128: Chapter 128 You Were Never You! Xuanji's Dao Heart Shatters
Taihuang Battlefield.
The lingering Dao rhythms of ten Hunyuan Supremes had not yet dissipated, clinging to the dark red air like an unyielding scab of blood.
Jiang Feng withdrew his fist, turned around, and walked back the way he came.
His pace was leisurely and indifferent, as if he were merely strolling, waiting to return home and rest.
"Stop."
Xuanji's voice was a bit hoarse.
She did not even know why she had spoken. Observation completed, returning to report—that was the procedure a Supreme Adjudicator was supposed to follow.
Yet, she found herself blocking Jiang Feng's path.
Her cyan-gold robe snapped and fluttered in the decaying winds of the wasteland, framing her bloodless face, making her look like a stone statue forgotten on an ancient battlefield.
Jiang Feng stopped.
It was not because she was blocking his way.
With his foundation of 466 Jian, there was little difference between walking around her or walking through her.
He stopped because he had sensed something.
"That mark inside you."
Jiang Feng tilted his head, his gaze not landing on Xuanji's face, but rather on the center of her chest—beneath her robe, at the location of her origin core.
"When was it planted?"
Xuanji's pupils contracted.
"What mark?"
The tone was meant to be an interrogation, but she could not suppress the tail end of her voice, which drifted upward by half a beat.
It was not an interrogation. It was guilt.
Jiang Feng took a step forward.
Just one step.
He released no pressure, invoked no laws.
Xuanji's body reacted before her brain could—instinctively retreating two steps.
Her legs were turning to jelly.
It had nothing to do with the numerical suppression of 466 Jian. It was a deeper tremor, one welling up from the very roots of her soul.
She felt as though she had been dismantled.
Not that her strength had been seen through, not that her secrets had been exposed.
It was as if her entire underlying structure was being opened up and read line by line.
"You spoke up for me in the Samsara Endless Prison."
Jiang Feng held up one finger.
"You followed me all the way from the Canglan Realm to the Taihuang Battlefield."
A second finger.
"And now you block my path, even though you know I can crush you to death."
A third.
He lowered his hand.
"Do you think these things—are your own will?"
Xuanji's lips moved a few times.
She made no sound.
Jiang Feng shoved his hands back into his pockets, his speaking pace neither fast nor slow, but every word felt like a dull knife scraping against bone.
"That mark is hidden in the deepest part of your origin, existing even before your sentience."
"Your curiosity about me, your impulse to plead for me, your action of standing here blocking my path right now—"
"All of it is it making decisions for you."
He paused for a beat.
"Not a single shred of the 'thoughts' you have about me belongs to you."
The wind stopped.
The entire wasteland fell silent.
Even the vibrating sounds of the residual Dao rhythms in the distance seemed as if someone had pressed pause.
Xuanji's complexion faded layer by layer.
From pale, to transparent.
It was not the flush of surging blood, nor the ghastly white of a soul frightened away.
It was a more fatal color—nothingness.
The foundation that supported her standing there had been more than half ripped away the moment those words landed.
"Impossible."
Her voice sounded like sandpaper scraping against a throat, dry and astringent.
"I was created by Venerable Xuan and Venerable Ming using the essence of origin and creation; my will is independent of—"
"Independent?"
Jiang Feng interrupted her.
There was no mockery in his tone, no pity, not even any superfluous emotion.
He was merely stating a fact.
"A created chess piece, speaking of independence?"
The corner of Xuanji's mouth twitched.
She wanted to retort.
Her mouth opened, and the words were already on the tip of her tongue.
But the moment she mobilized her divine sense to probe into the depths of her origin—she touched it.
The depths of her origin.
A position extremely, extremely deep.
In a corner more fundamental than her oldest memories, more ancient than the sprouting of her sentience.
A pale golden pattern was glowing faintly.
The light was so weak it was almost non-existent.
If Jiang Feng hadn't pointed it out, she would never have noticed this thing, even if she had exhausted all her fortune.
But it was truly, undeniably glowing.
The frequency of every pulse matched her heartbeat at this moment perfectly.
The blood in Xuanji's entire body seemed to have its temperature suddenly drained away.
She began to tremble.
Not a fine, slight tremor.
It was a violent shivering that spread from the soles of her feet to the top of her head, impossible to suppress.
Her Dao heart had cracked once before, back in the Samsara Endless Prison when Jiang Feng had torn her cognition to shreds.
"Lower realm beings cannot be stronger than high-dimensional ones"—that was what had shattered then.
Now, this was the second time.
It shattered more thoroughly.
This time, it was not cognition that shattered.
It was the self.
—"The 'me' I thought I was, has never been me."
"All my judgments..."
Her voice was intermittent, like a crumpled piece of paper.
"All my inclinations... from the very beginning have..."
She could not continue.
Jiang Feng glanced at her.
He did not respond.
He offered no comfort.
He turned and continued walking.
After walking two steps, without looking back, he tossed out a sentence.
"If you want to live, pull that thing out yourself."
His voice was so faint it was almost melting into the wind.
"I don't care about the lives of others."
He walked two more steps.
"Whether you are yourself or not, what does that have to do with me?"
Xuanji stood where she was.
Like a piece of deadwood stuck in the wasteland.
She watched that back figure walk further away step by step, her mind empty of everything.
Only that pale golden pattern in the depths of her origin remained, pulsing calmly, one, two, three times.
It pulsed like a heart.
But it was not her heart.
It never had been.
Supreme Void.
Before the chessboard.
Old Man Xuan set down his teacup.
His hand was a fraction heavier than usual.
The bottom of the cup clicked against the chess table, emitting a very faint, crisp sound.
"He noticed?"
Venerable Ming stared at the point of light on the chessboard representing Jiang Feng, his voice so cold it could scrape off a layer of frost.
Old Man Xuan did not answer.
He extended two fingers and picked up a white piece.
The surface of the piece faintly swirled with Xuanji's aura.
"It does not matter."
He placed the white piece back in its original position, his tone so flat there wasn't even a ripple of emotion.
"Noticing it and breaking free from it are two different things."
Venerable Ming narrowed his eyes.
"The mark is rooted in the origin."
Old Man Xuan picked up the teacup, took a sip, unhurried and slow.
"It lives and dies with her existence."
He swallowed the tea, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly—somewhere between a smile and not a smile.
"If she tries to force it out—"
"Her life will be gone."
Venerable Ming was silent for a few breaths.
Then he let out a cold laugh.
"You are quite ruthless."
Old Man Xuan set down the cup.
His gaze crossed over the dense array of pieces on the board, landing on that faint, yet extremely blinding point of light deep within.
"Merely a chess piece."
Three words.
Light as air.
Cold to the marrow of the bone.
Taihuang Battlefield, edge zone.
Jiang Feng paused.
He raised his right hand, thrusting his fingers into the folds of the void, preparing to tear open the dimensional barrier and return directly to Blue Star.
Go back, eat some pork ribs.
Take a shower.
Get some sleep.
Tomorrow, he would figure out how to smash that broken high-dimensional chessboard.
Everything was arranged clearly.
Then—deep in his mind, the master-servant contract line between him and the Dragon Girl suddenly shuddered.
It was not broken.
It was being interfered with.
The signal was still there, but the images transmitted back were like they were behind a layer of water mist, blurry, intermittent, skipping frame by frame.
Jiang Feng's hand, stuck in the void, froze in mid-air.
He closed his eyes, pouring all his spiritual attributes into the contract line, forcibly piercing through the interference layer.
The image flashed.
Above Blue Star.
On the outer wall of the Taixu Samsara Barrier he had personally laid down—a layer of extremely faint, gray-white patterns was crawling upward.
There were no signs of attack.
No fluctuations of energy impact.
The patterns spread silently along the surface of the barrier, like frost in deep winter crawling up a windowpane.
Quietly.
Slowly.
Not carrying a shred of killing intent.
But Jiang Feng only glanced at it, and the hairs on his back stood up.
The structure of that pattern.
It was exactly the same as the mark in the depths of Xuanji's origin.
Jiang Feng opened his eyes.
In his dark golden double pupils, all indifference, all casualness, all lightheartedness—in this instant, had completely faded away.
What remained was only one thing.
Killing intent.
Killing intent so pure it did not contain a single grain of impurity.
"Touch my family..."
His voice was ethereal, yet it shattered the endless void.
Venerable Xuan.
You are dead.