I fabricated myths to guide the revival of spiritual energy.

The space elevator car is ascending at an eerily smooth and extremely fast speed towards the synchronous orbit 36,000 kilometers away.

The interior of the elevator car was extremely spacious, but at this moment it was so quiet that you could clearly hear a pin drop, and even hear the heavy and suppressed heartbeats of the people inside.

Several high-ranking military officers and special envoys from the State Council who had boarded the elevator before Gu Qing were now standing in a corner, their postures almost frozen. Despite the perfect temperature-controlled array inside the carriage, their expensive uniform shirts were already soaked with cold sweat.

In their eyes, what had just happened in the square did not resemble an attempted assassination at all. Rather, it was a brutal blow demonstrating what absolute truth is. When the kinetic energy was erased out of thin air, and when the bullet vaporized the entire underground city along the causal lines, they finally realized that the man before them, revered by the world as the "Lord of the Dao," had long since transcended the realm of the human species.

Gu Qing sat quietly on a floating jade armchair, her eyes slightly closed. A long, pale finger rested on the armrest, gently tapping the jade surface in a very regular rhythm.

"Da...da...da..."

To the high-ranking humans, the crisp knocking sound was like the Grim Reaper turning the second hand of a countdown to the end of their lives.

Outsiders assumed Gu Qing was resting with his eyes closed, or perhaps calming his anger over the earth-shattering assassination attempt. But only Gu Qing himself knew that his emotions were completely calm, and deep within his consciousness, a holographic network called "God's Perspective" was unfolding.

[Ding—An extremely low probability internal conflict within civilization has been detected. A massive amount of "faith" fluctuations have been automatically captured.]

[Because the host exhibited "divine judgment" rather than "worldly rage," the global level of awe has increased dramatically.]

[The underground meeting place in Zone D of New Chang'an has been completely eliminated, and the partial causal chain has been closed.]

In Gu Qing's vision, a semi-transparent 3D map covering the entire Earth's tectonic plates was flashing with countless deep red dots. Each red dot represented a member of an underground organization like Qiao Yuan, harboring hatred for the new era and attempting to "set things right" in the shadows.

They were densely packed, like poisonous fungi clinging to the roots of a towering tree.

"You are trembling."

Gu Qing did not open her eyes. Her cold voice suddenly rang out in the empty sedan chair. There was no emotional fluctuation, but it made the knees of several high-ranking special envoys go weak and they almost knelt down on the spot.

"Dao... Dao Master, please forgive me!" Special Envoy Lin Jianming of the State Council spoke in a trembling voice, hoarse as if he had swallowed a handful of sand. "The matter of Li Jianguo and Qiao Yuan reveals an extremely serious loophole in our oversight. I have always been responsible for the emotional support of the 'Spirit-Slayers' within the Academy of Sciences, and I cannot shirk my responsibility. I beg the Dao Master to punish me, and not let these ashes of the old era chill the hearts of billions of seekers of the Dao worldwide!"

The military generals next to him also lowered their heads, not daring to even breathe loudly.

Gu Qing slowly opened his eyes, a faint bluish-gold light seemingly flowing deep within his pupils. There was no anger from the assassination attempt in his gaze, nor any blame for Lin Jianming's dereliction of duty, only a cold indifference that saw through the structure of matter and the inherent flaws of humanity.

"Will punishing you stop those intricate gears hidden in the gutter from turning?"

Gu Qing stood up, put one hand behind his back, walked to the huge porthole, and looked down at the azure star.

"Special Envoy Lin, do you think what I care about is that assassination attempt? What I care about is that what you call 'diversity of civilization' and 'freedom of thought' is becoming barnacles dragging this giant ship of humanity into the abyss."

He turned his head slightly, glancing at Lin Jianming out of the corner of his eye. The oppressive feeling in his eyes made Lin Jianming's breathing become intermittent, as if the oxygen around him had been instantly sucked out.

"Just in that one minute, a total of ninety underground bases around the world received signals that the assassination attempt on New Chang'an had failed." Gu Qing's tone was as calm as if he were reading an insignificant weather forecast. "Fifty of them are urgently transferring data and funds, twenty are burning the experimental samples they used for live dissection of cultivators. The rest are planning the next round of indiscriminate suicide attacks against Kunlun students and even civilians."

The high-ranking officials inside the elevator abruptly looked up, their faces ashen. For the first time, they realized so clearly that in the eyes of this Dao Lord, the world held no secrets. Humanity's proud encrypted networks and physically isolated underground fortresses were like transparent glass jars before him.

"In the past, I went to great lengths to teach you how to cultivate immortality, bestowed upon you cultivation techniques, and modified your spiritual veins, hoping that you would have the means to save yourselves in the impending cataclysm of the void."

Gu Qing raised his right hand, and a dark gray phantom appeared in his palm. It was the embers of the underground debris that had just been vaporized by the attack.

"But I've found that this gentle pace of evolution is too slow. Not only are you not focusing your efforts on combating threats from beyond the stars, you even have the leisure to reminisce about that narrow era supported by fossil fuels and capital monopolies."

"In that case, I'll help humanity clean up their overloaded memory."

Gu Qing's hands suddenly clenched together.

In an instant, an invisible wave, imperceptible to mortals yet causing all high-level cultivators worldwide to tremble in their souls, surged downwards along the main axis of the space elevator. This wave, through the spiritual energy nodes buried deep within the Earth's dragon veins, spread to every corner of the globe in a fraction of a second.

Meanwhile, in an underground nuclear bunker belonging to an ancient European tycoon, a dozen or so well-dressed aristocrats and arms dealers from the old era sat around a round table, watching the images broadcast from the new Chang'an Square on a screen, their bodies drenched in cold sweat.

"Quickly! Cut off all financial transactions with Qiao Yuan! Activate the 'Noah' backup plan immediately!" A silver-haired tycoon roared frantically.

However, no sooner had he finished speaking than the expensive glass of red wine he was holding fell straight onto the expensive carpet.

Without any warning, the tycoon's body suddenly erupted with an extremely dazzling pure white light from within. The light was like a high-dimensional eraser, starting from his hair and skin and instantly penetrating deep into his bone marrow.

"Ah—no!!!"

In just half a second, to the horrified gazes of those around him, this tycoon who controlled the economic lifeline of old Europe turned into a pool of glowing ashes devoid of any life.

Immediately afterwards, the other eight people around the round table were simultaneously enveloped in a deadly white light. The lead plates of the nuclear bunker, several meters thick, were rendered useless in the face of this obliteration of causality.

The same scene is playing out all over the world.

Inside a heavily guarded secret military base in North America, a traitorous general was entering the launch codes for a tactical nuclear missile, attempting to destroy a ley line node amidst the chaos. The moment his fingers touched the keyboard, his entire arm turned to ash, and then a white light engulfed his head.

In a dark slum in South America, an extremist who was assembling detonators for a homemade psionic bomb was vaporized in his makeshift shack before he could even scream.

This cleaning process is precise down to the cellular level and ruthless to an appalling degree.

Even on the bustling streets of New Chang'an City, countless people who had just recovered from the shock of the grand ceremony witnessed this scene that resembled the end of the world.

Among the patrol officers directing traffic at the intersection, a deeply hidden contact person from the outer perimeter of a "pure human" suddenly froze. To the astonishment of his colleagues, he turned into countless particles of light and dissipated, leaving only an empty uniform lying on the ground.

A socialite who was giving a speech on the top floor of the financial center collapsed into a pile of white ash in front of hundreds of cameras before he could finish speaking, just like a sand sculpture that had been weathered for a hundred years.

Panic swept across the globe like a whirlwind, but following closely behind was a deathly awe.

There was no bloody slaughter, no earth-shattering battle. Only silent annihilation. This is true divine punishment! When God wants you dead, He doesn't need an excuse, He doesn't even need to lift a finger.

Inside the space elevator car.

"Beep beep beep beep—"

The portable, high-security government terminal that Special Envoy Lin Jianming was wearing around his neck suddenly emitted an extremely piercing alarm. His hands trembled as he tapped the holographic screen, which displayed a monitoring report compiled in real-time from Skynet systems around the world.

The red "Vitality Signs Disappear" warning is flooding the screen at a rate of hundreds per second!

Every second, hundreds of names are erased from this world forever. Behind these names are reclusive tycoons of the old era, top physicists, powerful generals, and dangerous elements lurking in the streets.

"This...this is...a great purge?"

"No."

Gu Qing turned around, the background of which was the pitch-black starry sky that had completely transformed into the deep universe, and a huge synchronous orbital space station that was about to arrive, emitting a ghostly blue light.

This is called "redundancy cleanup".

Gu Qing's tone remained flat, as if he had just killed not tens of thousands of people, but merely swept a layer of dust off the table.

"When the body develops a carbuncle, scraping the bone to remove the poison will certainly be painful, but it's better than dying on a sickbed with this rotten flesh. Special Envoy Lin, go back and tell your colleagues in the State Council, as well as your colleagues in the military." Gu Qing's gaze swept over the few people slumped on the ground.

"I don't need your cheap loyalty, which is mixed with various interests and checks and balances. What I need is absolute order."

Gu Qing returned to the jade chair, his fingertips lightly tracing the void, and the system panel displayed a blood-red value that satisfied him greatly.

[Ding—Precise causal erasure has been carried out globally, eliminating a total of 8767 destabilizing factors.]

The current global rate of social unrest has temporarily increased by 15%.

[Purity of the product has increased by 30%.]

[Host behavior has been detected to have significantly deviated from the 'Lawful Compassion' path.]

[Behavioral System Evaluation: Extreme.]

[Humanity stripping level +5%, current overall progress is approaching the critical value. Warning: The host's emotional module is being forcibly compressed.]

Gu Qing looked at the "cool and fierce" review and a barely perceptible smile appeared on her lips.

At this moment, the elevator car shook slightly and finally came to a stop.

The hatches slid silently open to both sides, revealing not the bustling city of New Chang'an, but a quiet, cold, yet futuristic, heavy-industry-inspired synchronous track expansion station.

This will be Earth's outermost shield against the invasion of the void.

Several high-ranking officials stumbled out of the hatch. Looking at the steel and array-laden palace that had miraculously taken shape in just a few months, their previous pride in the marvels of human engineering was gone. Having witnessed firsthand the silent global purge, they were left with only endless humiliation and terror.

Gu Qing ignored them and walked straight into the core area of ​​the space station.

"System," Gu Qing murmured to himself.

【exist. 】

"In the emotional data that came back from that global purge just now, what percentage was dominated by fear?"

[This accounts for 89.4%. This high-purity fear, born from the unknown and uncontrollable forces, is precisely the best fuel for transforming higher-level information power and repairing Earth's defense network at this stage.]

"yes……"

Gu Qing slowly closed her eyes.

At that moment, he felt that the causal chain between himself and the mortals on this land had broken several extremely thick strands.

This feeling made him stronger and freer than ever before, yet also more lonely than ever before. It was as if he was gradually shedding the skin called "human" and ascending towards some eternal, cold, and absolutely rational cosmic rule.

And this is exactly the process the system wants to see.

When the elevator returns to the ground, what awaits Lin Jianming and the others is a new world completely washed clean by blood and fear, utterly silent and utterly humiliating.

Gu Qing will sit upright in this cold sky, continuing his increasingly grand and cruel "miracle" script.