In the grand tradition of traditional alchemy, transforming lead into gold was considered a commendable parlor trick for third-rate Daoist masters. Purifying thousand-year spirit ginseng into heaven-grade marrow pills was the life’s work of royal teachers. But what was currently occurring within the eighty-mile-wide sapphire core of Lin Xiao went beyond all earthly and sky classifications of the craft.
It wasn’t material transmutation. It was conceptual resurrection.
The Void Swarm had crossed three hundred galaxies with a singular, terrible purpose: to drag existence into the cold, featureless grave of breakdown. Trillions of tons of stars, sea-weights, ancient forests, and immortal palaces had been digested by the Broodmother, stripped of their identity, and reduced to a stale slurry of tightly packed negative mass. Left in that state, the energy was an existential poison. An un-matter that devoured light and chilled the spiritual leylines of living worlds.
If an ordinary Mahayana fighter had tried to digest such a monster, the negative flow-charge would have inverted their spirit veins, unmade their Golden Core. Then they dissolved their soul into gray static within three heartbeats.
Lin Xiao, however, possessed two advantages that no fighter in cosmic history had ever combined: the boundless, unbound solvent of the Primordial Chaos Dantian, and the calculating genius of the Omniscient Dao Spirit.
