Boom! The fossilized ground, previously as flat as a mirror, was smashed into a massive crater, the shockwave tearing the surrounding broken stone tablets into dust.
“Let's try spiritual penetration!” Ryan's figure was like lightning as he surged upward on the backdraft of the shockwave. His right palm was enveloped in highly condensed 【Lantern】 spirituality as he struck hard toward the featherfolk's chest!
Bang—!
A dull boom echoed across the plain!
Ryan felt a massive tremor run up his right arm. The spirituality condensed in his palm was actually blocked completely by the seemingly soft grey feathers on the featherfolk. The highly penetrative 【Lantern】 spirituality was absorbed and dissolved without a trace the moment it made contact with the feathers!
This monster possessed a terrifying defense that was virtually immune to spiritual penetration of the same aspect!
A fierce light flashed in the featherfolk's single eye. It swept its massive hand toward Ryan's head, forcibly compressing the space in its palm to create a terrifying suction.
“Echo!”
Ryan detonated the lantern at the absolute critical moment!
The cold white light erupted with a boom, and the lantern's ability instantly captured and illuminated the featherfolk's spiritual trajectory over the past few seconds.
At the exact moment the historical residual shadow of 【Echo】 overlapped with the penetrative vision of 【Glimpse】, Ryan finally discovered that the featherfolk's entire spiritual defense circuit did not originate from its chest or head, but was frantically converging onto an extremely concealed black feather—the third one on the left side of its back!
Its spiritual core was not inside its body, but in an external feather!
“Found it!”
Ryan's eyes were as cold as ice. No longer choosing to clash head-on, he used his agile footwork to move at high speed around the featherfolk's colossal body, repeatedly shifting the lantern's light spots to forcefully draw its attention.
The featherfolk was thoroughly enraged by this nimble "bug." Its single eye burst with a blinding glare, and its massive body suddenly spun halfway around, raising both arms in an attempt to crush Ryan.
This was the exact moment of its turn that Ryan had been waiting for!
【Lantern】 spirituality exploded beneath his feet, and Ryan's figure transformed into a streak of straight lightning, sliding along the ground through the gap in the featherfolk's arms. Using a condensed beam of light erupted from the lantern, he stabbed fiercely toward the right side of the featherfolk's back!
Puff!
The blinding beam of light severed that concealed black feather!
“Screech—!”
The featherfolk let out a tragic spiritual shriek as its previously indestructible feather defense instantly collapsed. Countless grey feathers drifted down like falling leaves, and without its core support, its massive body exploded from within into vast clouds of pure spiritual light!
Ryan knelt on one knee, his knuckles white from gripping the 【Echoing Lantern】 with a death grip.
In the center of the great hall, the marble ground, previously as flat as a mirror, began to ripple like the surface of a viscous, distorted pool of water.
Step... step... step.
The sound of boot soles rubbing against the stone flags was dull and clear, each step seemingly treading directly on one's heart. A figure completely "peeled" out of the distorted phantom, stepping forward to stand firmly on the marble floor.
It was Ryan himself.
The same black hair and black eyes, the same slender build, and even the blood seeping from the tears in his robes and the calluses on his knuckles were identical. Yet those eyes held no dullness or blankness; instead, they swirled with an eerie vitality that sent a shiver down one's spine—a complex mixture of playfulness, pity, and madness.
The mirror image tilted his head, rolling his wrists as his joints popped with a sharp click. The corners of his mouth slowly curled into a cruel, weary arc.
He spoke. What came out was not the common tongue of this world, but Chinese, a language only a transmigrator would understand:
“Don't look at me like that, Ryan. Or... should I call you Lin Yuan?”
The instant those sounds vibrated through the air, Ryan's pupils contracted violently!
Boom!
Without a single wasted word, the stone flags beneath Ryan's feet shattered with a bang!
He transformed into a streak of cold white lightning, lunging forward! The 【Echoing Lantern】 traced a highly concentrated arc of light in midair, whipping up a violent gale as it thrust straight for the mirror image's throat!
This was no mere probe; it was an all-out, life-or-death slaughter!
Yet, the mirror image's response was incredibly bizarre.
Facing Ryan's earth-shattering strike, the mirror image did not even raise a hand to defend. With a mocking smile on his lips, his body seemed to "slide" backward out of thin air like dry tree bark—this was by no means physical movement, but rather shedding a paper-thin residual shadow directly within the folds of space!
Puff!
The arc of light from Ryan's lantern pierced through the residual shadow and slammed into the stone pillar behind it, sending stone fragments flying.
“Getting impatient?”
The mirror image's voice rang out from Ryan's left rear without any warning. Like a venomous moth tumbling chaotically in a gale, he struck out with a backhand palm!
In his palm, pitch-black 【Moth】 spirituality condensed into three razor-sharp crescent arcs of light. With a shriek that threatened to tear flesh apart, they blasted straight toward Ryan's temple!
“Lin Yuan, what do you think you're holding on to? You hold this broken lantern, pretending to be a calm and rational extraordinary being, pretending you can save everyone. But don't you know it in your heart? You want to return to Earth even in your dreams! You miss the high-rise buildings, you miss the peaceful days. Everything here is nothing but a nightmare you can't wake up from!”
As the words fell, the three pitch-black arcs of light had already reached his face!
A sweet yet decaying scent of pollen faintly drifted through the air—the spiritual infiltration unique to 【Moth】 aspect spirituality, silently stripping away sanity and enticing one into sinkage.
Ryan grit his teeth and bit down hard on the tip of his tongue, the piercing pain forcibly dispersing the exhaustion rising in his mind. Spirituality exploded beneath his feet, and using the recoil thrust of the lantern, he forcibly twisted his body halfway in midair!
Rip!
The black light grazed his cheek, severing a few strands of black hair and carving three bottomless, pitch-black gashes into the stone wall behind him.
“Escaping reality and treating surrender as liberation—is this your 'Moth'?” Ryan's voice was as cold as frost. The moment he landed and smashed a deep pit into the ground, his leg muscles tensed violently, launching him forward once more like a fully drawn bow!
“All that is disguised shall reveal its truth!”
Ryan bellowed, twisting the lantern with his left hand as the colorful flame inside the casing erupted with a dazzling, cold white glare!
Hum—!
The light was like a sharp scalpel, forcibly piercing through the viscous airflow within a three-meter radius and completely illuminating the mirror image's spiritual trajectory hidden in the air!
Within the vision of 【Glimpse】, every time the mirror image "shed his skin" to evade an attack, an extremely fine black thread of spiritual energy connected his back to the shadow on the ground. That was no residual shadow caused by high speed, but rather a chaotic folding shift carried out within the folds of space using the chaos of 【Moth】!
“I've found your landing point!”
Ryan surged forward, his right fist enveloped in highly compressed cold white spirituality. Following the direction of the fine thread, he punched heavily toward the void in the left-front!
The pressure whipped up by his fist tore the air with a piercing screech, and the wind from the punch swept away all the dust in the entire space!
Boom!
An extremely dull sound of flesh impacting flesh exploded!
This punch landed squarely on the chest of the mirror image, who had just emerged from the void!
The sound of cracking bones was clearly audible as the mirror image was sent flying like a ragdoll by the punch, smashing heavily through two stone pillars at the far end of the great hall. A rain of collapsing rubble buried him completely!
“Ha... Hahaha!”
From amidst the dust and smoke, the mirror image's near-manic laughter echoed.
The rubble was pushed aside by an exploding burst of black spirituality, and the mirror image slowly stood up. A large section of his chest had collapsed inward, yet there was no blood at the wound—only dense, writhing black feathers crawling along the edges of the wound, stitching it back together!
“Well struck! That was brutal!”
An unhealthy, blood-red gleam flashed in the mirror image's eyes, and his Chinese became increasingly shrill, sounding like a small file scraping against metal:
“But can you kill me? I am the despair in the depths of your soul! As long as you still want to go home, as long as you feel even a single second of weariness in this godforsaken world, as long as you enter a dream, I will endlessly draw power from your despair!”
The mirror image shrieked to the heavens. The robes on his body instantly weathered and disintegrated, and countless pitch-black feather blades erupted from his entire being, transforming into a black storm that completely enveloped half of the great hall!
Intermingled within the storm was a mental resonance that struck directly at the soul. It was a death toll that thoroughly magnified the despair of "never returning"!
The storm of black feather blades carved thousands of deep gashes into the flat marble floor.
Lucia was sent flying by the violent spiritual aftershock, slamming heavily against the wall. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, and she could only grit her teeth and squeeze herself tightly into the blind spot of a stone pillar's alcove.
At the center of the storm, Ryan held the 【Echoing Lantern】 across his chest, compressing his cold white spirituality into an extremely thin shield over his body.
Puff! Puff! Puff!
The pitch-black feather blades pelted the spiritual shield in rapid succession, setting off a continuous metallic clanging. Every impact caused the spirituality inside Ryan's body to surge violently, sending sharp backdraft pains straight along his nerves to his brain.
“Look at me! Lin Yuan!”
The mirror image moved at high speed within the storm, his form having completely transcended human limits. With every step, he shed a layer of dead black skin in the air; his old body turned to ash while a new one stepped out of the void, his trajectory entirely chaotic and unpredictable!
“You think that just because you hold this lantern and wear these clothes, you are 'Ryan'? You are nothing but a ghost occupying a dead man's shell!”
The mirror image appeared eerily less than half a meter to Ryan's right. His claws, wrapped in corrosive black light, lunged straight for Ryan's heart!
“What about your parents on Earth? Your friends? Your past? In this world, absolutely no one knows who 'Lin Yuan' is! All your struggles are nothing but an absurd monologue in the eyes of this cold world!”
This strike was extremely fast and vicious, carrying the most terrifying mental pollution of the 【Moth】 aspect—attempting to drag Ryan down into the void of self-abandonment.
Yet, what answered him was a heavy, unhesitating elbow!
Bang!
Ryan slipped sideways to evade the claw. Enveloped in the blazing 【Lantern】 spirituality, his left elbow slammed hard like a heavy sledgehammer directly into the mirror image's face!
The mirror image's facial bones instantly caved in, and he was sent flying backward once again.
“You are right.”
Ryan walked forward over the rubble, fine lines of blood seeping from the corners of both eyes. In his vision, where the 【Glimpse】 eye technique was pushed to its absolute limit, the surrounding distorted and chaotic world was forcibly dismantled into its most primitive lines.
“No one here knows who Lin Yuan is.”
Ryan's voice was chillingly flat, devoid of rage or hesitation, carrying only a bone-deep calmness:
“But I know.”
“As long as I still remember the high-rise buildings, as long as I still remember the traffic on the roads, as long as I still want to go back... I will never become a monster of this world!”
“【Lantern】 does not offer comfort. 【Lantern】 only reveals reality.”
“And the reality is—you are nothing but the trash I left behind when I cut away my weakness!”
Ryan roared, violently raising the 【Echoing Lantern】 high!
“Echo: Triple Gaze!”
Hum—!
The colorful flame inside the lantern casing erupted with an unprecedented, pure white glare!
This was no longer scattered light, but three solid, pillar-like beams of extreme light that locked onto the mirror image as he shifted at high speed through the void from three completely different angles!
Under the forced historical freeze of 【Echo】, all of the mirror image's movement trajectories over the past three seconds were forcibly dragged back into reality!
The black feather blades dancing in the sky and the illusionary residual shadows constantly shedding skin shattered instantly under the illumination of the cold white glare!
“Aaahhhhh—!”
The mirror image let out an agonizing shriek. Under the illumination of the truth of 【Lantern】, the concealment and changeability he had masked through the 【Moth】 aspect were forcibly stripped away, exposing the fragile structure pieced together by distorted rules within.
His spatial fold shift was violently interrupted, and he tumbled pathetically out of the void, crashing heavily onto the marble floor.
“Now!”
Ryan did not give his opponent any room to breathe. Cold white thrust erupted beneath his feet, and he lunged forward like an arrow released from a bow, instantly crossing a distance of dozens of meters!
The moment his body neared the ground, Ryan opened his right hand from a fist into a palm, compressing all the remaining 【Lantern】 spirituality in his body into his palm. The cold white flame condensed on the edge of his palm into an inch-long needle of light!
Puff!
Following the gaps in the bones of the mirror image's collapsed chest, Ryan drove his palm strike home with absolute precision!
Spirituality exploded violently inside the enemy!
Boom!
There was no spray of blood. The moment the 【Lantern】 spirituality contacted the mirror image's core, it was like hot sun melting snow, completely igniting the 【Moth】 aspect spirituality within his body!
Pure white light burst from the mirror image's eye sockets, mouth, nose, and even every crack in his skin.
“Lin Yuan...”
Pinned dead to the ground by this heavy palm strike, the black feathers on the mirror image's body rapidly weathered to ash in the white light. He looked up at Ryan, who was gazing down at him. The madness and rage on his face gradually faded, leaving only a highly complex sense of relief and lingering sorrow in his eyes.
In Chinese, a language only the two of them could understand, he hoarsely spat out his final words:
“I'll be back.”
Bang!
With a dull bang, the mirror image's body completely disintegrated, transforming into drifting greyish-white spiritual fragments and black embers that danced through the air.
The wind blew through the damaged geometric ruins above the great hall, scattering those remaining ashes into nothingness.
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