The fourth bolt was not a spark discharge.
It was a deletion command.
A pencil-thin line of pure, light-absorbing blackness dropped from the apex of the vortex. As it passed through the air, the sky cold air didn’t ignite. It ceased to exist. That left a true physical empty pocket that hissed with the ear-splitting sound of collapsing reality.
Three miles away atop Falcon Roost Peak, Elder Kuang rose to his feet so wildly that his carved stone seat split in two.
“The Nine-Void Annihilation Ray...” Kuang’s voice trembled with a horror he hadn’t felt in three hundred years of Golden Core training. “On an outer sect fire slave? The Heavenly Dao is eradicating an unhallowed impurity at the root. The boy is already ash.”
In the basin below, Lin Ke looked at the black needle falling toward him.
No grounding grid could redirect this strike.
Shen Yue’s copper traces, Meng Shan’s meteor-iron shield, the dark rock bedrock—all of it would be atomized at the core level if it touched this entropic beam. This was not energy to be shunted to ground. This was the deepest compiler error of the universe, sent to erase an illegal variable.
