Qin Dynasty: They've all turned into zombies, what's there to fear about a rebellion?

"Sizzle—!!!"

With a sharp screech of electrical overload, a pale, extremely concentrated beam of light suddenly burst forth from the silver cylinder.

The light is too intense.

If Xiaomeng's "World Loses Color" forcibly dragged the world into the deathly silence of twilight, then Su Ming's move was like directly detonating a supernova in the twilight.

The intense light, like a red-hot sword, pierced through the hazy barrier of the domain without any resistance. Wherever the beam of light passed, the previously stagnant air instantly boiled over, and the colors that had been erased seemed to frantically reappear, filling the field of vision as if startled paint had been splashed back into the air.

"what!"

Xiaomeng felt a sharp pain in her eyes and instinctively raised her sleeve to cover them, her steps instantly becoming unsteady.

The intense light was not only blinding, but also carried an extremely domineering radiant heat that she had never seen before (a side effect of the increased pressure of the corpse energy), which made her skin ache. Her protective true energy melted away with a sizzling sound, like snow meeting boiling oil.

"It's...broken?"

Wei Zhuang, watching from afar, squinted and peered through his fingers at the scene, his usually arrogant face filled with astonishment.

The supreme domain technique of the Taoist Heavenly Sect was pierced through by a... glowing iron rod?

"That's impossible!"

Xiaomeng stumbled and landed, the Qiuli sword in her hand trembling slightly. She forced her tear-filled eyes open, staring intently at the man standing in the bright light, her voice for the first time filled with panic and confusion:

"What kind of sorcery is this? How could it break through my Dao Heart Domain?"

"Sorcery? I've already told you to read more books."

Su Ming turned off the flashlight's strobe mode, but left it on with a strong beam, shining it like a searchlight on Xiaomeng's face, forcing the Tianzong sect leader to awkwardly turn her head away.

He whistled, his face full of mocking arrogance:

"This is called optical physics. Light has wave-particle duality. Your field relies on suppressing the flow of 'color' and 'gas,' but in the face of high-energy photon flows, your suppression is too weak."

"To put it simply, your internet speed is too slow to keep up with my speed of light."

Xiaomeng didn't understand anything about photons or internet speed, but she understood the contempt in his voice.

"Clever words and a flattering expression!"

She gritted her teeth, her aura surging once more, black and white energies flowing behind her as she attempted to reconstruct her domain. "Everything has its destiny; life, death, prosperity, and decline are the laws of Heaven. Your attempt to forcibly break the balance with such strange and ingenious techniques is nothing but a fleeting moment!"

"Heaven and earth are ruthless, treating all things like straw dogs! You defy the heavens, and will ultimately turn to dust!"

"Stop, stop, stop reciting the text."

Su Ming impatiently interrupted her spellcasting animation, tucked the flashlight under his arm, pulled out a cigarette (also redeemed from the system) from his pocket, and said leisurely:

"Little sister, your so-called path is too narrow."

"You say everything will eventually turn to dust? Wrong! According to the law of conservation of matter, matter does not disappear; it simply exists in a different form."

Su Ming took a deep drag of his cigarette and slowly exhaled a smoke ring. The smoke twisted in the air and did not dissipate. Instead, it was drawn by the corpse energy in his body and transformed into a strange skull shape.

"Look, this tobacco burned to ash, turned into smoke, and I inhaled the smoke into my lungs, where it became my energy, and finally turned into this skeleton."

"Did it disappear? No. It just... upgraded."

Xiaomeng was stunned.

She stared at the smoky skeleton floating in mid-air, her brow furrowed. She had never heard of such sophistry before, yet it seemed to subtly resonate with some profound truth.

"As for what you said about life and death..."

Su Ming threw away his cigarette butt and walked step by step to Xiao Meng.

This time, he didn't use any weapons, nor did he activate any shields. He simply opened his arms wide, exposing his defenseless chest to the sharpness of the Qiu Li sword.

"Come on, touch it."

Su Ming grabbed Xiao Meng's hand that was holding the whisk and pressed it against his chest without saying a word.

Xiaomeng froze, instinctively trying to pull her hand away, but what she touched was ice-cold.

There is no temperature.

There were no ups and downs.

There was utter silence there; there wasn't even the sound of a living person's heartbeat!

"Can you feel it?"

Su Ming leaned closer to her face, his dark eyes flashing with a madness and indifference that transcended life and death. "My heart only beats three times a minute, just to maintain a minimum level of blood circulation."

"My body temperature is kept constant at ten degrees Celsius, in order to slow down cell aging."

"In your world, I'm a dead man. But in my science, this is called 'low-power standby mode'."

Xiaomeng's pupils contracted sharply, and the icy touch from her fingertips traveled up her arm and straight to her heart.

How is that possible?

The man before her could run, jump, talk, laugh, and was quick-witted; he could even shamelessly flirt with her. Yet, his physical characteristics clearly indicated he was a corpse!

"You... what exactly are you?" Xiaomeng's voice trembled, and her Dao heart was violently shaken at this moment.

"What am I?"

Su Ming grinned, revealing a set of gleaming white teeth that looked particularly menacing under the bright flashlight beam.

"I'm not human anymore, Xiaomeng!"

"Since being human means experiencing birth, aging, sickness, and death, and being subject to the cycle of reincarnation, then why should I even be born as a human?"

Su Ming suddenly waved his hand, and Wei Zhuang behind him, Hong Lian in the corner, Shao Siming, and even the busy mechanical corpse puppets seemed to become his background.

"Look at this Great Qin, look at this Youdu."

"We abandoned our fragile bodies, replacing them with steel skeletons; we eliminated useless pain, gaining endless power; we rejected the call of death, choosing eternal, data-driven existence!"

"You're saying this is defying the heavens?"

Su Ming pointed at the pale moon overhead, his voice filled with extreme arrogance:

"No, this is evolution! It's a leap in the level of life!"

"While you are still struggling to understand the Way of Heaven and trying to conform to nature, we have already trampled nature under our feet and dissected the Way of Heaven on the operating table!"

These words struck Xiaomeng's mind like a resounding bell.

Her adherence to the principle of "following the natural way" seemed so pale and powerless in the face of Su Ming's logically rigorous and factually based "theory of the evolution of the corpse way".

If immortality truly exists...

If the physical body is truly just a shell that can be replaced and modified at will...

Then isn't her "view on life and death" cultivated over more than a decade a joke?

"puff--"

Xiaomeng lost her composure and spat out a mouthful of blood. The "world loses its color" domain that she had been maintaining collapsed instantly, and the world regained its color.

She staggered backward, her face paler than her hair.

She looked at Su Ming, her eyes no longer filled with aloof indifference, but with confusion, bewilderment, and even a hint of...fear.

This man not only broke her moves, but also destroyed her heart.

"this……"

Xiaomeng sheathed the Qiuli Sword, looking helplessly at her hands, and murmured to herself:

"Is...this also the Dao?"