Chapter 1570: The Immortal Skeleton's Restoration Point
The Cat Treasure of this era was clearly far weaker than the one Li Fan had encountered in his previous cycles.
Even with the remarkable artifacts wielded by the crew of the Shang Immortal Boat, a being that could leap forth and subdue the Hunger Immortal should never have found itself in such a sorry state.
Pinned down by the relentless assault, the black-and-white cat's predicament grew increasingly dire. However, Li Fan noticed that while the cat appeared to be taking a severe beating from the Immortal Boat's crew, it had yet to sustain any real harm.
And the young man they called the "Holy Lord," after his initial transformation into an orange cat, had made no other move. He simply stood by, silently observing the unfolding scene.
"The offensive from the Shang Immortal Boat crew is ferocious, but it's ultimately ineffective for capturing the Cat Treasure. The key, I suspect, still lies with him," Li Fan mused, recalling the blue chains that had bound the orange cat.
Li Fan's intuition was rarely wrong.
After being battered for some time, the bruised but uninjured black-and-white cat actually began to acclimate to the attacks from the crew's artifacts. Its low roars gradually intensified, becoming as piercing as a blaring horn accompanied by war drums. Its black and white fur began to bristle. It stared murderously at the Immortal Boat crew members who were mauling it, its eyes flashing with a savage light.
Just as the tide of battle was about to turn, the Holy Lord of the Holy Merchants finally made his move.
He transformed into a cat once more, but this time it wasn't the orange decoy from before. Instead, it was a phantom cat composed entirely of blue light. The azure glow rippled and swayed, dreamy and surreal, its form hundreds of times larger than the real Cat Treasure.
"Meow~"
With a soft cry, the blue phantom exploded into billions of fine threads, all surging toward the black-and-white cat.
Unlike its reaction to the previous attacks, the black-and-white cat now showed palpable fear. Its fur stood on end, and its back arched high. It let out a sharp, explosive shriek, blasting away all the attacks assailing it.
It swiped a paw toward a nearby point in space, and the great tree formed of deathly energy where it had been hiding was instantly pulverized, seemingly absorbed into its body. The black patches of its fur deepened in color as a result.
At the same moment, the black-and-white cat swept its tail toward the distance.
Li Fan dimly perceived that at least tens of thousands of the Holy Merchant people had lost all their life force in an instant, their vitality siphoned away by the cat.
In a flash, having absorbed a vast amount of life and death energy, the cat's pupils turned into one black and one white orb. The black-and-white cat moved with an eerie grace, its form rippling like a flowing shroud. Then, astonishingly, it sat cross-legged in the void of the battlefield, just like a human.
It pointed a single claw forward into the emptiness.
The next moment, an endless torrent of life and death energy seemed to pour from its body. Or perhaps, it was that single gesture that had thrown the fundamental Dao of life and death, which permeates the world, into utter chaos.
The Dao of life and death is the very bedrock of existence and evolution. Now, stirred by the Cat Treasure, it was as if a storm had been conjured from nothing, twisting the life and death of all things.
Countless artifacts were scattered by the tempest. The billions of blue threads were forced to revert to their original form.
Yet the black-and-white cat sat at the storm's center, motionless as a mountain.
It watched as the living perished and the dead were obliterated within the maelstrom.
Although the blue figures of the Shang Immortal Boat crew possessed a unique form of life, they were still within the category of "living beings." Caught off guard, they were swept up by the storm and scattered, their lives extinguished in an instant.
On the battlefield, only the Holy Lord of the Holy Merchants, still in his blue light-cat form, survived.
The situation had been shockingly reversed, yet not a trace of alarm could be seen on the blue light-cat's face, even as the storm of life and death threatened to expand and consume the entire star-filled void.
With an indifferent gaze fixed on the black-and-white cat at the heart of the storm, the blue light-form of the Holy Lord suddenly swelled a hundredfold, completely enveloping the entire life-and-death tempest.
Within the storm, innumerable blue threads flickered like lightning. They were not annihilated by the chaotic forces but instead grew stronger with the passage of time.
Slowly, this region of chaos was dyed a deep blue.
The life-and-death storm continued to spread outward, forcing Li Fan to retreat his consciousness again and again.
"This divine ability... now this is more like the Cat Treasure I know."
"An attack on the level of the Great Dao, shaking the very foundations of order. If allowed to spread unchecked, without anyone to suppress it, it could even swallow an entire possibility..."
The black-and-white storm of life and death swept through nearly the entire expanse of space.
In the end, the once-vibrant Shang Immortal Boat had been transformed into a land of utter death.
Only about a hundred beings managed to survive this catastrophe.
But within the dissipating storm, the dense, inescapable net of blue threads, and the black-and-white cat bound tightly within its center, now deep in slumber, declared the identity of the battle's true victor.
The storm subsided, and the blue threads slowly contracted.
The black-and-white cat met the same fate as the orange cat, suppressed and imprisoned.
The young Holy Lord reverted to his human form. He gazed upon the dead, silent expanse of space before him, showing no emotional response whatsoever.
The next instant, a sudden change occurred.
An inexplicable ripple descended, sweeping across the entire space.
Then, all the beings that had vanished, that had perished, were restored to their original state.
In just a few breaths, life bloomed once more in this stretch of the void!
Only then did a faint smile appear on the Holy Lord's face.
"What is this...?"
Li Fan, who had witnessed the dramatic reversal, was inwardly shaken.
The scene was all too familiar.
"It's just like [Truth]."
"But it lacks the aura of the True False Transformation."
"That ripple just now, it came from..."
Li Fan looked up, toward the space above this region.
The Holy Lord and the resurrected crew of the Immortal Boat began to study their latest prize.
But Li Fan did not follow them back. Instead, he quietly flew toward the location he had just sensed.
Though it wasn't simply located directly above in the spatial structure, Li Fan's exceptionally keen perception allowed him to smoothly track the ripple to its source.
A skeleton of gleaming white bone lay there, its head tilted to one side.
The hollow sockets of its skull were aimed directly at the Shang Immortal Boat below.
Li Fan felt a faint sense of danger emanating from the skeleton.
He didn't approach, merely observing from a distance.
With all his knowledge and experience, he couldn't immediately discern the nature of the Dao contained within these bones.
But there was no doubt that this skeleton was responsible for the instantaneous "restoration" of the annihilated Immortal Boat.
"The True False Transformation creates something from nothing. This Dao, however, returns things to their original state."
"Even compared to the True False Transformation, the standing of this Dao is extremely high. More importantly, I can sense that it is not a foreign power, but a Dao inherent to the [Primal Possibility]."
"How did it fall under the control of the Shang Immortal Boat?"
"Judging by its aura, it seems to have been here for a very long time."
Li Fan couldn't help but recall Jian Daosheng's description of the Xuanxian Ark.
"The Xuanxian Ark escaped from an experimental site guarded by observers from the Immortal Realm."
"As mere NPCs, their ability to escape the Immortal Realm's control says something about how extraordinary they are."
"It seems the Xuanxian Ark, as the losing side of the schism, is far less resourceful than the Shang Immortal Boat. They just don't know it."
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