Side Story 6: This Punch, Quells Impatience and Restlessness.

Whoosh!

In a distant parallel timeline, an ancient and immortal hall stood silently in the void, eternal and unchanging.

At the center of the hall was a square formation, laid out like a chessboard. Within it, specks of starlight glimmered, with world after world drifting and rising amid them.

Suddenly!

A strand of starlight lit up within the formation.

The starburst seemed to break free of some unseen restraint. It trembled violently, then suddenly leaped upward, attempting to escape the confines of the board.

Buzz!

An invisible ripple immediately erupted from the edges of the formation, attempting to suppress the rebellious starburst and force it back down. Yet when that terrifying pressure touched the starlight, it seemed to sense something. In an instant, all the pressure withdrew, as though nothing had ever happened.

With nothing left to impede it, the starburst leaped again with all its might.

Specks of starlight sprang out of the tiny formation.

The next moment—

Light erupted, dazzling beyond measure!

A slender figure dressed in plain white suddenly appeared within the great hall. Perched on his shoulder was a cute little white-haired girl, who gazed around the ancient hall in bewilderment.

“Where are we?” Xiaobai asked, sounding utterly lost.

Ye Shu secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Fortunately, he had seized something from the system that could prove his identity. That was why he had been able to escape the formation so easily.

He raised his head.

The World Tree still stretched across the sky.

Even though his senses told him he was inside an ancient hall and that it should have been impossible for him to see such a magnificent World Tree, his eyes could still perceive it directly.

It was as if the tree had been branded directly into the depths of his soul. No matter where he went or how many layers of space separated them, he could see every vein and branch of it with perfect clarity.

Even inside this formation, which isolated everything from the outside world, it was no different.

He silently turned his head back.

“Is this... our world?” Ye Shu murmured as he stared at the formation before him.

A square formation resembling a chessboard floated quietly in front of him. The countless vast worlds within it, which should have spanned endless distances, had all been reduced to something as tiny as dust. They rose and fell within the formation like individual stars.

Every speck of starlight inside it represented a world.

Yet at this moment, they were all imprisoned within the tiny formation, completely unable to sense anything beyond it.

“What’s going on?” Xiaobai asked, staring at the formation in confusion.

“How should I know?” Ye Shu replied irritably. “I guess this is one of those clichéd situations where the upper realm is full of man-eaters, and everyone is warned never to ascend.”

“Huh?”

At his words, Xiaobai’s little face turned deathly pale. She anxiously shook his neck and cried out in panic, “Then—then let’s run! I don’t want to be eaten!”

“I haven’t lived long enough yet!”

Just as she finished speaking, a series of crisp footsteps suddenly echoed from outside the hall.

The two of them turned around at the same time.

A young man clad in a blue robe and wearing cloud-treading boots slowly walked in. When he saw Ye Shu standing before the formation, he froze for a moment, as though he had not quite processed what he was seeing.

“Who are you...?”

An enemy?

Ye Shu abruptly turned around, already prepared to erupt into action at any moment.

However, in the next second, the young man suddenly came to a realization. He nodded and hurried forward.

“You’re a new system who just came out of the trial grounds, aren’t you? Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

The young man circled around Ye Shu, clicking his tongue in amazement.

“This is your host’s skin, right? Not bad.”

The trial grounds?

A new system?

Skin?

Those few words alone revealed an astonishing amount of information.

Ye Shu stood rigidly in place, his gaze filled with suspicion.

Clearly, the formation he had just escaped from was a testing ground used by the system race. No—in light of the system’s memories, it would be more accurate to say that it was less a trial and more a means by which the system race prepared its newborn systems.

To give newly born systems something to rely on within the parallel timelines, they used overwhelming power to cut out portions of certain worlds and seal them inside the formation. Then they sent the newborn systems in to plunder their destiny, allowing them to complete their initial accumulation.

His own system had clearly been an outstanding one.

Unfortunately, its greed had exceeded its capacity. It had run into trouble in Xiaobai’s world during its final operation—and dragged Ye Shu down with it.

But another question followed close behind...

If Xiaobai had been one of the beings sealed within this formation, how had she managed to pull him over from the Sole True Realm?

No. This was not the time to think about that.

Ye Shu kept his face impassive as he looked at the young man before him.

This fellow had mistaken him for a system that had just finished plundering a world and leaped out of the formation.

And this body of his...

Judging from the young man’s words, the system race apparently used the bodies of their hosts as their forms when traveling through the parallel timelines.

As for their hosts...

Ha. They had already gone to heaven.

“Let me check your records...”

The young man furrowed his brows slightly. With a flip of his right hand, a translucent, pale-blue screen appeared in his palm. As he scrolled through it, he sensed the aura radiating from Ye Shu.

“Tsk... It’s actually the Seven-Realm Trial?”

The young man sucked in a breath, casting Ye Shu a somewhat astonished glance.

He had not expected this system to be newly born, yet already possess such formidable ability.

“I didn’t expect another prodigy to emerge from our race.” The young man put away the screen, his face displaying genuine admiration. He looked Ye Shu up and down, then extended a hand with a smile.

“My name is Zhou Chen. And you are?”

Ye Shu did not hesitate. He immediately took the offered hand and replied, “A pleasure. My name is Mo Yu.”

“Mo Yu?”

Zhou Chen nodded slightly and smiled. “I’ll remember that name. I hope you’ll look out for me in the future, Brother Zhou. Once you become a god and establish yourself as an ancestor, don’t forget your old brother here.”

Ye Shu nodded with a smile and agreed repeatedly.

But there was not the slightest trace of a smile in his heart.

These things were neither human nor beast. They wore human skin and spoke just like people, but deep down, every last one of them was a monster driven to devour worlds and plunder everything in its path.

The two exchanged a few more pleasantries.

Zhou Chen said no more. Instead, he turned around and led the way, smiling as he spoke. “Now that Brother Mo has left this place, you should go meet the other members of our race. The battlefield is raging right now. With you joining us, it will surely be like adding wings to a tiger.”

“And then...”

Pfft!

He had only just begun speaking when an unfeeling palm suddenly pierced through his chest from behind, accurately gripping the world core hidden within his body.

Zhou Chen’s smile froze.

He lowered his head in disbelief and stared at the hand inside his chest. Then he slowly turned his head and saw the cold, utterly emotionless expression on Ye Shu’s face.

It was as if he had suddenly realized something. His voice came out broken.

“You... you’re not—”

“You got that right.”

Ye Shu pulled his hand back without expression and said coldly,

“This punch is to guard against arrogance and impatience.”