mtlumby2d Chapter 196: Rift Dwellers
Chapter 196: Rift Dwellers
Ye Jun had once witnessed the very fabric of reality being torn apart in dreams of the Convergence, and the opening of the Rift gave him the same feeling. But upon further inspection, he realized a crucial difference between the two.
’In the dream, it really tore apart the fabric of reality, but this is different,’ Ye Jun thought, tapping on his sheathed Ember Sword. ’This is just cutting through space.’
After ascending to the Soul Tempering Realm and entering the Spiritual Realm, he had noticed a few things about the world. The Physical Reality as he knew it consisted of multiple dimensions.
What he could see and lived in was only a Four-Dimensional Structure. Three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. But there were more of them, ones that didn’t follow the normal dimensional rules.
Whatever created these rifts was actually just tearing through the four dimensions of their universe, not actually putting a tear in reality.
’Does this mean they’re trapped in another Spatial Dimension? The two dimensions maybe get close during the opening of the Heaven Opening Chasm, allowing them to rip apart the barrier between them and enter this world.’
His mind worked rapidly, trying to think of many things. He had a curious mind, so he simply couldn’t help himself after seeing such things. There was so much to learn. The more he got to know about this world, the more he wondered how complex it truly was.
Finally, the Rift finished forming, and the surrounding soldiers tensed up. There were only five of them here, three wearing the same robes that Ye Jun had seen the Demonic Cult disciples wearing, deep black robes with a trident symbol on them. While the others, who he assumed belonged to Orthodox factions, wore gray robes with a Red Dragon carved on their backs.
As the vertical tear in space stabilized, turning its border deep blue, a low, collective shudder ran through Ye Jun’s perception.
His newfound Soul Sense flared instantly, sending a wave of absolute revulsion straight into his mind. It wasn’t the kind of physical warning his Threat Assessment usually provided. This was an existential wrongness.
From the shifting blue distortion of the rift, the first wave crawled out.
They were Hollow Skins, the name automatically appearing in his mind for some reason, but he ignored the strangeness for the moment.
Dozens of them poured onto the stone plateau like failed, malformed castoffs from a creator’s trash heap. Ye Jun’s eyes narrowed behind his calm facade as his gaze swept over them.
One aberration had a vaguely human silhouette, but its front was a completely smooth expanse of featureless skin, no eyes, no nose, no mouth.
Beside it slithered a wolf-like horror with multiple human limbs sprouting haphazardly from its spine, and a bird whose wings were made of tattered, oily black membranes instead of feathers.
But what truly made his skin crawl was the spiritual vacuum they carried.
’They don’t have souls,’ his rational mind noted. ’Or rather, they have gaping, hollow voids where a soul structure should belong. Touching them with pure Soul Essence feels like staring into a drainage pipe.’
The gray-robed Orthodox soldiers and the trident-wearing Demonic Cultists dropped into their combat stances simultaneously, their elements surging as they prepared to manually channel Qi into the auxiliary nodes.
"Hold the line!" one of the Red Dragon guards bellowed, his saber igniting with localized wind currents. "Keep them away from the array layout!"
Before the vanguard could even clash with the featureless horde, the air inside the rift buckled violently. The deep blue edges fractured into fine, jagged lines, and a massive silhouette forced its way through.
A Rift Gnawer.
The creature was easily three meters long, looking like a hairless, emaciated wolf whose pale skin had been stretched so tightly over its frame that the twitching black muscle fibers underneath were entirely exposed.
It possessed six milky-white eyes arranged in a rigid vertical column down its skull. As its gaze locked onto the nearest cultivator, its jaw split outward into four distinct, independent sections, lined with jagged, overlapping teeth.
"Screeech—!"
The Rift Gnawer snapped its split jaws, its teeth grinding against each other with a sound that didn’t just hurt the ears, it actively produced tiny, flickering silver sparks of distorted space.
"A Tier 3 equivalent beast!" a Demonic Cult disciple yelled, his face losing its color as he raised a trident wreathed in dark mist. "The Spatial Bite will shred your Qi barriers! Don’t let it close the distance!"
The Rift Gnawer didn’t wait. It sprinted forward, its claws tearing up chunks of the stone plateau without making a single sound. The lack of acoustic resonance was unsettling as it moved like a ghost passing through a vacuum.
Two gray-robed vanguard soldiers lunged forward, executing a synchronized defensive strike, their swords weaving a dense net of pressurized Qi to intercept the beast.
The Rift Gnawer simply snapped its jaw sideways. Its Spatial Bite cut right through the incoming sword trails. The solid, compressed Qi barriers fractured into dozens of tiny, fragmented pieces as if they were nothing more than fragile glass panels shattered by a hammer. In the same motion, the creature’s jaws clamped onto the shoulder of the leading soldier.
Armor, flesh, and bone didn’t just tear, they disintegrated into clean, precise cubes. The soldier didn’t even have the chance to scream before a visible wisp of translucent gray light was yanked cleanly out of his chest and swallowed into the creature’s split maw.
The man slumped instantly, his eyes turning completely vacant as a tiny fragment of his Soul Essence was torn away.
"Fucking hell," Ye Jun grinned, rubbing his chin with his left hand while keeping his right loosely on the hilt of his Ember Sword. ’A Spatial Attribute combined with an automatic soul-harvesting trigger? This place is an absolute goldmine. Noice.’
The remaining soldiers panicked, their attacking rhythm completely falling apart as the malformed Hollow Skins began to swarm the perimeter.
"Get back!" the Demonic Cult disciple screamed, his trident trembling as three faceless humanoids closed in on him.
"Out of the way, kiddos," a casual, unbothered voice cut through the desperate shouts of the vanguard.
Ye Jun stepped forward, his strides light and lazy, completely devoid of the suffocating tension gripping the plateau. He didn’t even bother drawing his sword.
Now that he had achieved the Soul Tempering Realm, his Dantian felt like a vast, deep ocean compared to the shallow puddles of his past. His Qi Control had reached Level 7, giving him an uncanny, fluid mastery over his Qi reserves that he had never been able to utilize to its full potential before.
’Let’s see how something I invented performs at full potential,’ he thought with a dark, cynical smile.
He didn’t bother using his full power as he didn’t really need to. He simply flicked his wrist, allowing a minuscule fraction of his Yang Circulation to surge into his active pathways.
Crimson Flame Lotus Art.
Fwoosh—!
An explosive, deep crimson blaze erupted from his skin, but it didn’t scatter wildly like normal fire. Under his precise control, the intense flames instantly condensed, weaving themselves into translucent, overlapping layers. Within a single heartbeat, a massive, beautifully structured flaming lotus materialized around his body, completely enveloping him within its protective petals.
The heat radiating from the lotus was so dense that the stone beneath his boots began to turn into bubbling, white-hot slag.
Three Hollow Skins, a faceless humanoid and two malformed birds with membrane wings, lunged directly at him, driven by their mindless hunger for essence. The moment their distorted bodies made contact with the outer petals of the crimson lotus, there was no physical impact.
There was only a clean, instantaneous hiss.
The aberrations couldn’t even resist as the high-density Yang fire vaporized them into fine black ash before they could even touch the secondary layers of his defense.
"What kind of defensive technique is that?!" the surviving Red Dragon guard stammered, pausing mid-swing as he stared at the glowing protective lotus cage walking calmly through the battlefield.
The Rift Gnawer noticed the immense heat signature and turned its vertical column of six eyes toward Ye Jun. Drool mixed with silver spatial sparks dripped from its four-part jaw.
Recognizing a major threat, the beast kicked off the stone floor, its black muscles bulging as it launched itself at the lotus, its maw splitting wide to execute a Spatial Bite that could fragment space itself.
Ye Jun’s eyes glistened behind his calm expression. ’You want to bite my invention? Let’s see if your teeth are harder than my comprehension.’
Willing his mind outward, the massive crimson lotus enveloping him suddenly shifted.
"Disperse," he murmured.
With a crisp, metallic snap, the defensive structure dissolved as dozens of razor-sharp, flaming lotus petals separated from the core. Moving according to his silent commands, they shot backward into the air, hovering like a synchronized array of floating daggers before accelerating into long-distance trajectories.
Swif! Swif! Swif!
Five flaming petals zipped through the air, carving brilliant, glowing red trails across the dark sky. The Rift Gnawer tried to snap its jaw to fragment the incoming projectiles, but Ye Jun’s Qi Control was too fluid.
With a simple twitch of his finger, the petals unnaturally curved midair, entirely bypassing the creature’s split mouth and targeting its limbs instead.
The petals sliced through the exposed black muscles of the beast’s legs like heated wire through fat. The sheer heat cauterized the wounds instantly, leaving behind black, smoking stumps.
The massive three-meter creature lost its momentum entirely, crashing heavily onto the wet stone floor and sliding right to the edge of Ye Jun’s boots.
It writhed, its six eyes blinking frantically as it tried to snap its jaw upward in a desperate, final attempt to tear a piece of his soul.
Ye Jun looked down at the mutated bum with absolute indifference. Then, he simply lifted his foot, channeled a basic burst of Qi into his heel, and brought it down directly on the Rift Gnawer’s skull.
Crack.
The skull disintegrated under the raw physical weight of his Qi-Tempered Physique, black ichor splashing across the stone.
In the distance, the remaining floating lotus petals were systematically hunting down the rest of the Hollow Skins, tracking them with pinpoint accuracy and reducing them to ash from dozens of meters away. Within less than two minutes, the entire sector around the rift had been completely cleared of life.
Ye Jun took a deep breath, an invisible ripple extending three meters around him as his unique system went to work, vacuuming the glowing translucent orbs drifting from the fresh corpses without him moving a single muscle.
[Spatial Attribute +4]
[Soul Perception +3]
[Qi +23]
[Yang Fire Mastery +2]
[Blank Points +15]
A refreshing rush of cool spatial energy and pristine Qi poured straight into his pathways, automatically settling into his Dantian and broadening his reserves.
The surrounding Orthodox and Unorthodox soldiers stood frozen, their weapons still raised, their mouths open in absolute, stunned silence as they stared at the lone young man who had just casually demolished an entire rift vanguard while barely exerting ten percent of his reserves.
Ye Jun casually adjusted his ash-gray robes, turning his gaze toward the deep blue tear in space that was still humming with volatile energy.
An excited smile licked his lips.
"Bring it on!"