Bian moved to avoid the incoming attack. He never expected reality to suddenly blur.
It felt similar to hyper travel he had seen in movies through wormholes, but he was much, much faster.
Space broke around him, but he couldn't see anything to discern where he was. Worse still, the frightening energy that was stored in his body like lumps was burning up at unbelievable speeds.
To complete his evolution had only used one-tenth of the total energy, but now more than half was used in a couple of seconds.
The darting indigo streak broke through the barren systems and travelled the universe at impossible speeds.
Even light could not keep up.
Nothing could stand in its way, be it an asteroid, a planet, or a star.
Creatures at king level and below couldn't even register Bian due to his speed. Only deified beings could, provided they didn't blink.
His hyper travel didn't get to last long. In under ten seconds, all the energy from his body had been drained.
Bian could finally observe things again. He saw a small white dot rapidly swell until he crashed into it, shattering half of it into rocks.
As he fell downwards from the ricochet, he looked up and realised he had wrecked a moon.
Now the power was wholly gone from his system, Bian couldn't maintain the Emperical Body any longer. Using the last vestiges of his power, he sped up to the planet below, breaking through a space barrier and nearly crashing into a residential area before he altered course and landed in an alley.
All of this happened in the blink of an eye. As the moon exploded, Bian appeared in the alleyway with a flash of indigo light. He was hovering some feet above the ground, but his body, which looked like stained glass, reverted back to normal and he collapsed there.
Only then did he hear weird exclamations, presumably about the shattered moon in the sky.
Presumably because he couldn't understand the language they spoke. His eyes were blurry, ears were ringing, and mind was foggy.
Before he could figure out what was happening, he fell unconscious.
Not the light type of unconsciousness, like a knockout from a heavyweight champion, but the deep kind, like that of a comatose patient.
...
On a busy street leading to a market, a dirty man only wearing a rag moved with unsteady steps, as if drunk.
Six months after Bian regained consciousness, he finally had enough strength in his limbs to walk.
The past six months were nothing but torture for him. He woke up naked in a location, different from the alley, surrounded by beggars and dead corpses.
He was assumed to be the latter until his eyes opened. Judging by their shocked reactions, Bian knew he hadn't just gotten there. He must have been there for at least months, for them to be as surprised as they were.
That was also when he was able to confirm his location. He wasn't in the alliance or the sanctuaries anymore; most of the beggars there looked like humans, but they had sharp ears and protruding monkey tails.
The others were a mismatch of different races; some had cow heads and human bodies, others were half person, half snake, and so on. Bian fit right in with the minority.
He had woken up paralysed, unable to even move a finger.
Seeing as he couldn't hear the language of the natives, Bian tried communicating through blinking, but he had thought too highly of the people around him.
They could not care less about his physical condition, they didn't even mind that he couldn't move. They put a rag on him and carried him to a popular street with a rusted pot in his arms.
The street led to a local market, so sometimes people passing by would drop spare change and other times, foodstuff.
Bian was favoured above other beggars because he was quite handsome. Several ladies even dropped extra money and looked at him with pity.
Sadly, all the money and foodstuffs would be taken by the other beggars. They did not even know how to take care of their golden goose, leaving Bian unfed and dehydrated for a month.
Thankfully, Bian regained some motion in his arm after the first month. He was barely able to flinch, but in time he could eat some of the food that was dropped in his rusty pot.
From there, he started to regain his energy in a slow and arduous process. Now, after six months, he could finally walk on his own.
Sadly, that was the maximum he could do. Just taking in a deep breath was a task and a half. The lowest person on the streets had geno armor on.
This was the great gene universe. It was more astonishing that Bian didn't have geno armor as an adult.
Unfortunately, he couldn't hear what those ladies at the market were saying, he was vaguely sure a lot of them were trying to help him.
"Thankfully, being handsome didn't get me in trouble this time."
Only after he was able to walk did Bian have the boldness to activate the Emperical Will. This meant things were about to get started.
The past months had not been torture because of the state he was living in. While it was terrible, this much wasn't enough to disturb Bian.
Rather, he was deathly worried about his family in the alliance, especially Han Yan. Every waking moment he spent trapped in his head multiplied his anxiety.
If not for the Queen Piece, which signified that she was still alive, Bian might have run mad.
"Han Jinghzi might be an asshole, but surely he wouldn't bring harm to his own family member."
The more he thought about it, the more he reasoned it to be true.
"That must mean he either doesn't know I'm married to Han Yan or the asshole doesn't see me as family."
With this resolution in his heart, Bian was finally at ease to face his own predicament. Even the Rook Piece was intact, although the connection was dampened.
"Tyrant should still be alive, but sealed. Sleep for now, Tyrant, I'll come to free you soon."
Bian could move about, but he sat down again, wolfing all the food that came his way.
He was carried back when the sun went down. Back in the dark parts of town, another fight broke out again, with one of the foreign alien races killed again.
'This place is getting too dangerous. Their xenophobia is something else.'
Even Bian wasn't exempt from some roughing up. He had eaten most of the food he received, and although they had taken the money, they didn't seem to be satisfied.
The silence of night came. Some hours after everyone was asleep, a pair of eyes snapped open.
Like a thief in the night, Bian quietly sneaked around the degraded shanty, wearing the stained clothes of the man that was just killed. It was an upgrade compared to the rag he had on.
He thought about taking the coins from their pockets, but quickly dismissed the idea.
Activating the Emperical Will, Bian felt that wonderful sensation again.
'The Evolved Emperical Will is amazing.'
Countless threads seemed to spawn out of his body. Most threads were thinner than a hair, barely noticeable; some had widths of actual threads, and a handful had decent thickness like a rope.
He couldn't actually see these threads; he could only perceive them whenever the Emperical Aura was active.
What made Bian really excited was the fact that some threads stretched into the far recesses of space; some seemed to even extend into unknown reaches. He could feel the approximate distance of each thread and chose to follow the closest one.
It led him through a path he was all too familiar with and to a certain shop. The shop was closed with a weird alloy and had security features, not that Bian was interested in breaking an entry.
He picked the next closest thread, a slightly thicker one this time.
Bian followed it for several hours, until dawn, and he still hadn't found the source.
"I can only feel the thread is the closest one, I can't tell how close it actually is."
As the day started to break, Bian was growing restless. They must have carried him from the alley for a reason; he didn't think walking in the city in stained and torn clothes would bode well for him.
Just as he was about to head back, he felt the thread moving.
It was slightly rotating around him, and its length was reducing drastically.
"It's coming towards me?"
Bian waited where he was for some minutes. By now, some vehicles were flying, others drove past him.
He didn't have to wait long before a black race car came speeding down the road.
He couldn't see it, but he could feel the thread was attached to that race car.
Bian looked intently at where he assumed the driver would be. Although he called it a race car, it was three metres high and five metres long with no windows.
While it was bigger than most other vehicles he had seen, it was also quite sleek. He thought to himself that he wouldn't mind driving such a car.
The car came to a screeching halt by his side. There were no doors though, a hatch opened by the side.
A native woman walked out of the car. She had spiked black hair, slightly pointed ears, and a black monkey tail. Wearing a business suit, one could imagine her gaze would be quite fierce, but that wasn't the case.
She had round and gentle eyes, not unlike a doe.