Tonight, Alice joins the hunt.

The words still ring in my ears.

Ming Yanwei even remembered the subtle changes in the man's expression when she said those words—shock, disappointment, dejection, and finally, an uncontrollable rage.

Why was he angry? Was it because his efforts had gone unrewarded? Was it because his humble pleas, which had been rejected, had damaged his masculine dignity? Or was his anger actually directed at his own weakness and incompetence?

Perhaps both, perhaps neither. But Ming Yanwei didn't care—why should she care about the private life of a colleague she wasn't very familiar with? It's extremely impolite for outsiders to meddle in other people's private affairs. As a mature and rational lady, she wouldn't do something so tasteless.

And so the man left—arriving with a last hope, leaving with disappointment and anger. He abandoned everything he had done there, including all the things the team had given him—perhaps he has already returned to the Main God Space. Perhaps he has already left the team altogether.

Ah…that’s true. Everyone who reaches the God's Space is overflowing with despair. And all the reincarnators who survive in the God's Space have found hope. For Ming Yanwei, her hope lies in the little witch from the world of Ju-on, who cared for her during her most vulnerable time and whom she later adopted. And for that man named Zhang Heng, perhaps his hope is to reclaim his former love.

Since he has already lost hope, the Main God Space probably no longer holds any meaning for him.

After all, what's the point of becoming stronger if you lose the motivation to do so?

Ming Yanwei sighed softly. She activated all her armor and runes, and picked up the divine bow left behind by Zhang Heng before he left—a bow that belonged to a war knight. Long ago, she might have looked down on it, because Zhang Heng had once used it. But now—it was just a tool left behind by a distant, unfamiliar colleague. Why should she feel any special attachment to it?

So she left the Western-style building, stepped out of the room, and onto the quiet street. Zhang Jie and Luo Gandao, also fully armed, had been waiting for her for quite some time on the street.

At the other end of the street stood a pretty pink-haired girl dressed as a songstress—she possessed an ethereal quality like a doll, with a pair of delicate braids hanging down from her shoulders, and her pale red eyes displaying a kaleidoscope of intricate crystalline structures that constantly shifted and swirled. She lifted her songstress skirt and gracefully greeted the three of them.

"Good night, Miss Ming Yanwei of the Central Continent Team, and Mr. Zhang Jie and Mr. Luo Gandao." Her voice was soft, but it resounded in every corner of the city. "I am Yuzuriha Inori of the Demon Team, here to fight you three to the death."

Ming Yanwei returned her greeting—"Just you alone?"

“There was originally one more person, but that young lady didn’t see the person she wanted to fight here, so she left.” Yuzuriha Inori’s gaze lingered on Ming Yanwei for a moment before giving her the answer.

“I see… It seems my other self has a different perspective.” Ming Yanwei nodded and glanced at her companions—Zhang Jie shrugged, while Luo Gandao looked eager to try—so Ming Yanwei gestured for her to enter.

—A guest is a guest.

The next moment, countless pale purple crystals appeared out of thin air on all the buildings in the city of London.

Chapter 88: The Battle of Heaven - Crystallization

Crystallization, purple crystals, eroded the entire city. They eroded the ground, the atmosphere, the sky, and the world barrier beyond. And the endless true ether was then drawn in from the cosmos, further promoting the growth and spread of the crystals.

Crystallization, the spreading of crystals accompanied by a chanted song, and just as Yuzuriha Inori opened her mouth, an arrow, seemingly formed from a thread of light, struck her first, exploding directly within her body—a magnificent spectacle like a sunrise, the light and heat that made the Tsar Bomba bow down radiating outwards from Yuzuriha Inori. The entire city of London was evaporated in an instant, then returned to normal in a strange distortion.

Zhang Jie's dream had already covered the entire city before Yuzuriha Inori made her move, which allowed him to distort the perception of time within the dream, enabling Ming Yanwei to fire the thread of light before she could act. The moment the thread of light was detonated, a dream portal leading to the heavens opened randomly, resulting in a scorching radiance that pierced the sky!

The city returned to its original state, without crystallization, destruction, or Yuzuriha Inori. Yet the dream's barrier still covered it, protecting it while rapidly expanding outwards—the dream's expansion was formless and intangible, and wherever it was covered, everything returned to normal.

The crystals were restored, and the earth returned to its original form during the second distortion. At the same time, more than a thousand strands of light shot out from the dream-covered earth at strange angles, pointing straight to the sky, straight to the world barrier that had been cracked by the crystals!

Inori Yuzuriha's form reappeared unharmed from the rift in the world pointed to by the threads of light. Unperturbed, she gracefully placed her hand on her chest, then conjured layers of mirror-like crystalline barriers before her—the idea of ​​a mirror reflecting high-energy lasers is actually a fallacy, as sufficiently high-level light would melt the mirror itself. However, Inori's mirrors were different; their essence was crystal, and the essence of these crystals was an extraordinary event known as 'Apocalypse'. And after countless generations of modification and nurturing by her, this crystal continued to grow in power.

One of the characteristics of the Apocalypse is its erosion and assimilation. Her mirror absorbed light and assimilated it!

Then, the thousands of threads of light changed from pure white to light purple, and the thousands of pure purple rays of light mixed with countless crystalline raindrops suddenly fell from the sky!

Zhang Jie's dream displacement was triggered again, and the earth's surface was once again switched into a dream, absorbing all the bursts of light and heat—immeasurable psychic power erupted from the earth once more, restraining the crystalline rain falling from the sky. Then, in the next moment, even the formless psychic power was assimilated by the crystals!

The assimilated part wasn't just telekinesis. Because shortly after those purple threads of light were extinguished by Zhang Jie's dream, even the dream itself began to grow large patches of purple crystals.

Zhang Jie was forced to abandon the dreams that enveloped the earth, exposing the city and the forms of the three reincarnators to Yuzuriha Inori's view. At the very instant he did so, Yuzuriha Inori had already grasped a pure black crystal greatsword pulled from her own body. Like a falling star, like an orbital cannonball, she plummeted from the chasm at the top of the world!

Those with mental abilities fear this: once the means of limiting distance are broken, they can easily fall into a terrible disadvantage.

However, those who fear close combat are merely ordinary, low-level mental power users. For reincarnators who have already unlocked the fourth-tier gene lock and will undoubtedly make up for their shortcomings immediately after advancement, this level of predicament is hardly a challenge.

Even if it is, it doesn't matter.

Because the instant Yuzuriha Inori plummeted to near the edge of the sky, the fully armed Logando suddenly appeared on the earth's surface as a mythical giant in heavy armor, standing tens of thousands of feet tall. His enormous fist pointed straight at the heavens.

Ten thousand zhang, thirty-three thousand three hundred and thirty-three meters. The remains of Kua, a spoils of war obtained by Logandao in the Zero World, have been transformed by Chu Xuan and Alice into a bio-armor capable of unleashing its full power, almost like an avatar. Its appearance is that of a gigantic humanoid figure covered in runic structures and heterogeneous armor, and it is capable of unleashing a portion of the power of the fourth level!

The giant's fist collided with the falling songstress and her sword.

The next second, the entire sky of the Fourth Reality was covered in a deep purple color!

"Divine remains." Yuzuriha Inori's ethereal voice echoed again from the sky, and even more pale blue crystals gathered and fell from the heavens like a torrential rain. The giant's fist was instantly covered with crystals, only to shatter and disintegrate in the next moment, turning into scattered, shimmering dust.

"The weakness of the divine remains is the operator." — Her form reappeared like a phantom. And the coordinates where she appeared were in front of the giant's chest. The huge blade slashed down from the sky, and a huge gash that stretched for hundreds of meters was torn open from the giant's chest.

It split open, but no blood was drawn. The crack, hundreds of meters long, was at most only a dozen meters deep. And this level of cracking was not enough to directly destroy the giant's chest armor.

The next moment, the giant's hands slammed together, and the gravitational tide generated by the operation of its divine body imprisoned Yuzuriha Inori within it, shattering her body completely. However, what was shattered was only a tiny crystal fragment; the instant the giant's hands closed, her form reappeared on the giant's neck through teleportation!

While it's unclear exactly when the convention of always severing the nape of the neck to kill a Titan became popular in the multiverse, the human body itself is hardly a perfect structure. The neck is too fragile, and the respiratory system and central nervous system it houses are too vital. And when a human becomes a Titan, the structure doesn't change much.

The giant's nape was shattered with a single blow.

The flesh and rune structure were not stopped for even a moment, and were completely cut open by Yuzuriha Inori with her greatsword, and then rushed straight to the control core where it was bound to exist, following the operation of the internal energy channels!

Her movements were swift, her speed incredible. She effortlessly executed every imaginable two-handed sword technique, dismantling even the most advanced internal defenses—equivalent to those used in 30th-century space fleet warfare—with fluid grace, before directly reaching the bio-cavity of the main control center!

With a flash of the sword, the giant's main bio-cavity was cleaved in two and crystallized in mid-air. However, in the next instant, the entire world distorted and warped as Yuzuriha Inori frowned!

The giant's flesh and blood before her, the controlling biological cavity before her, the crystals before her, and the blood of the divine remains splattering everywhere vanished in an instant. In their place was a feeling of complete confinement, and a sudden shift in her perspective of reality!

This is a dream, Zhang Jie's dream.

She found herself still in the posture of severing the giant's nape with her sword, but her body was trapped in the giant's clasped hands, and Zhang Jie was hovering less than two thousand meters away from her, displaying his power!

A thumb-thick arrow of light burst forth from the earth, and the moment it was released, it pierced straight through Inori Yuzuriha's heart!

Her form began to dissolve, and the photochemical erosion spread outward from her heart and extended throughout her torso.

However, an elegant smile still lingered on her lips.

“The weakness is the operator.” Her voice remained ethereal and clear. “It’s because the operator always thinks they will become the weak point that gets focused down.”

And her body, which was flesh and blood just a moment ago, was instantly transformed into shattered purple crystals!

Zhang Jie's expression suddenly changed—

The next moment, Yuzuriha Inori, wielding twin crystal short swords, teleported directly to Ming Yanwei's side, whose position had been exposed by the previous attack. Her first sword deflected Ming Yanwei's close-range arrow, her second shattered all of Ming Yanwei's defenses. And her third sword thrust forward, aimed directly at Ming Yanwei's heart!

"Don't even think about it." Zhang Jie suddenly reached out his hand in the direction of Ming Yanwei. His dream once again overlaid on reality, but this time the dream passed right through Yuzuriha Inori, and her figure in the dream still appeared in front of Ming Yanwei!

She could create dreams from the very beginning; the Crystallized Apocalypse possessed the power to shape dreams from the start. And Yuzuriha Inori's form then transcended the dream, this third strike piercing through Ming Yanwei's heart!

Chapter 89 The War in Heaven - Inferior Goods

—This will happen in twenty milliseconds.

In the fleeting twenty milliseconds before the arrow left the bowstring, Mingyanwei's eyes caught a glimpse of the future in that brief moment before the shot was released. This prompted her to utter a whisper before she acted.

—“Coordinates locked, final destination is ████.”

And then the future arrived, just as she had previously foreseen.

Then, the moment her flesh and blood struck the third sword strike, which arrived twenty milliseconds later, they shattered into pieces, transforming into a cage, a restraint, a transcendent confinement capable of slightly delaying the movement of beings of the same level—she clearly saw the pink-haired girl's pupils dilate by a tiny margin. The next instant, an arrow of light, returning from beyond the heavens, pierced the back of Yuzuriha Inori's head, completely illuminating the area above her neck before erupting outwards as a powerful energy surge!

A brilliant sun rose above the earth's surface.

Night turned into day, and the barren land that had been the battleground was transformed into a sunken basin with at least three meters of vitrified material—and this entire vitrified basin instantly turned into pale purple crystals!

Ming Yanwei's form reappeared on the giant's shoulder, and Zhang Jie teleported his body to her side using spatial jump—without the need for words or eye contact, a long arrow formed from a nightmare was nocked on the bowstring of Ming Yanwei's drawn war bow. And the moment she released the bowstring, this dream arrow, imbued with destruction, struck the location of the crystal basin!

Once again, the dream replaced reality, the devastating nightmare transforming the entire land into a pure, clear void. It was as if a smooth apple had been bitten off by an invisible maw. No matter how many crystals or 'Yuzuriha Inori' existed on that land, they were all erased, as if they had never existed in the first place.

However, Yuzuriha Inori's voice still rang out.

"Future vision, the fracture of fate, a variant of the Great Prophecy—you have excellent eyesight, Miss Mingyanwei. Completely different from the other you." Her voice came from the sky, from the pale purple firmament and the rift in the heavens. And the giant controlled by Logandao swung his fist upwards without hesitation—for at the very moment it threw its punch, a crystalline comet, its size comparable to Halley's, plummeted straight down from the rift at the top of the sky!

The giant's roar echoed across the land, sending spiderweb-like cracks through the earth and the dream-shrouded city. These cracks were enormous; a closer look revealed them to be long, narrow fissures extending to the very bottom of the continent. Endless subterranean fire and lava dyed them a fiery red, erupting forth as they combined with the sharp, cone-shaped fist strike of the giant, shooting straight towards the heavens!

It was a boiling volcano growing towards the sky. And in an instant, the volcano's peak collided abruptly with the falling crystalline star in mid-air!

The sky and the earth lost their color in that instant.

There was no sound, no vibration. The medium that could transmit its impact was completely severed the instant before the impact erupted, beneath a silent, unfolding dream barrier. The giant's fist, aided by home-field advantage, clearly demonstrated the power to crush the falling star. Within the field of vision observable only by extraordinary life forms, the rising volcano effortlessly shattered the pale purple crystalline star.

But the volcano's ascent never stopped; it continued upward, reaching the clouds, and beyond them. The vast distance was traversed in an instant. And the moment it finally came to a stop, its form transformed into a filling gel, firmly sealing the crack in the heavens!

The pale purple sky visibly returned to a colorless, transparent night sky.

The shattered crystalline star disintegrated into billions of fragments of varying sizes. The lava remnants that failed to become artifacts to mend the heavens, however, were uniformly and completely enveloped from top to bottom and bottom to top—they couldn't successfully fall to the earth because the dream barrier, which sealed off the medium, prevented their descent. Then, thousands upon thousands of threads of light pierced through the dream barrier and precisely struck each enveloped crystalline fragment, transforming them, along with the cooled lava, into a luminous form.

The world quieted down—or rather, it returned from the emptiness of lacking a medium for sound transmission to ordinary tranquility.

Large amounts of white vapor spewed from beneath the giant's mask—an unnecessary heat dissipation phenomenon, but its essence represented a slight relaxation in Logandao.

The land was leveled again, and the cities and wastelands returned to their pre-war state.

but--

Yuzuriha Inori's voice rang out once again.

“Impressive.” She clapped her hands lightly, her severed neck, now only a bowl-sized gash, appearing in the air not far from the three members of the Central Continent Team. “As fellow bottom-ranked players, I tried everything but couldn’t gain the upper hand. Your Central Continent Team is indeed a formidable opponent for our Demon Team… It’s a pity I couldn’t kill even one or two of you. This is all I could manage against you.”

She hadn't used her full strength, because the moment she spoke, her mind had already been completely repaired. And as she returned to wholeness, a pure light emanated from her eyes.

A pure, clear light, the light of the soul, a mimicry devoid of its own color. When this extraordinary phenomenon manifests on her, it signifies that her life level is only half a step away from unlocking the middle stage of the fourth-tier genetic lock! Possessing a mimicry of the light of the soul is a sign that advancement is possible at any moment. This means that perhaps with a sudden inspiration, perhaps with a sneeze, perhaps by eating one more or one less piece of bread, she could break free from her shackles and leap from the clouds to the heavens!

However, she hasn't taken that step yet. And since she hasn't taken that step, she hasn't distanced herself sufficiently from the conventional Four Beginners.

She wasn't using her full strength, nor were the three members of the Central Continent Team. But not using their full strength didn't mean they couldn't assess each other's strengths and weaknesses; one at their limit versus three at their peak. Since they couldn't determine a winner in the initial, sudden exchange, the subsequent battles couldn't possibly be decided by a life-or-death struggle that had lasted for millions of years.

She came to fight to the death, not to kill time with friendly sparring. Since it's clear that neither side can be determined to die, there's no need to continue fighting.

Zhang Jie took a cigarette out of his pocket, put it in his mouth, and took a deep drag.

"In the Demon Team, are all the four Initial Limits who possess the Mimicry of Mind Light the bottom of the class?" He flicked the ash from his cigarette and exhaled a puff of pale white breath. "Your Demon Team is really strict."

"To be precise, it should be called an inferior product. 'Below the mark' is a euphemism, and only I use it. It makes me feel like I'm back in my student days." The murderous intent surrounding Yuzuriha Inori gradually faded—of course, this shouldn't be taken literally, but it at least showed that she was willing to talk—she corrected herself and explained.

“In the primordial heavenly realm, humans who possess an independent spiritual light are called True Persons. And the meaning of True Person, literally, is a real person.” She tidied her somewhat disheveled hair and re-braided it into an elegant bun. “Chu Xuan of the Demon Team considers this a correct standard of judgment. Before reaching Fourth Middle School, one is not even considered an ordinary person.”

"That sounds like things are getting pretty tough," Ming Yanwei sighed. "Does your Demon Team operate on the law of the jungle? The other me is really having a hard time..."

“No, that’s not it,” Yuzuriha Inori shook her head slightly. “Everyone here is a good person, and Captain Zhengzha doesn’t want the team to keep arguing. But the Dao Erosion phenomenon will naturally form if you get along closely. Whether you are enemies or friends, if your level is not high enough, you will be affected by the Dao Erosion phenomenon—and right now, if I stay within one kilometer of Captain Zhengzha for more than ten minutes, a small-scale collapse will occur in my Heart Abyss.”

“I can’t hold on much longer,” she said calmly, pressing her hand to her chest. “And Zheng Zha on your side will be promoted sooner or later. So, so will you.”

A long silence fell over the air.

"At first, I thought that as long as I unlocked the third-tier gene lock and could control my thoughts and brain, I could resist the Dao erosion phenomenon of extraordinary life forms." From within the giant's body came Roger's dejected voice. "So, this level isn't enough after all..."

"Without a complete inner light, one cannot be considered human; this principle holds true in the primordial heavens for a reason." — Yuzuriha Inori answered calmly. The sky behind her was once again tinged with a faint purple, and even the pure light in her eyes seemed to be assimilating with the crystalline clusters rotating within them.

Zhang Jie and Ming Yanwei exchanged a glance; one sighed, while the other's lips twitched slightly.

"So you mean we're going to have to fight to the death from now on?" Zhang Jie flicked the ash from his cigarette and looked at her seriously. "But even if you say that, whether you want to kill us or we want to kill you, it's something that can't be done within ten or twenty thousand years. In a battle between equals above the extraordinary level, as long as there's no clear winner at the beginning, then what follows is just a slow grind that kills time... You should be very clear about this."

“Of course I understand.” Yuzuriha Inori nodded slightly. “But we can’t afford not to fight. So—”