Chapter 160: The Devouring Void Plan, Chen Changsheng’s Deadlock with the Nether Forest
Chapter 160 – The Devouring Void Plan, Chen Changsheng’s Deadlock with the Nether Forest
Sizzle—
Fat dripped from the roasting meat, hissing as it was licked by the open flames, sending a rich, mouth-watering aroma wafting for miles.
Just as the crisping flesh reached perfection, the earth beside Chen Changsheng ruptured, and a delicate sapling thrust upward.
Upon its slender branches, three crystalline fruits swelled and ripened at a speed visible to the naked eye.
A mere breath of their fragrance was enough to set one’s blood boiling and Qi surging; they were undeniably rare, heaven-defying treasures of pure vitality.
Yet, Chen Changsheng did not spare them a second glance. He callously plucked the treasures and ground them into the dirt beneath his heel.
“Too late. Apologies delivered after the grave is dug are cheaper than weeds. I have no intention of forgiving you now.”
“We will play this out to the bitter end. Whoever blinks first is a mutt!”
Having delivered his verdict, Chen Changsheng tore into the roasted meat with large, tearing bites.
Seeing its offering of goodwill so ruthlessly rejected, the sentient will of the Nether Forest withdrew into silence.
It seemed the immortal and the ancient woods were locked in a stubborn stalemate once more.
Half an hour later, Chen Changsheng wiped the grease from his chin, finishing his meal.
Staring at the pile of stripped bones, he didn’t hesitate, immediately sweeping them into the boundless void of his System.
With the remnants of his meal erased from the world, Chen Changsheng lay back against a bed of withered leaves, staring up at the sunless canopy.
Before his long slumber, he had spent eighty bitter years meditating on the structural flaws of the Nether Forest.
After countless deductions, he had arrived at a chilling conclusion: the Nether Forest was virtually flawless.
Every single blade of grass, every drop of blood spilled here could regenerate. Even if he reduced the entire forest to ash,
in the blink of an eye, the primordial breath would weave it back into existence.
Moreover, the flora and fauna continuously evolved through the crucible of combat. Theoretically, anyone trapped here was destined to be ground into dust by an immortal war of attrition.
Yet, it was the sheer perfection of this “cage” that bred a seed of doubt within Chen Changsheng’s mind.
The question lingered: Could the essence of the Nether Forest truly regenerate without end?
He had not immediately begun his campaign of destruction upon realizing this, because he suspected this superficial regeneration was not its true weakness.
Tianji Zi had been trapped in this green hell for six thousand years. A man of his intellect surely must have arrived at the same conclusion.
Yet, Tianji Zi had died a prisoner to the roots and vines. Clearly, the theory of infinite regeneration was missing a crucial piece.
Chen Changsheng had racked his brain, turning the puzzle over until it bled, finding no answer.
It wasn’t until one quiet moment, staring up at the false, gray heavens, that the revelation struck him like a bolt of heavenly tribulation.
The truth was elegantly simple: the Nether Forest was a sealed, hermetic realm.
The cycle of heaven-and-earth Qi within this isolated domain was perfectly balanced, allowing the Demon Beasts and spiritual flora to be reborn infinitely from their own decay.
No matter how many Demon Beasts he slaughtered or how many ancient trees he felled,
as long as their physical remnants remained to rot within this space, the total primordial essence of the realm remained entirely unchanged.
There was only one way to shatter this eternal cycle: to become a gluttonous maw, a devouring void that madly swallowed the very lifeblood of the Nether Forest without leaving a scrap behind.
Tianji Zi could never have executed this method. His spatial ring possessed finite limits, incapable of holding a fraction of a world’s worth of timber and bone.
Furthermore, while Tianji Zi’s cultivation had been profound, his mortal vessel could only contain so much Qi.
Compared to the vast, sprawling majesty of the Nether Forest, the essence Tianji Zi absorbed was a drop in the ocean. Upon his death, that borrowed essence simply returned to the soil.
But Chen Changsheng was not Tianji Zi. He possessed the System, an infinite, hungry void that knew no bounds.
Moreover, the foundation of Chen Changsheng’s Dao was fundamentally superior.
The only flaw in his “Body Cultivation” method was its monstrous, almost parasitic demand for worldly resources.
To force his cultivation to advance by leaps and bounds, ruthless, gluttonous consumption was the swiftest path.
He had already crossed the threshold into the seventh realm.
Given the terrifying depth of his foundation, cultivating the seventh realm to absolute Perfection would require an astronomical ocean of spiritual marrow.
The countless Demon Beasts of the Nether Forest were the perfect, unwilling sacrifices to fuel his ascent.
A cold light flashed in his eyes. Chen Changsheng pushed himself off the rotting leaves and resumed his task as the forest’s executioner.
But before his axe bit into the first trunk, he cast a provocative sneer toward the deep woods.
“I will say it one last time: if you regret crossing me, open a void-path to the central region.”
“Otherwise, I will bleed you dry, down to the last withered root.”
Lifting his heavy iron axe, Chen Changsheng began to hum a bizarre, off-key tune.
“In the little forest, chop, chop, chop…”
…
Four centuries bled away. As the decades blurred, fueled by his massive, continuous consumption of the forest’s flesh and timber,
Chen Changsheng’s cultivation deepened, his aura growing increasingly dense and heavy.
With his physical vessel fortified, the speed at which he butchered Demon Beasts and leveled ancient groves became terrifying.
It was in the twelve-hundredth year of his imprisonment that the Nether Forest finally snapped.
The essence this lone human had devoured was not yet fatal, but it could no longer endure the relentless, parasitic theft!
Left unchecked, even a mountain of pure jade would eventually be hollowed out by a single, persistent rat.
Thus, the sentient will of the realm mobilized its full wrath, launching a campaign of absolute extermination.
The earth tore open to birth two terrifying, eighth-realm Demon Beasts, backed by a sprawling, suffocating tide of lesser monsters.
Faced with the forest’s desperate retaliation, Chen Changsheng did not retreat a single half-step. He planted his feet and chose the path of absolute, bloody slaughter.
Though the two eighth-realm entities possessed raw power that eclipsed his own, they could not shatter him in a single strike.
His physical defense, sitting at a staggering two thousand points, was a fortress of tempered flesh and bone.
And as long as they could not kill him instantly, Chen Changsheng had room to breathe.
With every stolen breath, the Golden Silk weaving through his meridians fiercely stitched his torn flesh and shattered bones back together.
Furthermore, the Dao he had forged unified his essence, Qi, and spirit into an unbreakable monolith.
This unique path granted him monstrous endurance, unparalleled resilience, and a terrifying capacity for self-repair.
Had he remained in the sixth realm, the sheer toll of this battle might have drained him dry.
But having stepped firmly into the seventh realm, such mortal limits no longer bound him.
The realms beyond the sixth were explicitly forged to transcend the very concept of exhaustion.
…
The war that followed was apocalyptic, reducing more than half of the ancient Nether Forest to a scarred, cratered wasteland.
Two fists could not block four hands forever. Even Chen Changsheng could not weather the combined fury of two eighth-realm monstrosities and an endless sea of fangs and claws alone.
But he was not fighting alone. Curled within him was a very fat, very lethal companion.
The Golden Silk Cocoon existed solely to feast upon the bloodline of beasts. Chen Changsheng had nurtured it in secret, holding it as his trump card for this exact, bloody climax.
When the two eighth-realm beasts pinned him down, raining blows that left him battered and reeling, the Golden Silk Cocoon was unleashed to slaughter the masses without restraint.
Anything beneath the eighth realm was nothing more than fodder before the Cocoon’s terrifying appetite.
And the moment a beast fell, Chen Changsheng immediately swept its carcass into his void, denying the forest any chance to recycle its precious essence.
If the Nether Forest directed one of its eighth-realm titans to suppress the Golden Silk Cocoon, the pressure on Chen Changsheng instantly lifted.
Though his raw cultivation fell short of the eighth realm, his feral combat instincts, varied techniques, and instantaneous regeneration leveled the field.
In a brutal exchange of blows, he was entirely willing to trade a pound of his own flesh for the beast’s life.
Trapped in this bloody, grinding stalemate, the war raged without pause for sixty agonizing years.
In the sixtieth year, Chen Changsheng saw his opening. Three blinding streaks of golden light erupted from his hand, cleanly severing the head of one of the eighth-realm beasts.
The cost of this victory was horrifying: a gaping hole was punched clean through his abdomen, and a massive claw sheared through his neck, leaving his head lolling to the side, hanging by a mere third of its flesh.
Swish!
Ignoring the catastrophic damage, he instantly swept the titanic corpse into his void, slammed his right hand against his own head to keep it attached to his shoulders, and broke into a mad sprint.
Witnessing the permanent theft of an eighth-realm vessel, the collective consciousness of the Nether Forest boiled over in unadulterated frenzy.
The sheer volume of heaven-and-earth Qi locked within that beast was staggering. Losing it permanently was a crippling, agonizing blow to the very foundation of the realm.
A tidal wave of maddened beasts gave chase, but with the surviving eighth-realm titan fully entangled by the Golden Silk Cocoon, the lesser monsters could not bring Chen Changsheng down.
He sprinted for a full hour, his boots kicking up a storm of blood and dirt. Finally, his steps slowed to a halt.
Beneath his palm, the Golden Silk had already finished its grisly work, perfectly re-fusing the severed meat and bone of his neck and sealing his shattered abdomen.
Slowly, Chen Changsheng turned to face the roaring tide of monsters, a brilliant, feral smile splitting his face.
“Alright. Now, it’s my turn to hunt.”
…