Chapter 1756: The Star Descends to Devour the Mortal Body
“Shou Qiu!”
“Mo Yongge!”
“Lian Shan!”
Starlight rained down upon the Mountain and Sea, twisting his once-dearest comrades into its slaves.
Li Fan screamed himself hoarse, desperately trying to awaken them.
But it was all for naught.
Their resolute eyes had already turned pitch-black and indifferent.
Not a flicker of struggle crossed their faces, only savage contortions as they unleashed a barrage of divine arts without restraint.
Even the Mountain and Sea itself, the triumphant survivor, let out a piercing shriek, vowing to annihilate Li Fan.
The very world he had fought to the death to protect no longer remembered his sacrifice, treating him as a mortal enemy.
One moment, they had been celebrating their hard-won victory; the next, everything had been cataclysmically overturned.
Allies lost, their monumental effort undone at the final hurdle.
Under the eerie glow of the starlight, all life was warped and twisted. The Mountain and Sea was reborn, but it was no longer the world it once was.
Everything he knew, everything familiar, was rewritten in an instant by the lone Star. A pain like a knife twisting in his heart wracked Li Fan, and tears streamed down his face.
He teetered on the verge of utter despair.
He did not fear repeated failure.
What was terrifying was this: after enduring thousands of tribulations and countless cycles of reincarnation, he had seemingly, finally, succeeded in averting disaster.
Only to fail to prevent the advent of the lone Star after all.
To be granted hope, only to have it mercilessly replaced with absolute despair.
Even Li Fan’s indomitable will was nearly shattered by the blow.
He let the attacks of the familiar Saints pierce his body, offering no resistance.
But in his final moments, witnessing the horrifying madness of the Mountain and Sea under the starlight, Li Fan forced his will to rally one last time, using the Dao of True-False Transformation to reverse everything.
“Hah...”
Li Fan gasped, snapping awake from the endless illusion.
This memory was different from the fleeting fragments that usually rushed past.
It was intensely, viscerally real, as if he had lived it himself in a past life.
He discovered the faint, lingering trace of a tear at the corner of his eye, a clear remnant of his immersion in the memory.
“It wasn’t just my emotions that were affected. Even...”
An intense, piercing pain shot through his entire body, as if the divine attacks from the Saints in his memory had truly happened in reality.
What horrified him even more were the specks of starlight that began to ooze from every pore of his body.
It was as if a solitary star had truly appeared overhead, its light locking onto him.
If the starlight he had been tainted with from reading the [Star Radiance Rhythm Summary] could be measured as one, then the starlight now converging upon him was a thousand.
And this was only the beginning.
The surrounding Dao Annihilation seemed to sense something, rushing toward him of its own accord as if to greet its king.
The sensation of being exposed to some unseen gaze grew stronger, as if he were being roasted over a blazing fire, his entire being on the verge of evaporating.
“When the true is made false, the false becomes true!”
Knowing full well the power of the Star, Li Fan immediately activated his True-False Transformation the moment he saw the strange phenomenon, attempting to suppress the starlight’s influence.
But before he could, the insidious corrosion from the lone Star’s eerie light had already, silently, taken hold.
“When the true is made true, the false-false becomes true!” What he had intended to use was the supreme Dao of True and False, but what he unleashed was a twisted, unrecognizable parody that had lost most of its essence.
Far from fading, the starlight only spread further.
Smack!
Caught completely off guard, Li Fan’s right hand violently slapped him across the face. It was not his own action; the starlight had seized control of his arm, using it as a beachhead to further invade his mind.
It succeeded.
Threads of starlight began to swarm in Li Fan’s left eye. Then, as if yanked by an immense force, the eyeball popped out of its socket.
Still connected by strings of flesh and sinew, the starlit eye swiveled halfway around and stared, eerily, back at him.
In the reflection of his own eye, Li Fan saw a vision of the future: his entire body saturated with starlight, transformed into a slave of the lone Star.
“Hmph!” Unafraid, Li Fan forced himself to focus, wielding his True-False Transformation as a blade to sever the flesh connecting the corrupted eye to his body.
But the eyeball did not lose its connection to him. In a flicker of light and shadow, it snapped back into its socket.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
After a moment of stillness, the starlit eye began to slam violently inward, again and again.
Blood gushed from the socket like a spring.
“Damn it...”
It was not that he could not bear the pain. In his countless past lives, Li Fan had endured tortures many times worse and had always persevered.
It was because as the eye continued to slam inward, his vision began to fill with starlight.
The starlight’s corrosion accelerated.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Maniacal laughter erupted from Li Fan’s lips, but it was not his own—it came from his mouth, now mutated and beyond his control.
With each word, his mouth seemed to tear a little wider. A moment later, his entire jaw was ripped apart.
He could no longer make a sound.
After the silence, Li Fan’s remaining upper lip began to move, opening and closing.
At first, there was no sound. But slowly, a rustling whisper began to issue from his ruined mouth.
The Dao Annihilation began to stir, swirling like a great wind, the disturbance rivaling the one caused by the mysterious gaze from before.
The points of light on his body erupted anew, like festering sores.
Except for his sea of consciousness, Li Fan’s entire body had fallen.
The low whispers from his own mouth were not just affecting his physical form.
They were twisting his memories.
Take the [Star Radiance Rhythm Summary] for example. Before, he had only given it a cursory glance, but now, as the voice echoed in his mind, he found the transformations of the starlight becoming simple and easy to understand.
So that was how it worked. How could it be so simple?
He almost succumbed to the fascination.
Fortunately, at that critical moment, the horrific image of his comrades-in-arms, twisted and broken under the starlight, flashed through his mind.
The shock jolted him, pulling him temporarily away from his fascination with the light.
But the allure of the starlight clung to him like a shadow, threatening to drag him back into the abyss at any moment.
In the face of this crisis, Li Fan became calmer than ever before.
He abandoned the defense of most of his sea of consciousness, focusing all his will on protecting its very core.
His thoughts raced. *The True-False Transformation can absolutely reverse the advent of the lone Star. Of that, there is no doubt. The reason I’m in this miserable state, so vulnerable to the starlight’s corrosion, is because my understanding of the transformation has been twisted by the Star.*
*The only way to survive...*
*...is to find a counterbalance, something that can restore my mastery of the True-False Transformation to what it should be!* R{An0+b~Еs
With grim resolve, Li Fan threw the last shred of his will into the Dao One Mountain Sea Map floating silently beside him.
Or, to be more precise, onto the True God Finger within the map!
When the Mountain Sea No-Boundary Stele bore the marks of the Saints, it was just that—a stele.
But when all later traces faded and it returned to its primordial form, what descended upon the world was the True God Finger!
Li Fan’s consciousness took refuge within the stele, and the starlight instinctively followed.
As the starlight scattered across its surface, the True God Finger materialized!
Although it was merely an illusory projection born from Li Fan’s own comprehension, its collision with the starlight he had drawn to himself produced an unbelievable transformation!
The meditative effigy of Shou Qiu beside the No-Boundary Stele was swallowed without a trace, not even having time to struggle.
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