Chapter 86: How Dare You Meet Me in Your True Body

Chapter 86: How Dare You Meet Me in Your True Body

As I said—Xiang Bianfeng never expected me to skip confronting his force of consciousness outright and instead grind it down into scraps using something he’d never seen before.

That humiliation was eating at him now, sharp and furious.

He noticed I’d dropped my invisibility while using my force of consciousness, and the urge to land a killing blow took hold of him.

He drew qi into his body and thrust both hands toward me, fusing martial technique and force of consciousness into one strike—his strongest.

By then I’d settled enough into my cosmic consciousness that I didn’t feel the need to hide anymore. I let myself be seen, standing quietly seven or eight meters away, watching him bring his most lethal attack down on me.

Lethal?

To anyone watching, this would have looked like the strongest thing he had. It fused every ounce of his martial technique with the full weight of his force of consciousness. Whether you tried to take it head-on or dodge, it would still find you.

Martial technique has direction. Force of consciousness doesn’t need one.

Wrapping martial technique inside force of consciousness—using the force to track and martial power as the striking core—was probably his real killing move. The Tiangang Hand had just been the appetizer. This tracking, fused strike was his true weapon.

To the patrol team, it looked utterly inescapable. They scattered in a panic, desperate to avoid being caught in the fallout.

But why would I need to dodge, or fight it head-on?

It wasn’t as if I couldn’t see straight through it.

With cosmic consciousness active, I could view things from more dimensions than one. This attack, I could see clearly—its past, its present, and everything it was about to become.

So I shaped my cosmic force of consciousness into a giant hand and caught the fused strike gently, then began turning it, kneading it, working it down until it became a crystal ball the size of a basketball, shot through with strange, shifting color. I picked it up first and studied it a moment. Impressive, honestly—more than I could produce myself, even now. But there was no reason to waste it. I could just give it back.

So I turned my hand over and set the kaleidoscopic crystal ball gently down on top of Xiang Bianfeng’s head.

A boom.

He was gone.

His own power had driven him straight through the floor.

I dropped down through the hole after him, walked over, and looked down at him, flattened by his own strike. “Fourth Pavilion Elder,” I said quietly, “is this parasitic host of yours even usable anymore? Completely flattened. You’ll want a new one.”

He struggled to lift his head from the crushed remains of his body. “No… impossible. You—what rank are you?”

“Don’t know. Honestly. But it’s definitely not higher than yours.”

He forced the words out. “You’re… lying… to me.”

Then he had nothing left to say.

His consciousness had likely already returned to his true body.

I hadn’t lied to him. My rank really wasn’t higher than his—I knew that much myself.

But his rank was measured on the ordinary scale, the kind of force of consciousness I’d once harvested in the Eighteen Levels of Hell. It had strength, and quality too, but it was still only the kind an ordinary person could ever cultivate or harvest.

Call it human force of consciousness.

The reason Pu Liuqian hadn’t feared me was her belief that the Eighteen Levels of Hell couldn’t produce anything above rank fifteen. Feng Du hadn’t been generous out of kindness either—he knew the harvesting had a hard ceiling. I understood the logic. Prisoners down there could never carry much strength in the first place. Anything too strong, you couldn’t even chew through. Stacking weakness into strength only gets you so far.

But what I carried now was cosmic force of consciousness—something that read the world from more dimensions than a human mind ever could. Its raw strength might not be much; I’d only had three months to…