The Art of the Star-Stepping Phantom was a technique that defied conventional notions of travel. Wei was not moving through the world, but between its seams. Each step was a silent transition, a brief plunge into a non-space of absolute blackness before emerging hundreds of miles away. It was a disorienting, isolating mode of travel that would have shattered the sanity of a lesser cultivator, but to Wei, it was merely efficient.
For two weeks, he stepped through the unraveling grey lands, his destination the mythical Northern Crown mountain range. As he drew closer, the nature of the Void Corruption began to change. The frayed, blurry edges of reality started to give way to a landscape that was unnervingly sharp and clear, yet fundamentally wrong. He had entered a land not of unraveling, but of freezing.
The mountains of the Northern Crown were not made of stone, but of a substance that looked like frozen, black glass. They reflected no light, and their peaks were jagged, crystalline structures that clawed at a sky filled with motionless, grey clouds. The air was so cold it felt like a physical weight, a cold that did not just sap the heat from the body, but the very concept of motion. Nothing moved. Not a single gust of wind stirred the air. Not a single snowflake fell from the sky. It was a world frozen in the first moment of its own death.
Wei's 'Rune of Unchanging Self' burned with a low, constant warmth against his soul, the only thing preventing the absolute stasis of this place from seeping into his own being. He stood on a crystalline peak, his spiritual sense extending cautiously. The spiritual energy here was not frayed; it was frozen solid, locked into the black glass of the mountains.
His destination, the First Emperor's Tomb, was said to be at the very heart of this circular mountain range. He began to walk, his footsteps making no sound on the glassy ground. The silence was different here. It was not the absence of sound; it was the active suppression of it.
As he ventured deeper, he began to see figures. They were cultivators, hundreds of them, frozen mid-stride, mid-battle, mid-scream. Their bodies were not petrified into grey stone like the victims of the Grey Rot. They were perfectly preserved, their skin like flawless, translucent ice, their last expressions of terror or defiance locked on their faces for eternity. These were the masters of the northern sects, the warriors who had made their last stand here, only to be frozen in time by the corruption's final, absolute law.
Wei walked among them like a visitor in a museum of the dead. He recognized the emblems of a dozen different fallen sects on their frozen robes. He felt a flicker of his old, academic curiosity. He reached out a hand to touch the frozen arm of a swordsman who had been caught mid-lunge. The moment his finger made contact, the swordsman's body, and the intricate sword technique it was displaying, dissolved into a fine, glittering dust that settled on the ground without a sound.
"Interesting," Wei murmured. "The stasis is absolute, but fragile. The moment a new, external law is introduced, the preserved state collapses."
He continued on, his caution now at its absolute peak. This place was not just a graveyard; it was a gallery of ghosts, and he had no desire to disturb the exhibits. After another day of walking, he reached the center of the mountain range. There was no grand mausoleum, no towering monument. There was only a vast, perfectly flat, circular plain of the same black, glassy material. And in the very center of that plain, a single, simple, unadorned stone archway stood, leading down into darkness.
This was the entrance to the First Emperor's Tomb.
But it was not unguarded.
As Wei approached the archway, a figure coalesced from the frozen air before it. It was not a flickering paradox like the serpent, nor a geometric memory like the formation master. This was a being of perfect, solid form. It was a woman, dressed in the ancient, imperial battle armor of the First Emperor's personal guard. Her face was beautiful but utterly devoid of emotion, her skin the color of pale jade. Her eyes were closed, and she floated a few inches off the ground, a massive, crystalline spear held in her hands.
She was not alive. She was not dead. She was something else entirely. She was a 'Law-Puppet', a being whose soul had been completely erased and replaced by a single, absolute command, a sliver of a universal law. Her law, Wei could feel, was the law of absolute stasis. She was the source of the frozen silence that permeated the entire Northern Crown.
Wei stopped, his eyes narrowed. This was a true challenge. This was not a mindless beast or a looping memory. This was a perfect guardian, a being whose entire existence was dedicated to a single, unwavering purpose: to stop anyone from entering that archway.
"You are the guardian," Wei stated, his voice the first sound to truly disturb the silence in centuries.
The woman's eyes slowly opened. They were not eyes of flesh, but orbs of pure, solidified light, containing no pupil, no iris, only a cold, unwavering focus. "None shall pass," her voice echoed, not from her lips, but from the space around her. It was a voice made of pure, conceptual authority.
"I have no quarrel with you or your master," Wei said, testing her. "I am merely a scholar, seeking knowledge."
"The Master's rest is eternal. Your presence is a disruption. You will leave, or you will be stilled," the guardian replied, her logic absolute and unbending.
Wei sighed. There would be no negotiation. He had to get past her. He decided to test the limits of her law. He sent a single Venom-Quenched Soul Needle, coated in a fast-acting corrosive poison, streaking towards her. Halfway to its target, the needle slowed, its momentum bleeding away into the frozen air, before it stopped completely and clattered harmlessly to the glassy floor, its poison rendered inert. Her law was absolute.
"Very well," Wei said. He did not flare his aura. He simply activated his 'Domain of Abyssal Stillness'.
The world around them changed. The absolute, frozen silence of the guardian's law was suddenly met by a different kind of stillness. Wei's domain was not about freezing motion; it was about suppressing life, about creating a perfect, silent vacuum. The two concepts of 'stillness' met, and the air crackled with an invisible, conceptual conflict. It was like two opposing pressures meeting, a grinding, slow-motion war of attrition.
The guardian tilted her head, a flicker of something akin to confusion in her light-filled eyes. Her law was absolute, but Wei's was a different flavor of the same concept, and it was not being negated. It was being resisted.
She lunged, her movement an act of instantaneous translocation. She was simply there, the tip of her spear an inch from Wei's forehead.
Wei did not dodge. He simply took a single step, using the Art of the Star-Stepping Phantom to vanish. He reappeared on the other side of the clearing. The battle had begun, but it would not be a battle of blows. It would be a battle of endurance.
For three days and three nights, a silent, epic struggle took place on the frozen plain. Wei never stopped moving, constantly circling the guardian, his Star-Stepping Phantom art allowing him to stay one step ahead of her instantaneous attacks. His 'Domain of Abyssal Stillness' was in a constant, grinding conflict with her law of stasis. It was mentally and spiritually exhausting, a war fought on a conceptual level.
During this time, he used his Stygian Weaver's Silk. The invisible, ethereal threads spread out, creating a massive, intricate web throughout the entire clearing. He was not trying to bind her; he knew that would be useless. Instead, he was using the threads as a delivery system. He began to secrete a microscopic, aerosolized version of his 'Dao Severance' poison. This was a gamble; the poison was a new, unstable creation, not yet perfected. He had no idea if it would even work on a being of pure law.
The guardian, a being of pure law, had no body to poison. But her law was a structure, and Wei's experimental poison was designed to dismantle such things. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the poison began to work. It was like a single drop of acid on a mountain of steel. The effect was negligible at first, but Wei was patient.
On the fourth day, he noticed the flaw. As the distant, unseen sun reached its zenith in the outside world, he perceived a tiny, fractional wavering in the guardian's otherwise perfect stasis field. It lasted for less than a second, a momentary recalibration as her ancient programming adjusted to the world's natural celestial cycle. She was a perfect law, but she was still bound to the world she was created in.
That was the weakness. That was the crack in the diamond.
He spent another full day in his circular, evasive dance, waiting, conserving his energy for that single, fleeting moment. As the sun reached its peak on the fifth day, he felt the wavering begin.
"Now," he whispered.
He did not attack. He simply focused the entirety of his will, the full power of his Spirit Emperor cultivation, into his domain. He stopped suppressing life and started suppressing law. At the same time, he commanded the unstable 'Dao Severance' poison that now saturated the air to activate all at once, focusing its full, corrosive power on that single, momentary flaw.
The guardian froze, her attack faltering. Her perfect, absolute law, assaulted from within by the poison and from without by Wei's domain, encountered a variable it could not compute. Her entire existence was predicated on perfection. The introduction of a single, undeniable imperfection caused a catastrophic failure in her core programming.
With a final, sorrowful chime that echoed the one from the formation master, her body shattered into a billion motes of pure, white light. As the light faded, a single object fell to the ground. It was a single, flawless, black crystal.
Wei walked forward and picked it up. It was cool to the touch. He looked at the simple, unadorned stone archway. He had defeated the guardian at the gate, but he had no idea what other defenses lay within. He now held the crystal that was its core.
He stood there for a long moment, looking at the crystal in his hand, then at the frozen masters around him. He was a practical man, and he did not delude himself. His intellect and his poisons were formidable, but they were not the only reason he was still standing. He was keenly aware that without the cheat-like abilities the system had provided—the 'Rune of Unchanging Self' to anchor his reality, the 'Star-Stepping Phantom' art to navigate this broken world—he would have become just another frozen statue in this silent museum of the dead. His own power was great, but the system was the foundation upon which his impossible achievements were built.
He took a deep breath, the first he had taken in what felt like an eternity, and walked towards the archway, ready to step into the tomb of the First Emperor, the heart of the Void Corruption.