Chapter 1227: Corporeity

Phei had grown accustomed to True Void Steps obeying him with a dangerous sort of perfection.

Distance had become negotiable ever since the ability evolved. Walls, formations, intervening terrain and the ordinary arrogance of space itself no longer possessed the same authority over his movement. Phei could slip into the hollows hidden between positions, surrender his place in the world for the briefest instant and return somewhere else before conventional motion had even begun to matter.

True Void Steps had never asked whether a destination welcomed him.

Distance had become negotiable ever since the ability evolved. Walls, formations, intervening terrain and the ordinary arrogance of space itself no longer possessed the same authority over his movement. He could slip through the hollows hidden between positions, surrender his place in the world for the briefest instant and return somewhere else before conventional motion had even begun to matter.

So when he vanished from Eira’s side and selected the Half Behemoth-Dwarf as his destination, Phei expected reality to yield as it always did; yet it had refused.

The instant his existence entered the spatial hollow surrounding the giant, something struck him with such monstrous force that his entire perception convulsed before Phei was hurled backward through the Void.

The recoil was vicious enough to make the ethereal dark around him fracture into countless black-white distortions, his consciousness ringing beneath a psychic impact that felt as though some colossal hand had seized the seam of reality and slammed it shut directly against his soul.

True Void Steps collapsed.

Phei reappeared hundreds of meters away with his body already twisting through the air, boots carving through a curtain of snow before Infinity Control and the True Void Steps seized the surrounding frost and arrested his momentum. Billions of crystalline particles gathered beneath him in an instant, compressed so tightly beneath his feet that they became an invisible-white platform suspended within the storm.

For several breaths, he simply stood there.

His expression had changed.

"What the fuck?"

The Behemoth-Dwarf had not even moved and that was what made it disturbing.

Phei’s True Void Sense spread toward the giant again, far more cautiously this time, penetrating the blizzard and brushing against the region surrounding that mountainous body.

Understanding arrived almost immediately.

There was barely any hollow space left around him.

The realization was absurd enough that Phei checked twice.

True Void Steps depended upon the hollows threaded through existence, those infinitesimal vacancies between matter, energy and position that ordinary perception could never touch. Phei entered those seams, crossed through their hidden continuity and emerged wherever the Void still possessed room to receive him.

Around the Half Behemoth-Dwarf, those seams had been crushed almost completely shut.

The bastard’s sheer corporeal density had conquered the surrounding space.

Yes, despite being accustomed to effortlessly dancing between the seams of reality, he found himself violently rebuffed and nearly knocked flat out of the ethereal plane. He had attempted a simple True Void Step, threading his existence through the spatial layers to materialize directly beside the Behemoth-Dwarf. Yet, the reality and space collapsed in on itself with a jarring, psychic shockwave.

It was not a failure of his ability; the void step failed for a far more terrifying reason: within the vicinity of and around the giant, the very concept of "empty space" had ceased to exist.

Surrounding the colossal man was an impenetrable, world-crushing pressure.

But this was no localized domain formed from ethereal mana or spiritual energy and his essence, but it was raw suffocating corporeity.

The sheer density of giant’s physical form defied the laws of physics!

Attempting to step into that space he occupied felt exactly like trying to blink one’s physical body into the center of a mountain of solid stone with no hollowness or a single air space in it.

The sheer, terrifying material weight of the Behemoth-Dwarf’s existence seemed to bleed outward from his skin and mutating the atmosphere itself around him. The air thickened into a hyper-dense, viscous domain and barrier that violently pushed back against Phei’s chest, threatening to crush his lungs with a single breath.

Every microscopic twitch of the giant’s massive, god-like musculature sent tectonic ripples echoing through this invisible somatosphere. It generated a localized gravitational crush so absolute, so tyrannical, that it pinned Phei as if the earth itself were trying to swallow him whole.

It was an insurmountable, evolutionary monolith.

The man’s sheer physical substance had conquered and devoured the environment, mutating his immediate vicinity into a sovereign territory where the fabric of space itself was forced to bow to his mass.

His physical existence possessed such obscene weight that the atmosphere within hundreds of meters had ceased behaving like ordinary air. It had thickened beneath him, compressed into a viscous invisible sea where every particle seemed burdened by the mountain of flesh standing at its center. Spatial hollows were squeezed thin, folded beneath that pressure until trying to emerge through one became little different from attempting to materialize inside solid rock.

Except rock would have been kinder.

Phei’s eyes narrowed.

The giant’s physical mighty created its own tyranny domain.

Every muscle carried impossible density, every bone felt heavier than forged divine metal, while the smallest shift of flesh displaced enough physical pressure to deform the surrounding region. Behemoth vitality and Dwarven compression had fused into something approaching a corporeal domain, a somatosphere governed by sheer mass of raw physical aura that had turned into something more corporeal.

The bastard existed with such preposterous weight that the world had been forced to accommodate him.

The air itself groaned beneath that fact.

Phei could feel the pressure from where he stood as it crowded his chest and turned breathing into labour, while the frost platform beneath his boots creaked under the invisible gravity flowing from the giant’s body. Several kilometres of snow had already compressed into hard ice around him, and loose fragments of glacier dragged themselves towards his feet in slow, grinding movements, caught in the pull of his physical existence.

Then the Half Behemoth-Dwarf flexed one shoulder and the surrounding atmosphere detonated.

A circular distortion tore outward, pulverising airborne frost and driving a tectonic tremor through the glacier. Phei felt it enter the platform beneath his boots and climb through his bones.

His expression became thoughtful.

"So that’s what Eira meant."

Phei had understood the words when she spoke them; now he understood the bastard.

The Half Behemoth-Dwarf had advanced so far along in his Body Cultivation that flesh, density and mass had become his physical authority pressed into existence. Ethereal abilities lost their freedom inside his presence, while weaker bodies were forced to bear the burden of his existence merely by drawing near.

Any ordinary Mortal Realm cultivator would already have burst into mist.

Phei’s Cosmic Dragon being merely groaned.

His bones hummed softly as Primordial Blood surged through him, reinforcing flesh, marrow and organs beneath the crushing pressure.

Phei spread Infinity Control farther into the surrounding winter and claimed every mote of frost within reach.

Phei’s boots lifted and snow beneath them rose.

Billions of microscopic crystals gathered and dissolved in ceaseless succession, their movement too fast as an instant and precise to follow. More frost circulated beneath his body in subtle currents, bearing his weight upward while the giant’s corporeal dominion attempted to drag everything towards the glacier.

Phei continued climbing until he stood well above the Half Behemoth-Dwarf’s shoulders still hidden in the void and Eira.

The air beside him shimmered.

Yet, defying that crushing physical tyranny, a sudden shift occurred. Right where Phei was now floating above the oppressive gravity, the vacant air had shimmered and a small figure, simply materialized. The overwhelming physical pressure of the Behemoth-Dwarf’s domain seemed entirely incapable of touching her.

She stood immaculately at Phei’s side, her expression possessing a chilling, untouchable serenity that belonged to a higher dimension.

Her expression, however, promised murder.

"Master."

Phei kept looking downward. "Yes?"

"I distinctly remember telling you not to approach him."

"I didn’t approach him."

Eira stared at him: "You attempted to appear directly beside him."

"Technically, the universe prevented the approach."

Her eye twitched.

Phei smiled and as he looked down upon the five inner World Transcendents guarding the Coffer, something colder gradually settled beneath its humour.

Phei had discovered that the Half Behemoth-Dwarf’s physical presence could suppress spatial hollows strongly enough to reject his True Void Steps.

Useful information but Phei had never intended to defeat eleven World Transcendents by respecting what they were good at.

He lifted one hand and Anarctica inhaled.

The change spread so swiftly that the Chained felt it before they understood its source.

The blizzard had raged across the basin since long before any of them arrived, an ancient violence belonging to the Dead Winter Realm itself. Winds crossed hundreds of kilometres without pattern, colliding with mountain walls, tearing snow from glaciers and carrying frost sharp enough to strip flesh from ordinary cultivators.

That chaos acquired a master before every snowflake found direction and every shard of ice aligned while the innumerable frozen particles filling the basin curved towards a single axis, and the raging winds followed because the winter inside them had already been claimed.

The storm began to turn.

Its first revolution was almost languid, in a slow and dreadful movement that belonged to something too immense to hurry. Then the rotation quickened, gathered violence and swallowed the horizon.

A colossal vortex formed around the battlefield.

Rivers of airborne frost spiralled through one another without collision. Razor-thin crystals assembled into perfect rings stretching kilometres across, while vast sheets of snow peeled from the glacier in coordinated waves and joined the rotation overhead. Enormous fragments broken from distant cliffs shuddered, tore free and entered the same orbit, carried through the blizzard like pieces of shattered moons.

Infinity Control had awakened.

And Anactica possessed more ice than Phei’s imagination knew what to do with.

The Dead Winter Realm became his weapon.