Apocalyptic Era: Starting from picking up a Bishoujo
Chapter 48 - 45 Fallen Demon Hunter VS Supernatural Power User 8 (Third Update/Volume One Complete)

Chapter 48: 45 Fallen Demon Hunter VS Supernatural Power User 8 (Third Update/Volume One Complete)

It was only then that I realized I might have made a very serious mistake.

Zhuang Cheng had said that his flame was his spirit, and I understood this to mean his spirit was just a regular spirit in a standby state. Only when he activated his superpower did his spirit become fuel for the flame or transform into the fire itself.

But what if that wasn’t the case?

Zhuang Cheng was a supernatural power user who could freely transform between himself and the fire. If his spirit in standby was not a regular spirit but instead possessed the characteristic of blazing fire, or even more so, resembled a "flame masquerading as a spirit"...

Then wouldn’t my actions be as foolish as sticking my hand into a burning incinerator that was operational?

And reality surpassed the metaphor. At that moment, I experienced the hallucination of beholding the sun.

The instant I launched my superpower at Zhuang Cheng, I felt as if I had collided head-on with a raging sun. Destruction, death, incineration, vaporization... I saw such fates with unsettling clarity.

At the same time, many of the questions I hadn’t previously understood became clear in my mind. For example, why Zhuang Cheng had claimed he’d never encountered any bizarre things before.

He hadn’t been lying, probably because he truly hadn’t encountered any.

It’s common knowledge in the mortal world that strange attracts strange, but this worn-out truth can’t bind a truly powerful being. It might even result in an extreme reaction, repelling other oddities and keeping them at bay.

Weirdos operating on instinct would avoid him out of fear, those with intelligence would unconsciously refrain from paying him attention, and even phenomena that manifest purely as oddities would glide by him, completely unaffected by unknown laws.

Now I could also understand why I had been unable to detect any mana fluctuations from him. It wasn’t that he had some unique attribute, but rather we were in different dimensions. Just as beings from two dimensions cannot perceive or interact with the three-dimensional world unless my target was his spiritual fragments as flame, or he purposefully lowered his own level, I could not possibly detect any mana fluctuations from him.

When one is in the mountain, they cannot recognize it as such. To me, he was an overwhelmingly immense presence, while to him, I was an exceedingly small one. It’s likely he couldn’t perceive my mana fluctuations, just as he was unaware when I attacked his soul earlier.

This was clearly the realm of Impermanence...

Wait a second... Why haven’t I been burned to death yet?

I snapped back to reality, and the illusion had already ended. And there stood Zhuang Cheng, seemingly waiting for my next move.

"What’s wrong? Aren’t you going to hit me?" he asked, "If you don’t come at me, I’m going to have to come over to you."

With that, he stepped toward me, and I couldn’t help but retreat while hurriedly checking on my spirit and superpower.

I immediately understood why I hadn’t died yet. Before the illusory sun could burn me to death, the activation of my power had stopped on its own.

The illusory sun would have needed only an instant to kill me, but the time from activation to stopping of the power was less than an instant. Just as a mantis shrimp can generate a temperature surpassing the sun’s surface for an instant but can’t really cause any significant damage, such brief contact wasn’t enough to kill me. But that wasn’t the problem; the problem was, why did the power stop on its own?

It wasn’t because Zhuang Cheng had blocked my power with his mana, nor was it due to some protective mechanism in my power. It was simply because the duration of the power had ended.

The time my power trapped the target in the illusion depended on how much emotion, like what I had just experienced, the target’s spirit generated in response to the illusion. And if the power ceased on its own right after contact with the target... that meant, it meant...

My power wasn’t shattered by his mana, it was overcome by his spirit before it could even take effect...

"No, impossible, I won’t accept it... I refuse to accept this!"

A fury from nowhere made me shout out uncontrollably.

"What don’t you accept?" he asked, puzzled.

The contact with the power had been too brief; he seemed completely unaware that my power had ever been activated.

I no longer paid attention to his reaction; instead, I manipulated all the shadows I could control around me with reckless abandon—even beyond my full strength.

Countless shadows surged wildly from cracks and corners, morphing into razor-sharp blades that shot at Zhuang Cheng from all directions like a barrage of arrows. He manipulated the surrounding Fire Sea to raise waves that swept away the shadowy arrows from every direction. But this was just a feint, a distraction. At this moment, I even had control over the shadows on the floor below.

Just as he focused his attention on the visible attacks, the floor beneath his feet shattered under the surge of shadows, swallowing him whole.

The shadows immediately dissipated, and Zhuang Cheng, who had been at the center, was gone without a trace, vanishing from the mortal world.

It wasn’t that he had dodged my attack; I had directly banished him to the Shadow World.

Banishing a target to the Shadow World was of no benefit to me, so I had never considered using this tactic against anyone in the past, not even when I didn’t think of it immediately before.

But now, all I wanted was for Zhuang Cheng to die!

Normally, even he shouldn’t be able to think or survive in a world without concepts of time and space, let alone return!

However, the next scene shattered all my hopes.

Zhuang Cheng reappeared, and with a flash of fire in the sky, a figure made entirely of flames materialized in the air above the tangled mess of steel and concrete.

I couldn’t understand how he could have returned and could only hastily gather all the shadows around me, transforming them into a Shadow Giant Snake to launch an attack at him. But I knew well that this seemingly overwhelming attack was nothing but an empty show, utterly useless against him.

He simply raised his right hand and made a chopping gesture towards the direction of the Shadow Giant Snake.

Not understanding what had just happened, I only saw a dazzling flash of light before my eyes. Then the explosion engulfed me, and I was blown away by the shockwave like a leaf in a storm, cast far into the distance.

The explosion sent me flying outside the unfinished building, even soaring higher than the building itself.

In my upside-down view, I watched a magnificent Fire Sea waterfall, flowing in reverse, splitting the entire building in half from the middle!

The stream of the Shadow Giant Snake had been completely obliterated, and the deafening roar of the explosion was relentless in my ears.

How could one combat such a ludicrous opponent? If I tried to immediately dive into the shadows and flee upon landing... I would surely be caught...

No, even if I managed to escape...

I...

Flashes of my past life surfaced in my mind, one after another.

As a youth, I longed for the magical and strange world; as a young adult, I kneeled in despair in a dead-end; as a middle-aged man, I killed for power and cast aside my conscience...

And the words of the Weirdo Maker from the past were interspersed among them:

"When you despair and resign yourself from the bottom of your heart, convinced that you can’t turn the tide..."

"The seed of the heart will leave you."

The last thing that fixed in my consciousness was Zhuang Cheng’s expression, completely oblivious to my use of superpower.

I closed my eyes, feeling utterly empty.

The seed of the heart I had nurtured up until now disappeared from my body like a burst bubble.

And the power that had coursed through my entire body, now lacking its core, spun out of control and self-destructed, tearing my body into spiritual fragments...

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