Changes in the Upper Layer of the Land of Origin

After tying up all loose ends, Lu Yuan's spatial clone slowly dissolved into the void of the Chaos Sea and waited in silence for the Mother of Aberration's arrival.

Time passed. Ten days of real time, no more — and a terrifyingly powerful aura began closing in from the distance.

Lu Yuan's spatial clone felt it instantly. That crushing presence, bearing down from somewhere far off. He stared fixedly toward its source.

In the next moment, a streak of green radiance tore through the Chaos mist and arrived at the exact position where the Universe Bubble had been. A colossal figure slowly materialized from within.

Lu Yuan's spatial clone stared, eyes wide, at the monster before him — a thing roughly one-third the size of a Universe Bubble.

*That's... enormous.*

He had never imagined anything in this universe could grow to such a scale.

But he made peace with it quickly.

The Mother of Aberration roamed the Chaos Sea, devouring Cosmic Origin energy to fuel her own growth. She likely wasn't a creature born from within any universe at all.

Even if she once had been, she was so far beyond that origin now that the label no longer fit.

Size wasn't the critical factor. What mattered to Lu Yuan was her raw power.

He kept his spatial clone focused on her, his attention stretched taut.

Just the ambient aura bleeding off her in her resting state was enough to send a chill through him.

She was stronger than him. Far stronger.

And this was just her natural state. If she unleashed her full force —

*How terrifying would that be?*

Ice prickled across his scalp.

A being that devoured whole universes in the Chaos Sea. Of course her strength was on a different plane entirely.

Deep down, a quiet flicker of relief moved through him — relief that he hadn't been foolish enough to stay and face her directly. If he had, he'd be dead by now.

There was one piece of good news, though: the Mother of Aberration didn't appear to have mastered Spatial Laws. She couldn't teleport.

If she had, she would have arrived in an instant rather than flying here. That was the only explanation.

That was enormously reassuring.

It meant that even if she located the Universe Bubble, she couldn't simply blink across space to reach it. He'd have time to run.

The Mother of Aberration arrived and looked around, sensing the residual Aberration energy that lingered in the area. The aura rolling off her shifted. Every eye scattered across her body blazed with an eerie light, and from her many mouths came a warped, furious roar.

"Worthless insects!"

She could feel it — every one of her offspring in this region had been wiped out.

All of them slaughtered by that young Laws Rank cultivator from the universe below.

She turned toward where the Universe Bubble had been. The faint traces of Cosmic Origin energy were still there.

But the Universe Bubble itself was gone.

That sent her fury surging higher.

Then, without warning, a faint tremor passed through the Mother of Aberration. Green radiance flared across her body. A cluster of eyes on one of her tendrils locked onto something. Beams of sickly green light erupted from them and blazed across the Chaos Sea — directly toward where Lu Yuan's spatial clone was hiding.

The green lances ripped through space, splitting the surrounding Chaos mist apart and carving open a Spatial Rift in their wake.

Lu Yuan's spatial clone, however, had already shifted. He re-emerged slowly from a different direction in the Chaos mist.

His eyes were wide.

The space of the Chaos Sea was unnaturally stable — even Lu Yuan's own attacks couldn't shatter it without drawing on Spatial Laws. Yet the Mother of Aberration had just cracked it with a passing, offhand strike.

*I've been underestimating her.*

The Mother of Aberration noticed him. Something cold settled over her grotesque face.

"So there's a little insect lurking here," she said. "It's you, is it?"

Every one of her mouths spoke in unison. Her voice carried a strange, seductive resonance that made even the spatial clone's focus waver for a moment.

Shock lanced through Lu Yuan's mind. He didn't reply. Instead he dove directly into the spatial current, moving in the opposite direction from the Universe Bubble.

But as he traveled through the Spatial Rift, something monstrous descended on him.

Sickly green radiance tore through the spatial current itself, wrapping around his spatial clone and pinning it in place.

The world lurched. Lu Yuan's spatial clone felt something cold spike through his every nerve.

*This thing can rip through Chaos Space and drag me out of the void?!*

He looked at the Mother of Aberration — that corrupt green aura writhing around her — and made his decision without hesitation. He dissolved the spatial clone.

The Mother of Aberration watched the clone fade away, her expression glacial. Green radiance pulsed around her.

She let out a cold snort. Under the sweep of her tendrils, the open Spatial Rifts slowly sealed themselves closed.

The Chaos Sea returned to its unbroken stillness.

She surveyed the area. A calculating look crossed her monstrous face as she extended her senses outward, reading the spatial fluctuations around her with careful attention.

She hadn't fully mastered Spatial Laws, but her vast command over so many different Laws gave her a working understanding of space — enough to detect simple spatial disturbances. And right now, she could feel it clearly.

The spatial wake left behind when the Universe Bubble had departed... had been interfered with.

The spatial clone had done it deliberately.

"Insolent insects! Don't think this means I can't find you!"

Her voice blazed with unrestrained fury.

In the next moment, tendrils began to separate from the Mother of Aberration's body. They writhed and reshaped, forming themselves into dozens of fleshy, amorphous creatures — each one radiating a staggering aura.

Every single one of them was Laws Rank.

Hundreds of them.

With a single thought, the Mother of Aberration sent these Aberrant Touches blazing outward in every direction, scattering like sparks.

Wherever they passed, they would leave trails. And if there were no leads here, she would find them elsewhere.

She was certain: she would find that universe. She would catch that insect.

Inside the Universe Bubble.

In the Gravity Room at Sky-Mending City, Upper Layer of the Land of Origin.

Lu Yuan, deep in his comprehension of Spatial Laws, suddenly felt pain spike through his mind. His Law Space shattered along with it.

He coughed up a mouthful of blood. His face went pale.

His gaze was dark and heavy.

Forcibly self-destructing a spatial clone sent a devastating backlash rippling back to his consciousness. Even with his current strength, the damage was far from light.

A green glow pulsed around him as Life Laws seeped into his body, steadily closing the wounds. The stabbing pain in his head began to recede, fraction by fraction.

The pallor faded from his face — and then, gradually, a pained grimace settled in its place.

The backlash had been severe. His Law Space was completely destroyed. He'd barely started comprehending Time Laws — hadn't made much progress at all.

What a waste of a Heart of Laws.

The twinge of regret lasted only a moment before a faint smile crossed his lips.

Yes, he'd taken real damage. Yes, he'd burned a Heart of Laws. But it had been necessary, and the intelligence he'd gathered was invaluable.

First: the Mother of Aberration's power was exactly as terrifying as he'd feared. He now genuinely doubted whether he could match her even after comprehending every remaining Law — Time Laws, Fate Laws, and Fantasy Laws combined. That aura of hers was simply on a different level. A casual strike had cracked Chaos Space open. She'd torn him out of the spatial current through sheer force.

If he hadn't dissolved the clone the instant he did, there was no telling whether she might have traced something back to the Universe Bubble.

*That's a chilling thought.*

He'd sent only a spatial clone in — and it had nearly gone wrong. If he'd still been inside the Universe Bubble back then…

He pushed the thought aside. The risk had been real, but confirming the Mother of Aberration's capabilities was worth it.

Second — and this was reassuring — he'd confirmed she had no mastery of Spatial Laws. Her raw strength could break space, but without command of Spatial Laws, her movement speed still couldn't match spatial teleportation.

He was already moving the Universe Bubble through irregular teleportation jumps. That would continue to buy him time.

But…

His brow creased slightly as another thought surfaced.

If she could shatter space with brute force alone, her senses were likely sharp enough to detect the disturbances that spatial movement left behind. That could become a real problem.

The thought made him act immediately. He condensed a new spatial clone.

A silver-white figure flickered into existence, then vanished in an instant.

He sent it trailing behind the Universe Bubble with one purpose: to erase every trace of their movement.

That was the safer approach.

With the clone dispatched, Lu Yuan let out a slow breath. The immediate crisis was as contained as he could make it. For the short term, at least, the Universe Bubble was secure.

He knew the Mother of Aberration's rough measure now. As long as he prepared carefully and leaned on his Spatial Laws mastery — combined with his ability to shift the Universe Bubble through Cosmic Origin energy — he would be extraordinarily difficult to find.

The one real problem remaining was that the Mother of Aberration was simply too powerful.

What if he mastered every remaining Law and still couldn't beat her? What then?

Keep running indefinitely?

Even if he wanted to, that wasn't a strategy that held forever. The aggressor has time on their side; the defender does not. If she ever grasped Spatial Laws herself, it would be over in an instant. And even without Spatial Laws, if she kept devouring universes and growing stronger, their universe remained in danger regardless.

Lu Yuan's mood was heavy. His thoughts churned. In the end, he found no clever answer.

All he could do was cultivate faster. Only by becoming stronger would he have any real options. Even if the day came when he still couldn't match the Mother of Aberration, at least he wouldn't be as helpless as a disembodied clone.

He exhaled slowly, clearing his mind, then reached for a Heart of Laws. He placed it in his palm and sank back into comprehension — Time Laws, from the beginning.

With his spatial clone and stellar clone working in tandem to shift the Universe Bubble along irregular trajectories, and a second spatial clone sweeping their tracks clean behind them, the Universe Bubble drifted quietly between the Chaos Sea and the Spatial Rifts.

On the whole, the universe remained calm.

And through all of it, Lu Yuan's true body cultivated without pause.

Time Laws proved several times harder to comprehend than Spatial Laws. His progress was grueling.

But it was always moving forward.

One hundred Origin Years later, the sky over Sky-Mending City filled with drifting layers of bronze sand — countless grains, each one inscribed with the abstruse patterns of Time Laws. For one brief, impossible instant, all of time within the city simply paused.

No one noticed.

The news that the Universe Bubble had vacated its original territory in the Chaos Sea had spread across the entire universe before long. It was far too significant an event to stay quiet.

In the Upper Layer of the Land of Origin, where the Gene Warriors were all formidable cultivators in their own right, word spread quickly. Everyone understood the weight of what was out there — the crushing pressure represented by the Mother of Aberration.

Nearly every Gene Warrior threw themselves into cultivation.

But other changes had been quietly unfolding as well.

With the Universe Bubble relocated far from its previous position, the Aberrant Beasts that had once poured through from outside were no longer being driven in by any external source. The corrupted zones spread across the Upper Layer of the Land of Origin were slowly shrinking — partly through the Land of Origin's own natural purifying effect, and partly through the efforts of light-type Gene Warriors whose abilities could cleanse Aberration directly.

Fewer corrupted zones meant less Aberration aura, which meant fewer aberrant Feral Beasts being born. The ones that already existed were steadily being hunted down and eliminated. Gradually, they vanished from the landscape altogether.

The sky itself changed. What had once been a perpetual, murky gloom was giving way — growing cleaner and clearer, almost luminous. The Spatial Rifts scattered across the Upper Layer were closing, one by one.

All of it traced back to the retreat of the Aberration Corruption.

Without the constant flow of aberrant Feral Beasts, Gene Warriors found their Merits income lower, and the resources they relied on harder to come by. Progress slowed somewhat.

But in exchange, the Upper Layer was genuinely safer than it had ever been. Warriors were no longer dying permanent deaths at the claws of aberrant Feral Beasts.

A trade-off with no simple verdict.

At this moment, a crowd of Battle King Rank and above Gene Warriors inside Sky-Mending City raised their eyes to the strange new phenomenon spreading across the sky overhead. Scattered among them, newer arrivals wore expressions of undisguised shock.

"What's happening?!"

"What is all that sand? It looks like it's covered the entire city — it's terrifying!"

"Is this — is the Mother of Aberration invading?!"

While the newcomers panicked, the veterans who had witnessed Laws phenomena before were already breaking into wide smiles.

"That's Lu Yuan, My Lord!"

"It looks like My Lord's Laws have broken through again. As long as My Lord is still with us, no matter how powerful that Mother of Aberration is — we still have a chance!"

"How many Laws does Lu Yuan, My Lord, have now? If War God Ruoshui and the others hadn't told us before, I never would have known that all those past phenomena were his doing."

"Exactly! My Lord is simply unbelievable — and he's saved this universe more than once already."

A few of the old-timers looked sidelong at the bewildered newcomers among the Battle King Ranks and shook their heads.

"Always making a fuss over nothing. That's a Laws phenomenon. Every time My Lord has comprehended a new Law, a phenomenon like this has appeared. This is hardly the first time — it's happened more times than I can count."