45 Fallen Demon Hunter VS ESPer 8 (Third Chapter / End of Volume One)

It was only then that I realized I seemed to have made a grave mistake.

Zhuang Cheng had said that his flame was his spirit. My interpretation of this statement was that his spirit, while in standby mode, was merely ordinary spirit. Only when he unleashed his supernatural ability would his spirit act as fuel for the flame, or transform directly into the flame itself.

However, what if the reality was not like that?

Zhuang Cheng was a supernatural being capable of freely converting his ego into flame. If his spirit in standby mode was not ordinary spirit at all, but possessed the very attribute of a blazing fire, or even more closely resembled the form of "a flame mimetic to the spirit"…

Then would not what I had done be as foolish as reaching into an operating incinerator?

Yet reality even surpassed the metaphor; at that moment, I experienced a vision of witnessing the sun.

The instant I unleashed my paranormal ability against Zhuang Cheng, I felt as though I were colliding head-on with a blazing, scorching sun. Destruction, death, annihilation, vaporization and sublimation… I had already vividly foreseen fates of precisely such a nature.

At the same time, many problems I had previously been unable to understand were effortlessly unraveled in my mind. For instance, why Zhuang Cheng had claimed that he had never encountered any anomalies in the past.

He was not lying; most likely, he truly had never encountered any.

Anomalies would naturally attract one another—this was the commonplace law of the mortal world, yet even this trite law was powerless to bind true powerhouses. In fact, things would reach an extreme and reverse course, causing other anomalies to keep their distance from him.

Anomalies acting purely on instinct would avoid him out of fear, intelligent anomalies would unconsciously refrain from paying attention to him, and even anomalies manifesting purely as phenomena would brush past him due to unknown laws.

Now I could also understand why I had been unable to perceive any mana fluctuations from him. It was not because he possessed some special attribute, but rather because we were not in the same dimension. Just as a two-dimensional existence cannot perceive or interfere with a three-dimensional one, unless the object of my perception was the flame acting as a fragment of his spirit, or unless he deliberately lowered his own tier, it was impossible for me to perceive any mana fluctuations emanating from him.

Being in the mountain without knowing the mountain, to me he was an existence far too colossal, whereas to him I was an existence far too insignificant. In all likelihood, he was likewise unable to perceive my mana fluctuations, just as I had previously launched a soul attack against him yet he remained completely oblivious to it.

This was clearly the domain belonging to a Great Impermanence…

Wait… why had I not been burned to death yet?

Only then did I snap back to my senses; the hallucination had ended long ago. Yet Zhuang Cheng stood before me, seemingly still waiting for me to make my move.

"What's wrong? Aren't you going to strike?" he asked. "If you aren't coming over, I'm going to make a move."

With that, he took a step toward me, while I instinctively retreated, hurriedly checking my own spirit and supernatural power.

I immediately understood why I had not yet died. Before I could be incinerated by the phantom sun, the activation of my ability had ceased on its own.

Ordinarily, it would take only an instant for the phantom sun to burn me to death, but the duration from the activation to the cessation of my ability was less than an instant. Just as a mantis shrimp can generate a momentary temperature surpassing the surface of the sun yet cannot inflict any formidable destruction, contact lasting less than an instant was incapable of killing me. But the issue did not lie there; the question was why the ability had stopped on its own.

It was not because Zhuang Cheng had blocked my ability with mana, nor was it because my ability possessed some protective mechanism. It was simply because the duration of the ability had come to an end.

The time during which my ability trapped its target within the dead-end illusion depended on how many emotions—similar to those I had felt at the time—the target's spirit would generate in response to such an illusion. And if the ability terminated itself almost immediately upon contacting the target… that meant, that meant…

My ability had been overcome by his spirit before it even had a chance to be shattered by his mana…

"No, impossible, I refuse to accept this… I refuse to accept it!"

A fury of unknown origin drove me to roar ungracefully.

"What are you refusing to accept?" he asked, looking bewildered.

The contact of the supernatural power had been far too brief; he seemingly had no awareness whatsoever that my ability had ever been activated.

I no longer paid heed to his reaction, but regardless of everything, went all out—even operating my ability beyond my absolute limits—to manipulate every single shadow within my vicinity that I could command.

Countless shadows surged madly out from crevices and corners, transforming into sharp blades that shot toward Zhuang Cheng from all directions with the momentum of ten thousand arrows loosed at once. He manipulated the surrounding sea of fire to whip up waves, sweeping away the shadow arrows from every direction in an instant. Yet this was merely my feint of making a sound in the east while attacking in the west; by this moment, I had already seized control of the shadows on the floor below.

The moment he focused his attention on the visible attack, the floorboards beneath his feet were shattered by a surging tide of erupting shadows, which swallowed him up in the momentum.

The shadows instantly dissipated, yet Zhuang Cheng, who had originally been in the middle, had vanished into thin air. He had simply evaporated from the world.

It was not that he had dodged my attack; rather, I had directly transferred him into the shadow world.

Banishing a target to the shadow world yielded no benefits for me whatsoever, which was why I had never considered using such a trick against others in the past, and hadn't even been able to recall this application immediately just moments ago.

Right now, however, I only wanted Zhuang Cheng to die!

Logically speaking, even he should have been unable to think or survive in a world devoid of the concepts of time and space, let alone return!

Yet, the scene that unfolded next utterly shattered my hope.

Zhuang Cheng reappeared once more. Accompanied by a flash of fire in the air, a humanoid figure composed entirely of flames materialized high above, amidst countless overlapping and crisscrossing layers of reinforced concrete.

Unable to comprehend how he could have returned, I could only hastily gather all the surrounding shadows, transforming them into a giant serpent that lunged toward him. Yet I knew very well that this seemingly imposing attack was nothing more than a superficial show, and against him, it was utterly futile.

He merely raised his right hand and made a chopping motion toward the shadow giant serpent.

Before I could understand what had happened, I only saw a flash of overwhelmingly blinding fire, and the next instant my entire body was engulfed by an explosion. Under the shockwave, my physical form was blown far away like a withered leaf battered by a violent storm.

I was blasted right out of the half-built building, soaring even higher into the sky than the structure itself.

Within my inverted field of vision, I beheld an unimaginably magnificent waterfall of fire surging upward in reverse, cleaving the entire half-built building straight down the middle from top to bottom!

As for the shadow giant serpent, it had long since been wiped out of existence, while deafening explosions echoed endlessly.

How could anyone possibly fight such an absurd opponent? If I were to plunge into the shadows and flee the moment I hit the ground… I would definitely be caught…

No, even if I could escape…

I would…

Scenes from my past life flickered across my mind one after another.

Yearning for a world of magic and anomalies in my youth, kneeling in despair in a dead-end alley during my young adulthood, murdering and abandoning my conscience in middle age in the pursuit of power…

And the past words of the Oddity Maker echoed amidst them:

——When you despair from the bottom of your heart and resign yourself to fate, concluding that you are utterly powerless to turn the tide…

——The seed of the heart will leave you.

The final image frozen in my consciousness was the expression of Zhuang Cheng, who remained entirely oblivious to the fact that my supernatural ability had ever been activated.

With utter emptiness, I closed my eyes.

The seed of the heart cultivated until now vanished from my body like a bubble in a dream.

Meanwhile, the power permeating my entire body lost its core and began to run amok, tearing my physical form to shreds from within…