Xilos Star was like a dilapidated old car on the verge of falling apart. Its core trembled violently, gravity went haywire, and surface rocks slowly began to rise into the air. The lighter ones, spun off by the planet’s rotation, were flung out into space.
The entire planet had reached its limit. Tiny spacetime fissures flickered in and out of sight.
The final showdown between Lin Xiaohe and the Suixing envoy leader erupted without warning.
The Suixing envoy leader struck first. The white vine filaments coalesced into a dazzling, deadly mass of energy, flowing like a galaxy pouring down. In an instant, they wound themselves around the red beetle’s thick carapace.
A chilling sensation of being devoured swept through her instantly.
The surging energy within the red beetle was visibly being drained away, turning into specks of starlight that melted into the bewitching white glow.
This was a desperate, all-or-nothing gambit that had been brewing for eons!
Lin Xiaohe couldn’t help but cry out in pain. The suction from the white vines was far more powerful than anything she’d faced in battle before.
“Anyone who schemes against me—dies!”
Gritting her teeth, the red beetle let out a deep, guttural hiss and swung its razor-like forelimbs in a fierce slash. But it was all in vain.
The pure-energy state of the white vines was bizarre. It wasn’t psychic power, nor was it any common form of energy the Federation knew. It more closely resembled the P-energy that the Dead Hand System was meant to convert.
Lin Xiaohe’s energy drained at an alarming rate. Her movements grew sluggish, and even her bright red carapace began to fade to a dull gray.
The white vines blazed even brighter, like a predator closing in on victory, tightening its energy tendrils in an attempt to completely drain its prey.
Just as the red beetle was about to be fully consumed, it lunged forward. It let the energy tendrils pierce even deeper into its body while simultaneously opening its massive jaws.
But it wasn’t attacking the energy flow itself. Instead, it bit down with surgical precision on the core of that flow—a tiny, seed-like solid crystal.
Crack!
The white vines’ light flickered violently, letting out a silent scream. The entwined energy instantly turned chaotic and dim.
Without a second’s hesitation, Lin Xiaohe fully activated [Food Is the Heavens for the People], which was inscribed in the [Holy Codex].
Her massive jaws opened and closed, tearing and devouring the shattered crystal fragments and the dissipating white energy stream.
With every bite, the previously dull-gray carapace shimmered with a faint starlight. The energy that had been drained returned twofold, making the shell even redder and more radiant.
At its edges, tiny crystalline facets even began to evolve, capable of refracting starlight.
The white vine energy sensed an unprecedented crisis. The information particles drifting through space were saturated with panic and fury.
“How dare you! You crippled wretch—how dare a lesser being strike above its station!”
At that thunderous roar, the heart-treasure within Lin Xiaohe’s body, along with her little companions, trembled in terror.
The heart-treasure in particular suffered the most—its genes began to collapse, and its leaves and roots rotted away at an alarming speed.
In just three short seconds, the heart-treasure’s physical form had dissolved into a puddle of green liquid!
“Heart-Treasure!” Lin Xiaohe hastily sent its spiritual form into the fourth-dimensional sanctuary.
In that brief moment, spots also appeared on the leaves of Sweetie, Annoy, Bean, and Little Red.
Apart from Yingzi, who fared a bit better, the others would soon follow heart-treasure’s fate.
Without a moment’s delay, Lin Xiaohe sent them all into the sanctuary, leaving only Little Black behind to fight alongside her.
The white vines grew ruthless. A mere human, dragging along a bug and a bunch of naturally defective trash, and she dares to try and devour me?
Fine then. Eat! Eat your fill! Let’s see if I burst your belly wide open!
A massive torrent of white energy surged into the red beetle through its gaping jaws.
The red beetle was forced to endure the onslaught of white energy.
Lin Xiaohe quickly realized what the other side was trying to do. Her heart hardened, and instead of trying to block the white energy, she actively cooperated with the devouring.
So it’s a game of chicken, is it?
Bring it on. Who’s afraid of whom?
As a warrior of the great leader and a successor of Huaxia, fear had never been in her bones!
If you’re not ruthless, you won’t stand firm. Today, either you die, or I do!
The sheer force of the white energy torrent was beyond anything Lin Xiaohe had imagined.
All the surface rocks of Xilos were hurled into space, exposing the planet’s core.
Lin Xiaohe’s pupils contracted in shock!
Xilos’s core wasn’t like that of an ordinary planet—a massive layered metallic sphere wrapped in a churning sea of liquid iron.
Its core was a ball of white vines!
These white vines had been compressed to their absolute limit, forming a sphere of liquid white energy.
Under the Suixing envoy leader’s control, that liquid white energy sphere completely engulfed the red beetle.
Eat! Eat all you want! Let’s see if you can swallow the energy of an entire planet!
Lin Xiaohe was utterly stunned.
Never in her life had she seen such a colossal life-form.
The great-sounding whales were huge too, but not to this extent!
Perhaps only Evergreen could compare.
So much energy rushed into her body all at once that Little Black’s spiritual form was forcibly pushed back into the fourth dimension.
In the fourth dimension, within the sanctuary, hundreds of thousands of tiny orbs were waiting to be fed.
They had received the evolution directive from the [Holy Codex], but without enough energy to replenish themselves, they could only consume from within.
Lin Xiaohe diverted a strand of the white energy and formed an energy pillar at the center of the chessboard.
Whenever the white orbs needed it, they could absorb energy from this pillar.
Thus, Wes and the others, who had been parched for so long, were finally met with a downpour. They ravenously devoured the white energy.
The hundreds of thousands of orbs required energy—not too much, yet not too little either.
For Wes’s people, however, this was an immense bounty. On their own, they might never have accumulated this much energy in a lifetime.
But for Lin Xiaohe, what they could absorb was far too little. Compared to the liquid white energy of an entire planet, what they took in wasn’t even as much as a tiny stream.
The unrelenting torrent of energy continued to pour in.
Lin Xiaohe could even hear the sound of her carapace cracking under the strain.
This won’t do!
She channeled the energy to extend along the warp and weft lines of the sanctuary’s chessboard.
The energy rushed forward like a roaring flood, expanding the grid lines further and further.
The entire sanctuary visibly expanded, growing a hundred times its original size before finally coming to a halt.
But that wasn’t because the white energy had run out—it was because a hundredfold expansion was already the limit of Lin Xiaohe’s control.
Lin Xiaohe took a deep breath and stepped into the chessboard herself.
The entire sanctuary trembled. It was as if the board had finally welcomed the arrival of its ruling principle, and it lit up once more.
“I am the Commander. I set the course for the realm!”
As Lin Xiaohe gave the command, she sensed that the energy capacity at the [Commander] position on the sanctuary chessboard was rising ever higher.
The madly surging white torrent formed a vortex at the [Commander] position.
Even so, the [Commander] position only consumed one-third of the energy.
Sweetie crashed onto the chessboard: “I am the Advisor. I guard the sovereign with unwavering loyalty!”
The [Advisor] position lit up!
Under the chessboard’s rules, white energy surged into the [Advisor] position.
Heart-Treasure leaped onto the board without hesitation: “I am the Minister. I fortify the mountains and rivers with unyielding strength!”
The [Minister] position lit up.
Bean: “I am the Knight. I charge through enemy lines without fear of death!”
Annoy: “I am the Cannon. I shatter bones and shake the cosmos with my roar!”
Little Red: “I am the Chariot. I sweep across the battlefield and break ten thousand foes!”
Little Black and Little Yingzi joined the [Commander] position—one as Lin Xiaohe’s mount, the other willingly becoming her brush for writing the [Holy Codex].
In an instant, the energy capacity of the [Commander] position rose once more.
But it still wasn’t enough! The remaining white energy, like a rampaging demon, swept wantonly across the sanctuary’s chessboard.
The two sides clashed fiercely, locked in a life-or-death struggle.
At this critical moment, the tiny specks of light that had been floating above the chessboard voluntarily descended onto it.
Countless tiny voices merged into one: “We are the Pawns. Loyal souls of iron, we charge forward—and never look back!”
