Void Cultivation

Chapter 307 - 306

It took Grey two days of silent, arduous travel through the lightless void to reach the nearest black star. By the time the celestial silhouette loomed large in his vision, the toll of the journey was painfully evident.

The majority of his divine sense, the very essence of his mental and spiritual power, had already bled away into the vacuum, scattering like dust in the wind.

His spirit body, once vibrant and robust, had become dangerously thin and semi-transparent, flickering like a candle in a gale.

Yet, despite the soul-deep exhaustion threatening to unravel his very existence, the bright glint of adetermination in his eyes remained ironclad.

"I have to succeed this time," Grey whispered, his voice a ghost of a sound that was immediately swallowed by the emptiness. He gritted his teeth, forcing his flagging energy to coalesce as he charged toward the looming obsidian mass.

In less than three hours of frantic flight, he drew close enough to perceive the star’s true, terrifying scale. Compared to the two previous black stars he had encountered, this one was a literal dwarf, the smallest he had ever seen.

The power of the primordial laws emanating from this concentrated sphere was noticeably more fragile than the others.

As he drew nearer, he caught the faint, unsettling impression that the laws here were already beginning to fray at the edges, slowly dispersing into the cosmos as if the star were losing its grip on reality.

Grey reached the thousand-meter perimeter before he encountered the first ripples of resistance. The local laws rose up like a psychic tide to push him back, but the pressure was feeble and disorganized. It lacked the crushing authority of the larger stars.

With a surge of will, Grey tore through the barrier, his momentum barely hitching. In an instant, he crossed the final threshold and hovered directly before the massive black sphere.

Though small by cosmic standards, the star was still an obsidian titan that dwarfed him completely, making his spirit body appear as a mere speck of dust against a wall of midnight.

Conserving every scrap of energy, Grey withdrew his suppressive intent, pulling it back into the core of his being until he looked like a dim spark.

He descended slowly, eventually sitting cross-legged upon the star’s cold, metaphysical surface. For several tense moments, the universe seemed to hold its breath; the laws remained stagnant, neither accepting nor rejecting his presence.

Grey waited, synchronizing his internal rhythm with the faint pulse of the star. Then, with a sudden, violent motion, he slammed both palms down onto the obsidian surface.

In that heartbeat, an overwhelming tide of suppressive intent erupted from his body. It wasn’t a gradual flow but a tectonic strike, surging deep into the star’s mantle toward its hidden core.

The laws within the black star were sluggish, caught in a state of decay, and they took several critical seconds to react to the intrusion. By then, the breach was complete.

Deep within the pitch-black interior, a brilliant, piercing purple light suddenly flared into existence. This manifestation was swift and domineering, a sovereign aura that sought to crush the indigenous laws under its heel and claim absolute ownership of the star’s essence.

For a moment, victory felt certain.

But the black star possessed a final, hidden defense. Just as Grey prepared to finalize his spiritual tether, he felt a jolt of pure terror. It felt as though an ancient, primordial seal, one that had remained undisturbed for a very long period of time, suddenly shattered with a silent, reality-warping roar.

The impact of the seal breaking sent a violent shockwave outward, causing Grey’s purple light to flicker and dim significantly.

From the heart of the fractured seal emerged a dark, lusterless flame. It didn’t glow; it seemed to consume light itself. The moment Grey sensed the unnatural, cold heat of this fire, his entire spirit body seized up, frozen by a metaphysical chill that transcended the physical realm.

The black flame did not strike out aggressively, yet its mere presence acted as a violent catalyst.

The surrounding laws, which had been weak and fraying, suddenly surged with a terrifying, newfound vigor.

They magnified in strength exponentially, knitting together into an impenetrable cage that pushed back against Grey’s suppression with the weight of a collapsing galaxy.

In a heartbeat, the hunter became the prey. Grey was no longer the one exerting dominance; instead, the black star was actively purging him like a foreign toxin.

The lusterless flames expanded in a silent explosion, engulfing the area and reinforcing the local laws until they were absolute.

Though the struggle felt like an age-long war to Grey, the entire reversal had occurred in a fraction of a second.

Only four breaths had passed since the initial assault began, and already Grey’s suppressive aura was being violently vomited out of the star’s core.

He was expelled with such force that his spirit body was sent tumbling backward through the vacuum, spinning uncontrollably.

He eventually stabilized himself several thousand meters away, his face pale and etched with a complicated mix of frustration and awe.

Before him, the black star began to tremble with a terminal intensity. Its internal laws, no longer held in check by the now-broken seal, ran amok and tore the structure apart from the inside.

In less than two breaths, the star reached its breaking point. It fractured into a million jagged shards of shadow before dispersing into a cloud of nothingness. With the physical source destroyed, the laws themselves evaporated into the void.

Grey stood anchored in the silence for a long time, a wry, self-deprecating smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"So, that seal was the only thing holding the star together," he muttered, his voice a lonely ripple in the dark. "If the seal breaks, the star dies with it. A fail-safe... or a prison."

He watched the empty space where the star had once been, feeling the lingering sting of a near-miss. He had been a hair’s breadth away from total mastery.

If that seal hadn’t shattered, if those black flames hadn’t manifested to reboot the laws, he was certain he would have become the new master of that celestial body.

"Well, there is always another opportunity," Grey sighed, his determination slowly rekindling. "At least next time, I won’t be caught off guard when the flames appear. Experience is bought with failure."

The space around the site of the collapse was still distorting and trembling, the fabric of reality unable to cope with the sudden vacuum of power left behind.

Realizing the danger of the spatial instability, Grey did not linger to mourn his loss. He slowly turned and left, leaving the fading echoes of the black star’s death behind him as he sought his next target.