He Who Steals a Hook Is Executed

*Crack!* Another fissure split across the cover of the Book of Judgment. Between its leaves, the writing pooled from boundless crimson shifted once more, overlapping and unfurling. It resembled an eye looking down from on high. Distant and callous. Looking down upon dust with disdain. The Abyssal Lord felt as though he had plunged into an icy chasm. The moment that eye materialized, the Book of Judgment—which had served him with unfailing ease for centuries, obedient as an extension of his own arm—slipped entirely from his control. Far from invoking Ji Jue's compounding sins to call down an Absolute Sentence, it turned right around to lock onto him instead. Immediately after, pitch-black characters rose from the paper like soaring flames, terrifyingly frenzied, like heavenly wrath! [ATROCITY]! No pardon for the Ten Treasons; clan extermination for a hundred felonies! The deepest mechanism of the Book of Judgment, a terrible power that even he could not easily deploy, was triggered in an instant. Countless blades and shackles seemed to encircle his body; an abyss yawned beneath his feet, and boundless illusions of flame surged toward the heavens. In that fleeting instant before he was ground to powder and reduced to ash, he had just enough time to make a ruthless resolve! *Boom!* The Abyssal Lord's body violently detonated, along with the Book of Judgment in his hands. Relying on centuries of mastery and erosion under the Tyrant's Law, he cut his losses like a warrior severing his own wrist! Before the Book of Judgment could fully trigger, he detonated and annihilated this body, the greater part of his power, and the book itself! Throughout the vast oceanic abyss, the sounds of shattering were ceaseless, accompanied by a tide of wretched screams. Countless splendid palaces amassed over centuries fell apart, and one Scaled One after another burst into clouds of bloody mist amid terrified shrieks. In an instant, the oceanic abyss convulsed in violent tremors, reduced to devastation. Upon the ruined throne, the Abyssal Lord painstakingly coalesced anew. His skin crawled as he looked around, lingering horror clinging to him as his vision swam with darkness. He couldn't fathom it. The grand spectacle of teeming vitality and flourishing triumph had just been before his eyes, so how had everything suddenly... Wait! Something was wrong. Why...? He stiffly raised his head and felt a cold gaze piercing through the void. Ji Jue. Those eyes were still watching him! Even though he had destroyed the link through the Book of Judgment and severed the connection with Ji Jue, why was his Tyrant's Law still entangled with Luo Island?! He couldn't even break free! When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you. Whether Tianyuan or the Tower, laws and mandates were always reciprocal. Once countless threads became intertwined, how could one cleanly cut them away simply by severing a wrist or hacking through a knot? How tightly he had gripped before was how stubbornly it adhered now. When he tried to let go, he discovered his Tyrant's Law had been glued fast—as if coated in industrial adhesive—firmly bound to Chixiao's foundation, dragging along his authority and his soul! What he felt was a gravitational pull like that of a black hole! Within Tianyuan, the suppression of the lower ranks by the upper ranks was absolute! Especially in a regime like the Eternal Empire, where fairness and justice had never existed, only absolute rule handed down from above. Even if Ji Jue possessed barely any Tianyuan blessings and Chixiao was merely a blank slate, the absolute standing of the swordsmith of Hanxiang and the Imperial Sovereign's Hand could still exert absolute suppression over a Tyrant who had usurped power! At this moment, the instant Chixiao's foundation turned around and locked onto the foe: Ji Jue's perception bridged the vast distance, breaking past the breadth of the ocean and the depths of the abyss to detect the Tyrant's location. He even... Tore through space and arrived! The instant the Abyssal Lord's location entered his perception, the navigation of the Doomsday Express locked on. In the next breath—in less than the flick of a finger—Ji Jue appeared out of thin air right before the Abyssal Lord. Flashing a grin at that stunned, stupefied face, he said: "Hello!" And then... atop the vermilion Pan Ying, blood-red light surged violently as blazing flames erupted! Wildly incinerating the life and souls plundered by Wolf Sin, the Blood Wrist's Heritage Burnt Offering engaged—a 512-fold boost fully primed! *You've probably gotten a taste of my mechanics. Now, are you ready to feel my stats?* *Boom!* A scarlet storm erupted out of thin air within the gloomy hall. In less than the flick of a finger, Ji Jue swung Pan Ying and hacked at that face—slash! Slash! Slash! Slash! Slash! Slash! Slash! The darkness boiled. The mass of black mist barely clinging together in human form unleashed tens of thousands of shrill screams, overlapping and echoing ceaselessly. With one hand wielding Pan Ying, he delivered a lightning-whirlwind cleave, weaving basic attacks between normal hits in plain, unpretentious fashion. His other hand wasn't idle either: Jingzhen! Jingzhen! Jingzhen! Jingzhen! Amid this frantic blitz and onslaught, he stripped the throne, the grand hall, and every blessed creation on the Abyssal Lord's body down to nothing. Shattering sounds rang out without end, like the lingering echo of a breaking heart... In under half a second, his health bar and life's fortune evaporated at the speed of light. The Tyrant couldn't even react in time, only able to hear the unending shrieks echoing through his soul. The subjects of the Abyssal Kingdom, a third of whom had just been blown to pieces, now faced another gratuitous disaster. Every time Ji Jue's blade struck down, a dazed Scaled One detonated into a flare of blood-fire... *Shield me!* The moment he sensed the crisis, the Abyssal Lord instinctively invoked his authority, forcing his subordinates to absorb this sudden deluge of damage on his behalf. Yet by the time he realized just how absurdly inflated Ji Jue's stats were, it was already too late! Within that single second, Ji Jue lost count of how many slashes he had landed. He could only see scarlet fireworks erupting one after another in the pitch-black abyss, bathing the gloomy rift in breathtaking crimson. The Abyssal Guard, the Imperial Scale Guard, the Ten Beasts, the Hundred Broods of the Abyss... Gone. All gone! The fortune and forces he had spent centuries painstakingly accumulating had been chopped up like firewood by Ji Jue—sword stroke after sword stroke! The darkness torn apart by bloody light suddenly boiled. A piercing shriek rang out, filled with grief as if both his parents had died! The Tyrant went mad. Darkness surged like a tidal bore, and a violent repulsive pressure manifested from the Tyrant, turning into a wild tide that forcibly shoved the scarlet storm aside. "I will kill—" Amid the fragmented black mist, a pale face covered in fish scales emerged, twitching, a straight gash of blood cutting across it. Glaring fiercely at Ji Jue with a savage expression, he roared at the top of his lungs! The oceanic abyss trembled; the Tyrant raged. Dark tides manifested out of thin air from every crack and crevice, reigning over all and commanding everything, turning the whole space into a plaything within his grasp. Violent shadows rose from the ground to form a colossal tower. Atop the tower, the Abyssal Lord's face faintly loomed, looking down on Ji Jue, who had recklessly intruded upon his realm. It was like staring down at an insect in his palm. Slowly, he clenched his fingers! Crush! It was as though the entire world had turned hostile in an instant. The heavens fell like walls of iron, the earth spewed flames to incinerate all things, and even the air turned into blades meant to lacerate the lungs. Ji Jue merely looked up at this and sighed soundlessly. He raised a single finger toward the Tyrant. —The Flame of Non-Fate had long been waiting! The long-starved flame violently erupted, raging like a tide and sweeping across the entire domain. Spreading along the kingdom, it climbed onto the projection of that hideous tower, permeating inward through every conceivable gap. A shrill scream burst forth. As if body, soul, and self had all been cast into a crucible, under the incineration of the Fire of Non-Fate, the Abyssal Lord's face twisted rapidly in agonized shrieks. There was no time for fear or despair. Disregarding the scarlet storm lunging at him once again, the Abyssal Lord gritted his teeth and reached out his hand once more! He who steals a hook is executed; he who steals a state is crowned a prince! As an Abyssal Lord who had usurped the reins of state, this act of usurpation had long since become instinct. Battered by consecutive heavy blows and burning within the Fire of Non-Fate, the Abyssal Lord chose a fight to the death—a desperate last stand! "Give it to me!" He thrust his palm toward Ji Jue, the authority of Usurpation manifesting to seize Pan Ying from Ji Jue's grasp. Without warning, Ji Jue's hands were empty, and Pan Ying appeared out of thin air in the Abyssal Lord's grip. Even the master-servant relationship had been thoroughly overturned—along with, of course, the still-active Heritage Burnt Offering. *What the fuck—* The Abyssal Lord's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets as he shrieked aloud. He felt his soul and life being ravenously drained by that bizarre blade like a bottomless pit, unable to stop! *Stop! Stop! Stop, dammit!* *Boom!* Half his body shattered. One vermilion blade after another pierced outward from within his flesh. His re-formed body suffered catastrophic damage once again, leaving him unable to even weep. Even crying took precious time! He barely had the strength left to suppress Pan Ying's violent backlash, only managing to seal it away to prevent Ji Jue from reclaiming it. Ji Jue didn't give a damn about any of that. Without Pan Ying, he still had Zhanlu! Purple lightning and black flames burst from his fingertips. The spirit essence shrieked, expanding rapidly into an overwhelming expanse of thunder and fire that illuminated the Abyssal Lord's eyes with feral excitement. *Right, there's still this...* *Hand it over!* [Usurpation]! *Boom!* Ji Jue's movements halted in surprise. His heart suddenly felt strangely empty as the heavy pressure vanished. Then he saw that in the Abyssal Lord's hands, an orb of terrifying light had expanded to its absolute limit, right on the verge of detonating. "Uh-oh~" He instinctively took a step back and raised his defenses. Then, within the riddled domain, searing light rocketed into the sky. Rampaging out of control, Zhanlu howled in ecstatic fury, unleashing its full and complete form. Infinite thunder and fire billowed upward, coalescing into a jagged, menacing mushroom cloud that bristled with radiant spikes, expanding rampantly as black flames born of the vile fiend cascaded from the heavens like a waterfall. In the abyss, a massive hole was punched out of nothingness. The deep sea boiled, and countless fish and shrimp were vaporized in an instant... Out of the dead silence came a choked sob. Like a wail of utter misery. Stripped to bare bone and charred into a ruined corpse, the mangled Abyssal Lord stood at the very epicenter of the blast. In his hand, he still gripped a mass of thunder and fire that he had strained with all his might to contain, yet was already threatening to detonate again. Viscous tears of blood trickled down slowly from the corners of his eyes. He was on the verge of wailing. *Why, God damn it, why?!* The way he looked at the craftsman now was like he had seen a ghost, unable to comprehend anything: *No, what kind of freakish bullshit are you even using?!* *Why does every damn thing backfire at the drop of a hat, blow up to drag the universe down with it, and try its best to murder the user?!* *Does this make any damn sense?!* Had he been set up by Tianyuan? How had he fallen to such a pathetic state? Yet Ji Jue remained silent, simply drawing the sword Chunjun with a flick of his wrist. Stepping forward once more, radiant illusory light danced across the blade where spiritus flowed, looking so tranquil. Once again, it reflected in the Abyssal Lord's eyes. *This time... it can't possibly... not again...* Summoning the last dregs of his courage, he wiped his tears away and reached out a trembling, shaking hand. [Usurpation]! And then... There was no "and then." In the span of a finger-snap, the sword Chunjun fell into the Abyssal Lord's grip. It was as smooth and natural as if it belonged to him, without the slightest hindrance. As he gripped Chunjun, he felt such peace settle into his heart, as though his missing soul had finally found completion. Within the blade, endless transformations shifted in perpetual flux, the subtle intricacies dazzling the senses. What a fine sword! What an extraordinary sword! It was unimaginable that such a spirited blade existed in this world, seeming almost alive! "Haha, hahahaha! This time, at last, at last—!!!" Choking on his laughter, the Abyssal Lord looked down at the dazzling, translucent blade. And then, he saw... In the reflection along the sword's spine, a pair of eyes was slowly opening. Amid billowing black flames, the Seven-Horned Crown emerged, its robe fluttering through the fire like blood. The vicious demon in the flames smiled soundlessly. "Truly, what a fine piece of jade you are—"