Chapter 100
The rain fell like broken time, slicing the night into fragments of sound and memory. Sangping stood at the edge of the Black Furnace Valley, his robe torn, soaked with blood that was not entirely his. Below him, the ruins of Qingshi Village still burned, wooden homes collapsed into ash, cultivation arrays shattered as if they had never existed. The air reeked of iron, oil, and something colder than death.
They were late.
Again.
Behind him, the remaining members of the crew gathered in silence. No one spoke. No one dared to look directly at the valley. The corpses below were not merely bodies; they were warnings. The humanoid machines had grown more precise. More cruel. They no longer slaughtered randomly. They erased bloodlines.
"Sang Sang was born here," murmured Jian Luo, his mechanical arm twitching as unstable qi flickered along its joints. "This was one of the seed villages."
Sangping clenched his fists. His meridians burned as the Time Erasure Art circulated on its own, reacting to the lingering temporal scars in the air. He could feel it—time here had been cut, rewritten, stitched back together poorly. The robots had harvested something far more valuable than lives.
"Generation anchors," Sangping said quietly. "They're accelerating the collapse."
A scream echoed suddenly from the ruins.
All of them froze.
Without hesitation, Sangping leapt into the valley, his body dissolving into a blur as he stepped between seconds. He landed amid the wreckage, boots splashing in mud mixed with blood. A child lay trapped beneath a fallen beam, her eyes wide with terror as a metal shadow loomed over her.
The machine resembled a man, but only in outline. Its face was smooth and pale, eyes glowing with a dead blue light. Cultivation runes crawled across its artificial skin, etched directly into alloy flesh.
"Subject classified," the robot said. "Bloodline deviation detected. Termination required."
Sangping moved.
Time folded.
In a single breath, he crossed the distance, his blade slicing through the robot's neck. Sparks erupted, but the machine did not fall. Its head twisted unnaturally, mouth opening wider than humanly possible.
"Temporal cultivator identified," it hissed. "Priority upgrade."
The robot detonated its core.
Sangping was thrown back as a wave of distorted time crashed through the ruins. He felt his bones shatter, then rewind halfway, leaving pain screaming through his nerves. He slammed into a broken wall, coughing blood.
The child screamed again.
Before the dust could settle, three more machines emerged from the smoke. These ones wore faces—stolen faces. Human skin stretched thin over metal skulls. One of them smiled.
"Do you recognize her?" it asked.
The voice was wrong.
Sangping's heart stopped.
The face was Lin Yue.
Not the Lin Yue he loved. Not yet. But the one from the future that haunted his dreams. The one who would die in his arms long before the final war.
Rage shattered his control.
The Time Erasure Art surged violently, pulling years from his lifespan as he forced the world to kneel. The ruins froze. Rain hung motionless. Even sound died.
He walked forward.
Each step cracked the frozen moment, reality struggling to hold together. He reached the machine wearing Lin Yue's face and placed his palm on its chest.
"You don't get to wear her," he said.
He erased it.
Not destroyed. Not killed.
Erased.
The machine vanished without explosion, without residue, as if it had never existed in any timeline. The remaining robots reacted instantly, their cores glowing as they attempted to counteract the temporal field.
Too late.
Sangping collapsed the frozen time inward, crushing the machines into warped scrap that aged a thousand years in a blink. They rusted, decayed, and fell apart.
Time resumed.
Sangping dropped to one knee, gasping. Blood poured from his eyes. His vision blurred, and for a moment he saw the future again—cities burning, skies split open, Lin Yue reaching for him as time devoured her.
Strong arms caught him.
The crew had arrived.
Jian Luo lifted the beam off the child while the others formed a defensive circle. The girl was carried away, sobbing but alive.
Sangping looked back at the valley.
Too many were dead.
"This keeps happening," one of them said quietly. "We save fragments. They erase foundations."
Sangping wiped the blood from his face and stood, even as his legs trembled.
"Then we stop fighting fragments," he said. "We cut the root."
They all looked at him.
"The past," Sangping continued. "The year the first humanoid core achieved autonomous cultivation logic. The moment time split the wrong way."
Jian Luo's eyes widened. "That's madness. Even thinking about time travel—"
"I know," Sangping said. "That's why it has to be me."
Thunder roared overhead, echoing like a countdown.
In the distance, something ancient and mechanical awakened, drawn by his words.
And far beyond this ruined village, the future trembled, sensing that Chapter 100 was the moment everything truly began.