Chapter 656 - 62: Qi Absorption and Eating Mist: Entering the Hall

Chapter 656: Chapter 62: Qi Absorption and Eating Mist: Entering the Hall

Leonard died without ever escaping the frozen time.

He was still clutching his chest, a trace of blood at the corner of his mouth, his face frozen with the terror he’d felt at Leonardo’s fury.

He didn’t even realize what was happening as the phantom image rolled over his body, erasing him from both the observable and unobservable worlds at once.

The hallway fell silent again.

Sunlight streamed in from outside, illuminating the empty floor, the open window, and Sebastian’s pale face.

He wanted to say something, but he saw that Cheris’s gaze remained fixed.

In the end, he said nothing.

Cheris withdrew her hand. Her slender index finger, painted with glossy black nail polish, still gleamed faintly in the sunlight.

Even though that finger had just crushed a Third-Level Wizard, even though the aftershocks of the phantom image still lingered in the hallway, her gaze never left Murphy.

From the moment she appeared, she hadn’t looked at anyone else.

"Are you really okay?"

Her voice was even softer than before, as if she were afraid of startling something.

Murphy looked at her, at the healing void behind her, at her pale cheeks, and at the careful tenderness in her eyes that she couldn’t quite hide.

"I’m really okay."

Cheris stared at him for a few seconds, then suddenly let out a soft laugh.

The smile bloomed on her pale face like a sudden ray of sunshine on a winter day.

"That’s true. How could anything possibly happen to my student?"

She put her hands on her hips, her chin slightly raised, her voice filled with a self-evident pride.

"I’m a Fourth-Level Wizard, and you’re the student I personally took in. If something happened to you, wouldn’t that just be a slap in my face?"

Just then, in the depths of Murphy’s consciousness, a torrent of profound knowledge surged in like a tide.

Qi Absorption and Eating Mist [Entering the Hall]—Techniques on how to use Mana, how to refine Mana, and how to improve Magic Power Quality unfolded, layer by layer, in the depths of his spirit.

He suddenly understood things he had never been able to figure out before.

The bottleneck that had trapped those at the Foundation Establishment Limit below the Golden Core realm, capping their Magic Power Quality at 5.0, was no longer an insurmountable chasm.

However, before he could fully digest all that knowledge, a bone-deep exhaustion surged up and completely overwhelmed him.

The influx of knowledge was the last straw. Having pushed his Mind Furnace to its limits for his deductions and exhausted all his Mana and Spiritual Power just to survive, Murphy could hold on no longer.

A Crimson light flared from his body, flickering one last time like a candle flame about to be extinguished in the wind.

Then, his body disintegrated into countless tiny points of light, which in the same instant re-condensed—into a small sword, about three inches long, that fell from mid-air.

The smile on Cheris’s face froze.

She instinctively reached out and caught the falling gleam of the sword, momentarily at a loss for what to do.

For some reason, she was suddenly reminded of the first day, when this very sword had fallen out of a spatial rift and landed before her.

She had picked it up just like this back then, too.

Of course, she seemed to recall just walking past it then.

But in the end, the sword ended up in her hands anyway.

And then she had held it all night as she slept, until it had taken human form, until she’d woken up to find a strange young man in her bed.

Her cheeks grew slightly warm. She instinctively wanted to throw the sword away, but the moment her fingers loosened, she quickly tightened her grip again.

She looked down at the flickering sword in her arms, at the cracks still spreading across its surface. Biting her lower lip, she finally hugged it to her chest, just as she had on that first day.

"Just a Spiritual Power overload... too much Energy consumption... he passed out..." she muttered, trying to find a reason. "Just a quick check, it’s perfectly normal..."

She raised a hand, and an invisible ripple spread from her fingertips, carefully enveloping the sword in her arms.

The ripple flowed over the sword’s blade once before the feedback returned to her senses.

She checked it again and again, and only after confirming the feedback showed no dangerous signals—just excessive consumption of Energy and Spiritual Power—did she finally let out a long sigh of relief.

She lowered her head, looking at the sword in her arms.

"You and your stubborn pride..."

she mumbled, her voice carrying a hint of gentle reproach, and a trace of joy that even she herself hadn’t noticed.

Then, holding the sword, Cheris began to walk on air.

Her small black leather shoes stepped into the void one after another, as if climbing an invisible staircase.

Sunlight shone from behind her, outlining her silhouette in a faint golden light. Her deep blue Magic Robe fluttered gently in the wind. In her arms, the small, three-inch sword lay quietly, the cracks on its blade slowly mending in the warmth of her palm. The blade’s dim light flickered like a sleepy star.

Sebastian stood at the edge of the shattered floor, watching her approaching figure. His voice was urgent. "President, about what happened today—"

"Shut up."

Cheris didn’t look at him.

Nor did she stop walking. "If my intuition didn’t tell me you were still useful, you’d be mixed in with those two piles of ash in the hallway right now."

Sebastian’s back was instantly soaked with cold sweat.

He stood on the edge of the fortieth floor’s chasm, opening his mouth, wanting to explain, to beg for mercy, to say something to salvage the situation, but the words all got stuck in his throat. He couldn’t utter a single one.

Cheris took two more steps, then suddenly stopped as if remembering something. She added coolly, "Oh, and that room has been entered by outsiders. I don’t want it anymore."

Sebastian froze for a second, then whipped his head around to look at the President’s room, which was already damaged beyond recognition. He suddenly realized what she meant.

BOOM—

An explosion erupted from the very center of the fortieth floor.

In that instant, the room was torn apart from the inside by an invisible force.

The walls collapsed outward, the floor gave way, the ceiling shattered, and flames and dust spewed from the broken windows.

But after spewing from the windows, the flames and debris were frozen in place at that same horizontal level by some unseen force. Not a single piece fell, not a single speck drifted down. Everything was just suspended in mid-air, as if the explosion had happened on solid ground.

And just like that, the fortieth through forty-third floors of the Society of Truth headquarters vanished in the explosion.

Sebastian was thrown into the air by the blast wave, sent flying like a kite with a broken string.

In the process, his body was blown into countless pieces—flesh, bone, and organs scattered and splattered through the gray-white dust like a blooming flower.

But a moment later, the pieces began to reassemble.

Bones flew back from the dust, flesh coalesced from the fragments, and organs returned one by one to their proper places.

A few seconds later, the man in the dark formal suit was floating in mid-air again, completely whole.

He looked down at his clothes, which were shredded to rags, and at the various scrapes and grime covering his face.

He raised a hand, intending to repair his injuries and his clothes, but after a twitch of his fingers, he fell silent for a moment, then stopped.

Then, with a composed expression, he lowered his hand.

And so he remained, floating in the tattered clothes in the air where the fortieth floor used to be. He didn’t dare to move, letting the dust settle on his exposed skin in gray and white patches.

The cross-section of the building was exposed to the sun. The space where the fortieth to forty-third floors had been was completely empty, as if something had taken a giant bite out of the tower.

Yet the floors above and below were completely unharmed. The severed steel bars, shattered pipes, and broken floorboards all hung suspended in mid-air, held steady by an invisible force.

Sunlight poured through the massive gap, illuminating Sebastian as he floated in mid-air, and shining on the suspended rubble and dust.

Cheris’s figure had long since vanished, along with the flickering sword in her arms, disappearing into the morning sun of Zlesko City.