After a thousand years of cultivation, he returns at the pinnacle!

The Twelfth Apostle was defeated!

This amazing news was broadcast live at that moment.

The silver light of the teleportation array slowly dissipated behind them.

Jiang Chen stepped out of the arched doorway of the Twelfth Apostle's Hall, his feet landing on the permafrost of the Scandinavian Mountains. A biting wind, carrying fine ice particles, rushed towards him, but he didn't turn back.

Behind them, the pitch-black, angular building was emitting a low, rumbling sound, like the dying gasp of an ancient behemoth. The sound came from the foundation of the Apostle's Temple, spreading along the frozen ground, causing the water cups at the temporary camp three kilometers away to sway slightly.

The first crack appeared on the spire of the Temple of the Apostles.

The cracks were extremely fine, almost invisible to the naked eye, but they were definitely there. They started at the highest point of the spire, spreading downwards along the building's exterior wall like a black snake winding its way across a smooth, mirror-like surface. Then came the second, the third, the tenth, and the hundredth.

Cracks spread, intertwined, and merged on every inch of the Apostle's Temple, tearing the once inviolable black building into a massive, crumbling canvas covered with spiderweb-like cracks.

The roar suddenly intensified.

The spire of the Apostles' Temple began to crumble from the top. Black fragments peeled off from above, continuing to shatter and decompose as they fell, from fist-sized pieces to fingernail-sized flakes, from flakes to powder, and from powder to nothingness.

The spire has disappeared.

Then came the outer walls. Large chunks of the smooth, mirror-like black walls crumbled away under the erosion of cracks, the fragments dispersing into black specks of light in the air. The internal structure of the Apostle's Temple began to be exposed—the pitch-black corridors, the halls shimmering with purplish-black light, the staircases suspended in mid-air—all began to collapse at the same instant.

The entire Temple of the Apostles is collapsing inward.

There were no explosions, no flames, no earth-shattering special effects like in disaster movies. Only a silent, solemn, almost ritualistic collapse. The black building that had stood deep in the Scandinavian mountains for three hundred years was shrinking, collapsing, and turning into nothingness at a visible speed. Every brick, every wall, every level of space, having lost the support of the laws after Morgana's death, was being swallowed by the void itself.

The last layer of the exterior wall has cracked.

The core of the Apostle's Temple—the void that was once the hundredth layer—was briefly exposed to the leaden sky. A purplish-black light surged from the void; it was the lingering, shrill power of Morgana's soul, the countless fragments of souls devoured over the past three hundred years, the final remnants of the entire Apostle's Temple. The purplish-black light swirled, twisted, and hissed in the air before being torn apart by the high-altitude winds, transforming into countless tiny specks of light that drifted across the Scandinavian ice plains.

Then all fell silent.

Where the Temple of the Apostles once stood, only a deep pit, hundreds of meters in diameter, remains. The edges of the pit are smooth as a mirror, as if neatly sliced ​​by an invisible giant blade. There is nothing at the bottom of the pit—no rubble, no remains, nothing that could prove a building had ever existed there. Only exposed permafrost, and a thin layer of slowly melting black frost on its surface.

That layer of frost was the last trace the Apostles' Palace left for this world. It would be completely buried when the next snowstorm came.

Jiang Chen withdrew his gaze and strode towards the temporary camp.

Behind them, the black frost on the edge of the deep pit was melting. The melting was so slow that the disappearance of each patch of frost could be seen with the naked eye. Black water droplets seeped from the edges of the frost, seeping down along the cracks in the frozen soil, into the permafrost layer that had never melted for millennia, into the depths of this land that had been ruled by the apostles for three hundred years.

From then on, the Temple of the Twelfth Apostles ceased to exist.

Inside the Dragon Kingdom Awakeners Administration Bureau, Chu Tianxiong's communicator was flooded with messages from all over the world at the same time.

"Nordic Observatory Report! Massive energy collapse detected deep within the Scandinavian Mountains! The coordinates of the collapse source perfectly coincide with the Twelfth Apostle's Temple! Energy level—unmeasurable! Duplicate, unmeasurable!"

"European Bureau of Abnormal Affairs confirms! The signature Soul Screaming Law fluctuations of the Apostle Temple have completely disappeared! The Twelfth Apostle, Morgiana, is confirmed dead!"

"Dragon Kingdom Kunlun Monitoring Station reports! The energy fluctuations of the Thirteenth Apostle Temple's remains are synchronously decreasing! There is some kind of chain reaction at the level of laws between the two Apostle Temples!"

The sounds overlapped, intertwined, and exploded in the command tent, with every channel shouting the same thing in different languages—the Twelfth Apostle's Temple was gone.

But outside the tent, cheers had already erupted across the ice field.

Three kilometers away, the camp of the joint forces from various countries had turned into a sea of ​​revelry.

Soldiers of different skin colors, uniforms, and languages ​​huddled together. Some threw their hats into the air, some knelt in the snow with their hands clasped together, and some shouted hoarsely at the leaden sky.

A Scandinavian female officer removed her helmet, her long, silvery-white hair flying in the cold wind. She tilted her head back and gulped down the entire canteen of strong liquor, then smashed it on the ground and shouted something in Swedish. The Chinese translator beside her paused for a moment, then burst into laughter, yelling into the communicator in Chinese, "She said—'Three hundred years! Finally, it's our turn to see the Apostles' Temple collapse!' Time for some drinks!"

On the snow-covered edge of the camp, a group of young Awakened students huddled together, laughing and crying. They came from Awakened academies around the world, sent to observe the Apostle Temple challenge. Their teachers told them it was a learning opportunity, a chance to witness history. They thought they were just there to watch a battle. They had no idea they would witness the collapse of an Apostle Temple. A blonde, blue-eyed girl knelt in the snow, her hands covering her face, tears streaming through her fingers.

Her father died ten years ago during an apostle's descent; she was only seven years old then. She chose to become an Awakened because she wanted revenge for her father. Today, she sees something more important than revenge.

Dragon Kingdom, Imperial Capital. In front of the holographic projection screen in the command hall of the Bureau of Extraterritorial Control, Chu Tianxiong's hand holding the communicator trembled. On the screen, the ruins of the Twelfth Apostle's Hall were turning into black specks of light and dissipating.

Zhou Tianze took off his headphones and slammed them heavily onto the control panel. A shallow dent appeared in the metal surface. He turned around, staring intently at Ye Wuhen with his left eye, which Jiang Chen had healed. His lips moved, but he couldn't utter a word.

Ye Wuhen didn't look at him. He stood in front of the holographic projection screen, his right hand still gripping the longsword with only the hilt remaining, and a slight smile played on his lips.

"The second one," he said. Then he turned and walked towards the door, "to prepare for the next step of the plan."

Luo Qinghe followed behind him. Her right arm had fully regained feeling and was now resting steadily on the hilt of the ice sword at her waist.

As she reached the door, she glanced back at the screen, which was still scattering black specks of light, and the smile on her lips was even more pronounced than Ye Wuhen's.

She remembered what Jiang Chen had said on the hundredth floor—"They spied on my secrets and exposed them to billions of people. That debt must be settled."

Then he used his strongest sword strike to send Morgana away.

That guy really holds a grudge...

Meanwhile, in Jiangzhou.

At the end of an old street, Jiang Xueqin stood in the center of her living room, watching the black building collapsing on the television screen. She was completely unaware that a spatula had fallen to the floor.

Jiang Tianyi stood up from the sofa, walked to her side, and took her hand in his roughened hands, calloused from the wind and sand of the construction site. He didn't say anything.

Jiang Xueqin's tears finally fell.

The boy on the screen walked steadily, his posture was composed, and his expression was calm, but she saw something change in his eyes. It was something she had never seen in her son's eyes before, like a stone that had been pressing down for too long finally being moved, like a scar that had been closed for too long finally beginning to heal.

"What did he see inside?" Jiang Xueqin's voice trembled.

"He just told that apostle that he had seen an old friend."

Jiang Tianyi was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Whatever he saw, he came out."

Jiang Xueqin didn't ask any more questions, seemingly ready to welcome her son's return. As for those so-called other world matters, she would ask them when Jiang Chen came back.