He only revealed his fangs when it was time to kill.

“Qi and Blood manifesting a phantom! Your cultivation level! Impossible… that regeneration…” The merman babbled, his mind breaking under the impossibility of the threat profile.

He thrashed, trying to access his Storage Bag, trying to crush a transmission jade to scream for backup. But Xu Qing’s shadow was sentient. It predicted his frantic muscle twitches, locking his joints in place and denying him access to his inventory.

Xu Qing didn’t waste a single millisecond. He closed the final gap, a cold steel dagger materializing in his grip.

Staring at the blade, the merman abandoned all rationality. Ignoring the corrosive shadows melting his throat and arms, he forcibly mutated his biology. His legs fused, shifting rapidly into a massive, muscular black fish tail. Channeling his entire bloodline, an ancestral mermaid phantom materialized around him, merging with the tail for a devastating, last-ditch strike.

Xu Qing’s face remained deadpan. He didn’t even flinch. He threw a raw, kinetic punch with his left hand. Behind him, the Kui shadow mirrored the motion, driving its colossal fist down.

CRACK. Flesh exploded. Bone pulverized.

The massive fish tail detonated into chunks of gore. The ancestral phantom shattered like cheap glass under the Kui’s overwhelming force.

The alley shuddered. A shrill, butchered scream tore from the merman’s throat, but the dense hydrostatic barrier trapped the noise within the concrete box.

“Curse!!” the merman howled, his eyes bleeding crimson. Having lost his entire lower body, he triggered a biological failsafe. The shredded meat and blood of his destroyed tail suddenly ignited with sickly energy, flying back toward Xu Qing like a swarm of homing missiles.

The curse was fast. Xu Qing was faster.

He triggered his speed-enhancing talisman. The cursed blood splattered against empty air, melting nothing but an afterimage.

Xu Qing reappeared directly behind the merman. Before the alien could even process the spatial shift, the freezing edge of a dagger pressed flush against his vocal cords.

“Xu Qing, I—”

The dagger tore through flesh, cartilage, and bone. Xu Qing didn’t listen to final negotiations.

Squelch. Arterial blood painted the alleyway. The merman convulsed violently, twitching like a decapitated fish on a butcher’s block. His eyes bulged, desperate to turn around, to comprehend his executioner. As his lungs failed and his vision faded to black, he finally caught sight of the face hovering above him.

“The clothes, you got them dirty,” Xu Qing said softly.

It was the only sentence he had spoken the entire night.

“You…”

Blood frothed from the ruin of his neck. The merman shuddered and went still. His dead eyes remained wide open, frozen in absolute disbelief that a premium asset, a prodigy of his race, had been liquidated in a filthy back alley.

Xu Qing’s expression didn’t shift. He retrieved the speed talisman from his leg, confiscated the merman’s inaccessible Storage Bag, and turned away. The shadows feeding on the corpse slithered back, seamlessly reattaching to Xu Qing’s heels.

He didn’t look back as he reached the alley’s exit. He simply raised his right hand and clenched his fist.

The massive hydrostatic barrier sealing the area violently destabilized.

The water curtain imploded. Driven by terrifying hydraulic pressure, the dome collapsed inward, centering precisely on the merman’s corpse.

BOOM! The overwhelming crush of pressurized water liquefied the body, the bones, and every stray scrap of cursed flesh. The physical and spiritual remnants of the merman were entirely eradicated.

Xu Qing faded into the night.

The hydrostatic barrier lost cohesion, raining down as ordinary droplets. The water washed the alleyway clean, rinsing the blood into the drains and leaving the concrete pristine.

As dawn broke, the morning sun reflected off the small puddles, scattering a brilliant, blinding light.

From pitch black to blazing dawn, to the cosmos, it was merely an instant. To humanity, it was the exact same.

Just like life and death.