Chapter 161 | The Collapse

Chapter 161: 161 | The Collapse

The sky above the deep core area tore open with a deafening, unnatural crack.

Silver light bled through the jagged fracture, casting a harsh glare over the broken black rocks. The two-week limit of the Myriad Herb Secret Realm was ending, and the fragmented dimension was beginning to tear itself apart.

Chunks of floating stone broke away from the heavens, plummeting into the forest below with explosive crashes.

The spiritual energy in the air turned violent, whipping around Lin Tian like invisible, razor-sharp blades.

He did not run. He simply adjusted his internal flow, reinforcing his meridian walls against the crushing pressure.

The ambient Qi no longer flowed in natural currents; it fractured into jagged shards that scraped against his skin.

Ahead of him, the ground suddenly split open. A silent, empty void hovered in the air, distorting the light around it.

A falling leaf drifted into the empty space and was sliced perfectly in half without a single sound.

Lin Tian stopped. He extended his spiritual sense, mapping the hidden fault lines and the chaotic rhythm of the falling spatial tears.

The collapsing realm was a deadly minefield, but every trap had a structural pattern.

The leylines beneath the soil were snapping one by one, creating a cascading failure across the terrain. He calculated the safe nodes and the exact weight his body could apply before triggering a secondary collapse.

He stepped exclusively on the stable nodes of the earth, moving forward with cold, ruthless efficiency.

The physical toll was heavy, forcing him to circulate his Qi in a continuous loop just to keep his lungs clear.

***

Three kilometers behind him, the three scavenger leaders stood at the edge of the ruined crater.

The narrow gorge was completely sealed by a massive avalanche of black rock. The Guardian Beast was dead, and the Pure-Yang Lotus was gone.

But the scarred leader of the first team was not ready to accept defeat.

He knelt in the dust, his fingers tracing a faint, almost invisible boot print near the western ridge.

"He went this way," the scarred leader muttered, his eyes narrowing. "The terrain here is too rough for a normal escape. He is hiding something."

The second leader stepped forward, his spiritual energy flaring with impatience. "The realm is collapsing. We need to find the exit. If we chase him into the unstable zone, we could be torn apart by spatial tears."

"He has the Pure-Yang Lotus," the scarred leader snapped, standing up. "And the beast cores. And the secondary herbs. A single Early Stage disciple could not have killed that beast and taken everything without using high-tier talismans. He is wounded. He is slow."

Greed quickly overrode their fear. The promise of a Tier-4 herb and a spatial ring full of high-grade materials was worth the risk.

They had spent weeks scavenging the outer rim for scraps. Now, a fortune was within their grasp.

"Track his spiritual residue," the scarred leader ordered his team. "We follow him into the tear zone. We take everything he has, and then we find the exit."

The three groups moved out, their eyes fixed on the faint trail leading deep into the collapsing core area.

They ignored the violent tremors shaking the ground and the silver cracks splitting the sky.

Blinded by the promise of wealth, they saw the collapsing realm as just another obstacle on their way to riches.

***

An hour later, Lin Tian walked into a narrow, rocky valley.

The walls on both sides were steep and composed of dark, brittle stone. The spiritual energy here was incredibly unstable.

Tiny, dormant spatial faults crisscrossed the ground like a spider web, waiting for a single trigger to tear open.

He stopped in the center of the valley and turned around.

A moment later, the three scavenger teams emerged from the rocky path ahead, blocking his retreat.

More than a dozen cultivators fanned out, their weapons drawn, their eyes glowing with predatory greed.

Their combined auras disturbed the fragile air, causing tiny spatial sparks to pop and hiss around their boots.

The scarred leader’s sword glowed with a harsh, unstable fire Qi, while the second leader’s spear radiated a heavy, earth-attribute pressure.

They were confident in their combined strength, unaware that the ground they stood on was a loaded trap.

The scarred leader stepped forward, a cruel smile spreading across his face.

He looked at Lin Tian’s solitary figure and the lack of heavy pressure radiating from him.

"End of the line, junior," the scarred leader mocked, his voice echoing off the steep walls. "You led us on a good chase. But now, you are going to hand over your spatial ring. Every herb, every core, every pill. If you resist, we will cut you into pieces and take it from your corpse."

Lin Tian’s expression shifted. He took a step backward, his posture tightening as if struck by fear.

He looked at the dozen armed cultivators surrounding him, then glanced at the unstable ground beneath his feet.

His mind rapidly calculated the structural integrity of the valley floor. The fault lines were perfectly aligned.

"You do not understand," Lin Tian said, his voice carrying a slight tremor. "This area is highly unstable. The spatial tears are active. If you attack me here, the energy backlash will kill us all."

The second leader laughed loudly. "Do not try to trick us with ghost stories! You are just an Early Stage weakling trying to scare us. Hand over the ring!"

Lin Tian took another step back, moving deeper into the center of the valley. His boots crunched softly on the brittle stone. "I am warning you. The ground beneath us is fractured. One wrong move..."

"Shut up and die!" the scarred leader roared.

He raised his sword and lunged forward, his team rushing in right behind him. They poured their spiritual energy into their weapons, ignoring the violent fluctuations in the air around them.

Their greed made them reckless. Their arrogance made them blind.

Lin Tian stopped walking.

The faint tremor of fear vanished from his posture. His spine straightened, and his gaze locked onto the scarred leader with absolute, chilling calm.

A faint, sharp light flickered in his eyes.

He kept his blade sheathed. He simply raised his right hand and pressed two fingers against the air.

He channeled a dense, piercing needle of Primordial Yang Qi and struck the empty space directly in front of his feet.

The energy did not hit the scavengers. It hit the hidden structural fault line beneath the soil.

The pressure multiplied in a fraction of a second, shattering the fragile web of energy holding the dormant spatial tears together.

The earth groaned, a deep, unnatural sound that vibrated through the soles of their boots.

CRACK!

The sound was not loud, but it was absolute.

The space in the center of the valley simply tore open.

It was not a physical explosion. It was a sudden, violent rupture in the fabric of reality.

Dozens of invisible, razor-sharp spatial blades erupted from the empty air, spinning in a chaotic, deadly vortex.

The sheer force of the tearing dimension created a vacuum, pulling dust and loose rocks into the void.

The scarred leader was mid-stride when the spatial tear expanded.

He did not even have time to scream.

The invisible blades passed through his body as if it were made of soft butter. His sword arm separated from his shoulder, spinning through the air before dropping to the ground.

A second later, his head slid cleanly off his neck.

Thick fountains of blood sprayed across the dark rocks.

The second leader tried to activate a movement talisman, but the spatial distortion shattered the paper before he could channel his Qi.

A massive spatial blade caught him at the waist, severing his torso cleanly in half. His upper body slid off his legs, his face frozen in a mask of absolute shock.

The rest of the scavengers crashed into the spatial vortex. The chaotic blades tore through their defensive Qi, slicing through their armor, their flesh, and their bones.

Screams of absolute agony filled the narrow valley.

Cultivators were cut in half, their limbs severed, their bodies falling into the expanding spatial rift. The air turned thick and metallic with the scent of fresh blood.

Lin Tian stood perfectly still, exactly three feet outside the radius of the deadly vortex. The wind from the spatial tear whipped his robes, but his stance remained completely immovable.

He watched the blades tear the greedy cultivators to pieces. His face was a mask of absolute indifference.

There was no malice in his actions, only the cold arithmetic of survival.

The kill cost him almost nothing. A single thread of Qi to trigger the fault line.

Within ten seconds, the screaming stopped.

The spatial vortex slowly stabilized, the invisible blades fading back into the dormant earth.

The valley fell completely silent, save for the wet sound of blood dripping from severed limbs.

More than a dozen cultivators had been reduced to nothing but red mist and broken meat.

Lin Tian lowered his hand. He looked at the headless corpse of the scarred leader lying near his boots. A low-grade spatial ring rested on the dead man’s finger.

Lin Tian did not bother to collect it. The contents of a scavenger’s ring were not worth the time to clean the blood off his hands.

He had no use for their cheap, blood-stained trinkets.

Lin Tian adjusted his breathing, clearing his meridians of the chaotic ambient Qi. He had not wasted a single drop of his own energy on a direct fight.

He had simply let the realm’s natural collapse do the work for him.

He turned around and continued walking south.

The ground trembled violently beneath his feet as another massive crack split the sky above. The realm was dying, but his path to the exit was finally clear.