138: Chapter 138 The Holy Lord's Judgment
I don't know how much time had passed.
Perhaps it was a fleeting moment, or perhaps it was as long as an entire century.
Within the endless darkness, cold, and dead silence, my consciousness, which had nearly dissipated completely, reignited a faint spark like a candle flame in the wind.
Pain!
Every bone in my body felt as if it had been crushed and then forcibly pieced back together. Every tremor transmitted through my carapace was like countless steel needles wildly stabbing at my nerves. These were the horrific wounds left behind by being grazed by the shockwave of a Demon Rank Expert's self-destruction.
I struggled with immense difficulty to free myself from Lin Qingzhi's icy embrace.
She had fallen into a deep coma. Her stunningly beautiful face, capable of toppling kingdoms, was now deathly pale without a trace of color, like a flawless white jade statue, yet carrying a heartbreaking fragility. If not for the extremely faint rise and fall of her chest, I would have even thought she was already...
I dared not think any further.
I looked around, using the few weak rays of moonlight filtering through the cracks in the rocks above to see our surroundings clearly.
We had been buried alive.
Countless tons of boulders, twisted steel bars, and concrete blocks pinned us down at the deepest part of this underground ruin, forming a veritable 'tomb of the living dead.' The air was thick with dense, suffocating dust and the sulfurous smell left by the explosion. Every breath felt like swallowing scalding sand mixed with glass shards.
"Cough... cough..."
I coughed violently from inhaling the dust, and a feeling more intense than facing death welled up in my heart... despair.
In this situation, even if we hadn't been killed by the explosion, we would eventually die from suffocation or a secondary collapse.
Just as a sliver of despair rose in my heart, my Spiritual Energy Perception suddenly detected an extremely faint, yet bone-chillingly venomous and ominous... energy fluctuation.
That aura was all too familiar to me!
It was Night Crow!
I jerked my head up, using my damaged compound eyes to pierce through the layers of darkness, looking toward the very core of the self-destruction zone.
Amidst the chaotic ruins, completely scorched into barren earth, lay a horrifying figure, tattered and broken, reduced to little more than a charred, blackened skeleton.
He was actually still alive!
His frenzied self-destruction had destroyed nearly all his vitality, but the sinister potency of that crimson pill he had swallowed acted like a most malicious curse, forcibly imprisoning a wisp of his remnant soul within this ruined skeleton, leaving him unable to live or die!
In his empty, skull-like eye sockets, two ghostly green flames burned slowly.
Those ghost fires held no warmth whatsoever, yet radiated a soul-freezing, deepest malice and... fear?
Yes, it was fear.
He wasn't looking at me. His ghost-fire-burning eye sockets were fixed, unmoving, staring at a white-clad figure not far away, also buried in the ruins and unconscious.
He was looking at Lin Qingzhi's exquisitely beautiful face, which even in unconsciousness, even stained with dust and blood, still faintly exuded an Ice Phoenix Charm.
He was looking at that innate, inviolable... imperial will that still emanated from the depths of her soul, even under such severe injuries.
A terrifying, long-buried memory from the deepest recesses of his mind, a white-clad figure he had once glimpsed from afar during the 'Holy War' that swept through the heavens, where even true gods fell like weeds... slowly superimposed onto this unconscious young girl before him.
That figure, clad in snow-white robes, peerless in grace and bearing. With just a glance, she could freeze galaxies spanning billions of miles. With a single pointed finger, she could cause a Demon Emperor who shook the universe to perish utterly, body and soul!
In that instant, the two ghostly green flames in Night Crow's eye sockets flickered violently, almost extinguishing on the spot!
It wasn't anger, nor was it hatred.
It was the ultimate... terror and... fear that arises from the deepest soul when a mortal inadvertently glimpses the true form of a creator deity!
"It's... it's you... It's actually... really you?!"
His voiceless roar, produced by his soul directly vibrating the air, abruptly echoed in the dead silence of the underground space! That sound no longer held the arrogance and madness from before, only an indescribable tremor, like a child crying in the night!
He finally understood!
He finally understood what kind of forbidden, terrifying existence he had provoked from the very beginning!
No wonder! No wonder she was merely an Essence Rank, yet possessed such inconceivable combat skills!
No wonder! No wonder such a bizarre, utterly inscrutable, and infinitely potential monster followed by her side!
So that's how it is!
So, from the very beginning, he had been... courting death by provoking a... slumbering deity!
Boundless fear instantly drowned all his reason and malice.
He dared not linger for even a moment longer. Without hesitation, using the last shred of his soul's power, he shattered the Blood Teleportation Talisman, the final life-saving trump card personally bestowed upon the deepest part of his divine soul by that supreme Holy Lord, whose back he wasn't even qualified to gaze upon!
Hum!
A bizarre crimson light instantly enveloped his ruined skeleton completely.
His body rapidly transformed into countless points of light, about to dissipate on the spot.
And before he vanished completely, his roar, filled with endless malice and fear, echoed throughout the collapsed underground space like a most venomous curse.
"So it's you... Just wait! Just wait! The Holy Lord's judgment will descend soon! The entire world will tremble for your rebirth! Hahahaha—!"
That mad, malice-filled laughter echoed for a long time within the collapsed ruins, like a prelude to the apocalypse.
I stared blankly at the spot where he had vanished, then looked at the still-unconscious girl in my arms. An unprecedented... heaviness surged in my heart.
Holy Lord?
What kind of terrifying existence would that be?