Void Cultivation

Chapter 326 - 325-

Grey’s field of vision turned purple, and all the colors of the world suddenly inverted and distorted. For a moment, he froze in shock as reality itself seemed to twist under his gaze. The world he knew collapsed into something unrecognizable.

The pitch-black waters of the dead sea were no longer black or murky in the way he normally perceived them. Instead, they appeared like a vast fog of miasma spreading endlessly across existence. Thick, suffocating, and alive.

That fog covered everything.

Not just the waters—but the earth, the skies, the very fabric of space itself. It was as though the entire world had been submerged beneath an infinite veil of corrupted mist.

And within that altered vision, Grey saw something even more terrifying.

High above the earth, suspended in the void like an unseen god, was an entity constantly exuding that miasma. It had no fixed form. Its body was composed entirely of dense, writhing black fog, shifting and collapsing into itself without end. Yet within that chaos, Grey could faintly perceive something else—something golden.

A flicker.

Just a trace of gold, like a divine spark buried deep within corruption.

But that glimpse came at a cost.

The moment Grey stared at it for more than an instant, his eyes violently ruptured. Blood exploded from his eye sockets, black and thick, followed by trails seeping from his nose and ears. His body convulsed as an unknown corrosive force invaded his senses, as though reality itself was punishing him for perceiving too much.

And yet—even with his eyes destroyed—he still saw.

The world remained in that distorted state within his mind’s vision. Colors no longer obeyed natural order. They merged, separated, and recombined endlessly, forming patterns that defied logic, slowly evolving into something entirely foreign. Something new.

Everything he saw was being rewritten by the black miasma fog.

It was not just corruption.

It was transformation.

A beginning.

An evolution that could not be halted or resisted.

Grey’s entire body trembled.

Then, abruptly, his attention shifted downward.

Inside the cabin below the deck, Roxanne was cultivating in silence. Her expression remained pale, calm, and detached—almost indifferent to the world around her.

But Grey no longer saw her as a normal person.

What he perceived instead was something far more terrifying.

A manifestation of what he could only interpret as divinity.

Around Roxanne’s body were countless threads of color—endless, intertwined, stretching out in every direction. They pierced through her body, through the surrounding miasma, anchoring her to something far beyond perception.

Something vast and unseen.

Grey’s instinct urged him to follow those threads, to trace where they led.

But the moment he attempted to do so, his body violently recoiled. A crushing pressure slammed into his consciousness, and he coughed out a mouthful of blood. It felt as though an unknown existence had noticed his gaze and turned its attention directly onto him.

The sensation vanished just as quickly as it came, but so did his curiosity.

Yet what he had already seen was enough to freeze his soul.

Roxanne’s body was not truly flesh and blood.

In his altered vision, she was composed of diluted miasma fog, black blood and crimson flesh.

There was also golden white feathers sticking out from all parts of her body.

She did not have hair, instead, there was a small crown of fire hovering above her mass of abomination. It constantly shifting, dissolving, and reforming. Her form flickered between stability and chaos, as though something inside her was trying to break free.

Something alive.

Something aware. However, Roxanne who was deep in meditation did not seem to notice this thing trying to claw out of her. It was as if she did not feel it at all.

Moreover, her perception was also deterred, stopping her from noticing anything even if she wanted to.

Then, suddenly... it stopped.

Whatever was inside Roxanne, whatever had been attempting to claw its way out, paused.

Grey was not sure how, but he felt like the thing had turned and looked at Grey.

In that instant, Grey suffered severe damage and several heavy, muffled explosions resounded inside his mind. His consciousness felt as if it had shattered, as though his brain had been forcibly detonated from within.

Grey collapsed inwardly under the pressure.

A moment later, the purple glow in his hollow, bleeding eye sockets faded. The distorted vision of colors disappeared, and his perception of the world snapped back to normal. His presence stabilized, returning to what it had been before.

But the damage remained.

His eyes were gone, replaced by empty, bleeding sockets. Blood still trickled from his nose and ears, staining his face and clothing.

Yet Grey did not react.

He simply sat still, breathing slowly, processing what he had witnessed.

What he had seen... through the perception of a Soul Ascendancy realm expert.

And now, he understood one thing with terrifying clarity.

The world was far deeper, and far more wrong, than he had ever imagined.

---

Several minutes passed, yet Grey’s vision did not return.

Black blood continued to seep from his seven orifices, dripping in slow, uneven threads that stained his robe and the ground beneath him. His expression remained unnaturally still—devoid of reaction, as if his body had already abandoned the concept of pain.

But inside that motionless shell, terror was screaming.

Deep. Absolute. Primal fear.

Not of death, but of what he had seen.

Grey’s mind was moving at a frightening speed, forcing itself to analyze what should have shattered it completely. Fragment by fragment, he reconstructed the vision, aligning it with reality like a cursed puzzle that refused to remain broken.

The black miasma...

"The black miasma must represent the corrosive substance..." Grey thought inwardly, his consciousness trembling under the weight of his own deduction. "It’s not just pollution. It’s alive... or something close to it."

His jaw tightened.

"It’s slowly infecting everything on this continent—mutating matter, laws, even cultivation itself. Reality isn’t stable anymore. It’s being rewritten from the inside."

A cold realization crawled through him.

"It behaves like a living organism. Not random. Not chaotic. It spreads, adapts... invades everything and anything around it."

His fingers twitched slightly, as though trying to grasp something no longer there.

Then his thoughts shifted upward... toward the sky.

"The giant mass in the sky... the source of the corrosive substance..."

Grey’s throat tightened.

"It isn’t just a phenomenon. It’s a hand."

His mind replayed the image again, and even now, his soul recoiled.

"The hand of God..."

A bitter, almost broken thought surfaced.

"And its true form... is even more terrifying than what I saw."

His breathing turned uneven for the first time. A faint tremor ran through his shoulders.

"Just looking at it... I almost died."

Grey’s hand slowly rose, hovering near his hollow eye sockets. He could still feel the phantom pressure of that gaze, like something had looked back through reality itself and recognized him as an intruder.

His fingers brushed the emptiness where his eyes once were.

A faint, hollow exhale escaped him.

Then, with deliberate care, Grey reached into his storage bag.

His movements were slow and careful, almost reverent, as if any sudden action might invite something worse than what had already happened. From within the spatial storage, he retrieved the purple light he had instinctively sealed away earlier.

It pulsed faintly in his palm.