Chapter 872: Zero (2)

By the end, he couldn’t help but laugh in cruel mockery. A glint of killing frost flashed in Li Xiaofei’s eyes.

Shlick.

The Blood-Drinking Sword twisted sharply and a soul-searing agony burst through Nie Yucheng’s body. Even his very soul seemed to writhe in torment.

“Aaaargh!” A shriek of unimaginable pain tore from his throat.

No one could withstand such suffering, not even the toughest warrior. And Nie Yucheng... was far from that. Yet even in the midst of his screams, he refused to give up the location of Si Kongxue and the others.

Li Xiaofei did not hesitate further. He immediately dismissed the Realm of Eternal Samsara. Leaving Nie Yucheng skewered on the Blood-Drinking Sword, he returned to the real world while dragging the man along like a bloodied banner as he began searching the Forging Association buildings in a frenzy.

But even after overturning the entire place, Li Xiaofei still found no trace of Si Kongxue or the others. He did, however, detect remnants of their aura in a sealed chamber. They were clear signs that both Si Kongxue and her daughter had been there. But they had already been moved.

“Tell me, where were they taken?” Li Xiaofei growled, lifting Nie Yucheng by the sword, his patience nearly gone. “Speak! Now!”

Cough, cough, cough...

Nie Yucheng spat out blood, his face twisted in a broken smile. He said, “I don’t know... hahaha... With my level of authority, all I could do was borrow them to bait you. Even during that period, Zero personally oversaw everything. There was no room for error. The moment you appeared at the Forging Association base, they were transferred elsewhere.”

Zero. The supreme leader of Eden in the Xiao Kuang Star Region. The true puppet master behind the curtain. A shadow looming over every cultivator’s head. For centuries, both military and civilian forces, and even elements within Eden itself, had tried to overthrow and assassinate him. Yet he still lived. And everyone who had tried to kill him... was dead.

Even someone like Nie Yucheng, who was vicious, cunning, and obsessed with power, could do nothing but submit quietly beneath Zero’s feet. He could only carry out orders in trembling deference. That alone spoke volumes of Zero’s terrifying might.

Li Xiaofei had once received a trove of intelligence on Eden from the Chu Family, much of which described Zero in vague and fearful terms. But even among all that, very little concrete information existed. They were all just repeated warnings of how formidable and fearsome he was.

“You’re saying...” Li Xiaofei’s voice turned cold as he asked, “Zero was here this whole time?”

“He’s everywhere,” Nie Yucheng rasped. His hoarse voice, tinged with reverence and death, made those words feel like a chilling whisper from the abyss.

“Where is his stronghold in Stargate Base?” Li Xiaofei pressed further.

No matter how powerful Zero was, he had to be found. He had to be defeated. Li Xiaofei would stop at nothing to save his wife and daughter.

“He is everywhere.” Nie Yucheng’s answer remained the same, a hushed murmur, like a prayer whispered by a devout believer.

Li Xiaofei felt a subtle tremor in his heart. It was clear now, Nie Yucheng, for all his ruthlessness and cunning, was someone who feared pain and death. Just moments ago, he had nearly given in. But the mere thought of Zero had overwhelmed even his physical agony and spiritual torment with sheer terror.

How afraid must one be of another person to reach the point where that fear outweighed the instinct to survive, even under the threat of death and torture?

“Then let me change the question,” Li Xiaofei said, voice steady. “How can I find him?”

Nie Yucheng looked up at him, struggling to keep his gaze focused. And then, unexpectedly, a glimmer of pity surfaced in his eyes.

“You don’t need to find him,” he said softly. “Because he will come for you. He will come for you.”

With those final words, his body relaxed and he died. His vitality extinguished itself and his soul shattered. Li Xiaofei’s eyes widened in shock. He hadn’t intended to kill Nie Yucheng.

There were still secrets to extract and intelligence to be gleaned. Handing him over to the military could have dealt a heavy blow to Eden’s influence in the Xiao Kuang Star Region. But Nie Yucheng... had chosen to die. He had simply let go of his own life.

After answering Li Xiaofei’s final questions, his own thoughts must have cleared, perhaps for the first time in a long while. He knew, with absolute clarity, that this defeat was final. There was no survival beyond it, and so, death was preferable.

The upper echelons of Eden possessed a secret technique, an ancient method that allowed them to die at will. It originated from the Reaper’s Wisdom faction.

This was one of the primary reasons that, despite countless generations passing and the presence of Martial Arts Immortal Emperors guarding the human race among the stars, Eden had never been truly eradicated. They left behind no intelligence. No critical information could ever be extracted from high-value captives.

Li Xiaofei silently activated the Blood-Drinking Sword.

Buzz...

Sword intent hummed coldly, siphoning away every last drop of Nie Yucheng’s blood, spirit, and energy. All that remained was a wisp of ash, scattered on the wind. In the very next moment, with Nie Yucheng’s death, the external domain of the Mountain of Corpses and Sea of Blood began to collapse and dissolve into nothingness.

Thud!

A blood-soaked figure fell from midair, crashing heavily to the ground.

“No, don’t eat me! Please don’t eat me!” He thrashed and wailed, pleading in terror, eyes wide and vacant.

Yue Zhuoran had been completely broken by fear. Clearly, after Li Xiaofei had escaped the domain using the Secret Time Pavilion's abilities, the headless corpses, no longer under Nie Yucheng’s control, had inflicted a devastating psychological breakdown on Yue Zhuoran within that twisted world.

Li Xiaofei swung his sword.

Slash.

Yue Zhuoran’s body and soul were annihilated in one clean strike. His blood, spirit, and essence were devoured by the Blood-Drinking Sword. Thus, one of the most promising heirs of the prestigious Yue Family in the Xiao Kuang Star Region followed Nie Yucheng into oblivion. He was reduced to ash and scattered to the winds.

Li Xiaofei stood silently with his sword in hand. His mood was far from calm. The bitter regret of missing his wife and daughter by a step filled him with a rising, uncontrollable fury. He wanted to simply raze everything in his path.

Just then, a shrill, piercing alarm rang out from outside. It was the sound of war. Li Xiaofei immediately strode to the door and looked up and his pupils contracted.

He could clearly see massive legions of Reaper forces appearing around the spatial transport anchor point in the distance through the protective formation dome above Stargate Base. They were surging forward like a tidal wave of locusts, bearing down on the base with terrifying momentum.

Invasion... had come once again. Though Li Xiaofei hadn’t been on Planet Nock for long, it was obvious even to him that this was an unprecedented Reaper assault. The unstable spatial anchor point, which could not be fully sealed, now resembled a giant boiling cauldron. Spatial elements roiled within, bubbling over.

One by one, grotesque and terrifying beasts emerged, along with warships radiating waves of deathly energy, without pause. Mere seconds after the first alarm sounded, half the sealing arrays, interception formations, and firepower matrices the human military had set around the anchor were already obliterated.

Li Xiaofei drew in a sharp breath and thought,

Are the Reapers launching their final assault?

The blaring of war sirens echoed through every sector of Stargate Base, rising in a chaotic crescendo. The massive metal complex that made up the base began to shift, disassembling and reforming into full combat mode. This was the base’s strongest and last line of defense.

At the same time, streaks of light shot up from both the base and from Planet Nock itself not far away like fireflies rising on a summer night. The strongest of humanity had risen first. Then came the warships, lifting off at full speed to join the battlefield.

Chaos, yet beneath it—order. And within that order, the unmistakable gleam of courage. Li Xiaofei, the Blood-Drinking Sword in hand, rose into the sky without hesitation. He would fight.

In that moment, only slaughter could quell the fire raging in Li Xiaofei’s heart. Countless streaks of light streaked across the starry sky. Though his cultivation was merely at the Four Extremes Realm, insignificant by the standards of this battlefield, the Emperor’s Weapon in his hand, the Blood-Drinking Sword, was anything but ordinary. It was a weapon that could shift the tide of war.

Sword qi surged across one thousand and five hundred kilometers of space. Wherever the golden and silver flames passed, Reaper Beasts exploded into showers of blood, their remains scattered and annihilated in the vacuum of space.

The Blood-Drinking Sword grew stronger with each drop of blood it devoured, its power surging again and again. Li Xiaofei could feel its exhilaration at the chaos of battle and its hunger for blood.

He slashed again. A streak of sword light sliced across the starry river, cleaving through three Reaper warships belonging to the intelligence caste in one blow. Terrifying chain explosions followed, wiping out who knew how many Reapers onboard. Their humanoid corpses with lizard-like heads floated lifelessly through the battlefield like specks of ash.

Li Xiaofei surged forward at blistering speed. In the blink of an eye, he was already at the front lines. The Blood-Drinking Sword slashed out again and again, cutting down swathes of enemies with each stroke.

“Who is that? He’s terrifying!”

“Where did that powerhouse come from?”

“Could he be a hidden expert from the War Division?”

The human cultivators fighting across the battlefield saw the carnage he wrought, and their morale soared like a tidal wave. The elite warriors of the Xiao Shi Battle Division, along with powerful cultivators from various associations and merchant guilds, instinctively began converging on Li Xiaofei’s position.

With him carving out a stronghold in the battlefield, they launched a fierce counterattack against the Reaper army. The Reaper faction had always been split into two fundamentally different forces, the Wisdom Faction and the Primal Faction.

In nearly every war across the starry rivers of the galaxy, both of these sides would appear simultaneously.

The Wild Reapers were monstrous creatures who relied solely on their physical might and primal instincts. Their appearances were grotesque and wildly varied, but were often fully bestial forms with little intelligence. They were always sent charging into the front lines and treated as disposable cannon fodder.

In contrast, the Wisdom Faction Reapers resembled humans. They created warships and mechs, wielded immense power, and possessed intelligence equal to, if not surpassing humankind. They often served as battlefield commanders, orchestrating the flow of war.

𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

These two divergent paths of evolution seemed to eternally stand in contrast, as if nature itself was running an unending experiment. And yet, to the confusion of countless human scholars, these two completely opposite branches of the Reaper species had, for much of their evolutionary history, managed to cooperate in seamless harmony.

It was no different now. Beasts and warships. Their coordination was refined and precise. They executed specialized tactics and formation maneuvers with terrifying efficiency.

Had Li Xiaofei not exploded onto the battlefield with such overwhelming force, the situation for the defenders of Stargate Base would have been dire, perhaps even hopeless. Despite the strength of the stationed Xiao Shi Battle Division, their defeat had only been a matter of time against such relentless assaults.