Chapter 3084: The Battle of The New Era (2)
As Yin and Nian Shi continued to confront, a shockwave of pure force, born from the friction of their conflicting wills, finally erupted outward.
BOOOOM—!!
Nearby star systems, untouched by their direct conceptual edits, were simply vaporized. Not exploded—unmade. Their suns, their planets, their asteroids, and the space between them ceased to exist in a wave of absolute nullification that spread at the speed of thought.
Further out, galaxies were sent spinning from their orbits, their structures warping and twisting like paper in a hurricane. Nebulae were shredded into chaotic streams of glowing plasma. The cosmic background radiation, the faint echo of the universe’s birth, flickered and died in vast swathes of space.
Tantai Lanling, shielded within the folded space of the Land of Beyond Heaven that Nian Shi carried, felt the vessel around her shudder violently. It was like being inside a bell struck by a god.
She watched in utter horror as the universe outside their pocket dimension seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Both Nian Shi and Yin felt the kinetic release. Their heads turned slightly towards each other, their playful, academic expressions hardening into ones of focused intensity. The preliminary skirmish of concepts was over. The direct confrontation had begun.
They moved simultaneously.
There was no teleportation. They simply were in front of each other, having erased the distance between them.
"Take this."
Nian Shi struck first. His hand, wreathed in the harmonious duality of Creation and Uncreation, did not form a fist. His fingers were held like a blade, and he thrust them forward in a move that was simple, direct, and utterly devastating.
It was not a physical attack aimed at Yin’s body. It was an attack aimed at his existence in the present timeline. The thrust carried the combined force of a billion big bangs and a billion heat deaths, focused into a single, reality-piercing point.
Yin did not block. He accepted it.
He raised his own hand, palm open. His hand was not wreathed in energy; it was a hole. A perfect, absolute void in the shape of a hand.
Nian Shi’s finger-blade struck Yin’s palm.
The impact did not produce a sound. It produced a silence so profound it was itself a weapon. The shockwave that erupted this time was not one of destruction, but of cessation.
A sphere of absolute nothingness, hundreds of light-years across, bloomed from the point of impact. Within that sphere, every law of physics, every concept of energy and matter, simply stopped. It was a perfect, expanding bubble of non-reality.
The two were pushed apart by the force of their own clash, floating amidst the silent, dead space they had created.
Nian Shi’s eyes narrowed. His attack, which could have unspun galaxies, had been nullified completely. Yin’s defense was the embodiment of "no." It was the ultimate negation.
Yin smiled, a cold, empty expression. "My turn."
He didn’t lunge. He simply pointed a finger at Nian Shi. From his fingertip, a thread of absolute blackness shot forth. It was not fast, but it was inevitable. It was the concept of the end of all journeys, the finality of all things.
It did not seek to destroy Nian Shi; it sought to announce that Nian Shi’s journey was over, that his story had reached its final, permanent full stop.
Nian Shi felt the weight of that declaration press down on his soul. The power within him, the vibrant force of Creation, revolted against it. He crossed his arms before him, and a shield of swirling grey-silver and brilliant light materialized—a perfect balance of ending and beginning, designed to counter absolute finality.
The black thread touched the shield.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the shield began to... tarnish. The brilliant light dimmed, not because it was being overpowered, but because it was being forgotten.
The concept of "defense" itself was being eroded away by the thread of ending. The shield was being conceptually retired from existence.
"Hmm?"
Nian Shi grunted, a flicker of genuine surprise in his eyes. He poured more power into the shield, forcing the light to remember to shine, forcing the endings to remember to protect. He was using Creation not to create something new, but to reinforce and remember what already was—a vastly more difficult task.
With a tremendous effort of will, he managed to stabilize the shield, the black thread finally dissolving against it. But the effort had cost him.
The kinetic feedback from this clash was different—it was a wave of existential fatigue that washed over the surrounding cosmos.
Stars that had survived the first shockwave suddenly aged trillions of years in an instant, crumbling into dust. It was the fatigue of a universe being asked to remember itself under an assault of absolute forgetfulness.
They stared at each other across the dead space, both now understanding the true nature of the other’s power.
Nian Shi was force and possibility. He could make and unmake, but his power required active will, active imposition.
Yin was cessation and negation. His power was passive and absolute. He didn’t need to do anything; he simply needed to allow the natural state of nothingness to reassert itself. He was the universe’s default setting.
The two primordials hovered in the void they had deadened, the echoes of their catastrophic clash still resonating through the fabric of spacetime. The air, or rather the absence of it, crackled with the unspent energy of their mutually annihilating wills.
A slow, mocking chuckle broke the tense silence. It came from Yin. His universe-filled eyes regarded Nian Shi with a look of profound amusement, as if watching a child play with tools it could not possibly understand.
"Impressive," Yin said, his voice a silken taunt. "Truly. You wear the skin of potential. You wield the powers of genesis and oblivion. You have even managed to force them into a semblance of balance. You have become the new Creator everyone feared and desired."
He paused, letting the false praise hang in the void before his expression sharpened into one of icy derision. "But that is all it is. A semblance. A facade. Even now, with all this stolen power coursing through you, you are still, at your core, the same old Nian Shi. The God of Time. A calculator. A schemer. A being who deals in endings and manipulations, now simply using a grander brush."
Yin shook his head, a pitying smirk on his lips. "A fake, no matter how beautifully crafted, will never become the genuine article. You have taken the vessel, but you lack the essence. You are a usurper playing dress-up with divinity, and it is a pathetic sight."