Re-birth: The Beginning after the End-Chapter 186: SCATTERING HER SOUL

Li Hua took a deep breath, knowing what she was about to attempt could either win her the battle or leave her lost between realities. First, she activated the Void Cloak Technique, letting her presence dissolve into nothingness. But instead of maintaining that emptiness, she began layering the Thousand Veils technique within it—creating multiple versions of herself inside the void.

The strain was immediate and intense. Maintaining multiple layers of reality while keeping her self hidden felt like trying to hold water in cupped hands—the moment she focused on one aspect, another threatened to slip away. But she pressed on, adding the Mist Walker Technique to her movements. Now each of her false selves moved differently, yet none of them stood out from the natural flow of the world.

Mo Xing's attacks suddenly faltered. She saw his eyes narrow as he tried to track her movements, but how could he when she existed everywhere and nowhere at once? Her phantom steps carried her between realities while the Thousand Veils ensured that each glimpse of her led to another deception.

The strain wasn't just building—it was consuming her. Li Hua felt her grip on reality fracturing, her sense of self dissolving between the layers of deception she'd created. Which version was real? The one attacking from the left? The three circling behind? The one materializing from the lavender blooms? She was everywhere and nowhere, each false self feeling as real as the last until she could no longer remember which one housed her true consciousness.

The ultimate fusion of techniques wasn't just working—it was working too well. Her existence scattered like light through a shattered mirror, each reflection holding a piece of her soul. She was losing herself, drowning in the very void she'd created.

Mo Xing felt it before he saw it. The moment her essence began to unravel, splitting into too many fragments to maintain coherence. For the first time in centuries, genuine fear gripped his heart—not for himself, but for her. He recognized the catastrophic fusion attempt, saw her consciousness dispersing across multiple planes of reality.

"LI HUA!"

His voice shattered the air like thunder breaking across a silent sky. Time seemed to crystallize around them as thousands of Li Hua's fragments scattered across multiple planes of reality—each one a perfect reflection, each one slowly dissolving into the void. Above them, the sun hung motionless, it's light fracturing through her countless forms like starlight through broken glass.

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Mo Xing moved with the desperate grace of a man diving into an abyss. Dark essence erupted from his form as he fused the Sixth Realm techniques into something terrifying. Reality itself seemed to bend around him as he reached not with his hands but with his very essence, sending threads of pure dark energy piercing through the layers of existence she'd torn apart.

Each obsidian thread found a fragment of her consciousness—here a laugh, there a memory, elsewhere the echo of her heartbeat. They weaved through the void like hunting stars, seeking, finding, pulling. Her scattered pieces began to glow as his power touched them, creating a constellation of Li Hua's essence suspended in the spaces between realities.

The lavender field held its breath as Mo Xing drew his hands together in a gesture of desperate command. The threads responded, pulling taut across dimensions, drawing her fragments back like a thousand glowing streams flowing into a single point. Each piece of her that returned carried its own chime, creating a haunting melody of reconstruction.

Reality snapped back into focus as Mo Xing caught her physical form, his arms wrapping around her with enough force to anchor her to this plane of existence. The threads sank into her skin, each one carrying another piece of her consciousness home. The threads of darkness pulsed beneath her skin like living ink, each one melting into her essence before slowly fading, leaving behind only the subtle gleam of shadow-touched completion.

"What did you think you were doing?" The words tore from his throat, shattering the air between them. For the first time since she'd known him, Mo Xing's carefully crafted facade crumbled completely. Gone was the mischievous smile that never failed to make her pulse race, absent was the calculated calm that made her want to shake him. Instead, she saw something raw and real—pure fear transmuted into rage, his golden eyes wild with an emotion so intense it made her breath catch.

His fingers dug into her shoulders, and she realized with a start that the great and mysterious Mo Xing was actually shaking. Not with power, not with his usual contained energy, but with genuine, uncontrolled terror at how close he'd come to...losing her?

"I—" she tried to speak, but agony lanced through her skull, every thought fragmenting like broken glass. Her body felt as though it had been shattered and poorly reassembled, each bone screaming in protest at still being whole.

She struggled to find the right words through the haze of pain. Should she apologize? But what exactly was she apologizing for, and to whom? Their relationship wasn't... they weren't... The thought scattered as she tried to grasp it. What was Mo Xing to her, really?

But then she saw his eyes—haunted, dark with a grief that felt too familiar to be new. The look of someone who had watched this exact scenario play out before, who had seen someone else dissolve between realities. Someone who hadn't made it back.

Time seemed to still as they stayed like that for what seemed like hours, the weight of his fear and her near-dissolution hanging heavy between them. The world narrowed to just this—his trembling grip on her shoulders, her struggling breath, the silent understanding that something fundamental had shifted between them.

Then darkness claimed them both, and reality rearranged itself around them as they reappeared in her bedroom, the sudden shift from open field to enclosed space making her already fragmented senses reel.

Despite his attempt at gentleness, pain blazed through her reconstructed form as he settled her onto her bed. His movements, usually so confident and precise, now carried an unfamiliar hesitation as he drew the blanket over her trembling body.

"Please, my Little Tempest. Don't you dare do that again..." The words held equal parts command and plea. He paused, something flickering in his golden eyes. "At least not until your soul is strong enough."

The edges of her vision were already beginning to darken when she saw him withdraw a vial. The silver liquid inside caught what little light remained in her consciousness, shimmering with strange power. But before she could wonder about its purpose, the world faded to black.