Devouring Nuclear Bombs and Becoming an Immortal

The message spread to all military command centers within seconds.

On the giant screen in the White House underground command center, real-time satellite images were magnified to the extreme.

The president, still in his pajamas, was dragged out of his bedroom by the Secret Service. As he walked, he fastened his tie and, upon reaching the entrance of the command center, asked, "Did the magnificent satellite capture something again?"

No one answered him. He walked into the command center and saw the pale white figure hovering in near-Earth orbit on the screen; the coffee cup in his hand fell onto the carpet. The chief of staff reported in a low voice all the information they had gathered:

There were no heat signals, no electromagnetic signals, no thruster exhaust flames, and no known signs of life, but the person just stood there, quietly watching the Earth as if standing on their own balcony.

The president paused for a moment, then asked a question everyone wanted to ask but no one dared to answer: "Who is he?"

Nobody knows who he is. But someone does.

At this moment, the signals of all live broadcast channels were simultaneously taken over by an unknown source, and the picture switched from the live broadcast before Liu Jin broke through the screen to the real-time satellite image at this moment.

Every screen around the world—mobile phones, televisions, computers, giant LED screens in plazas, flight information displays in airports, and even small TVs in convenience stores—switched to display the same image at the same instant:

An Eastern person dressed in a moon-white gauze robe floats in near-Earth orbit, with the blue Earth slowly rotating behind them.

On the giant screen at the Shibuya intersection in Tokyo, the idol GG, who was playing, suddenly stopped, and the image switched to that pale white figure.

After a brief moment of astonishment, the crowd at the intersection suddenly erupted, with screams, camera flashes, and phone calls mingling together.

Some people stood still and looked up at the screen, while others started running but stopped halfway because they found that all the screens around them were showing the same image.

The electronic display boards at Shinjuku subway station, which used to scroll through train timetables, are now completely still, replaced by a picture of that person's profile.

A white-collar worker who had just finished get off work leaned against the ticket gate, staring at it with his mouth agape for a full ten seconds, before saying to his colleague next to him, "Is this a movie shoot?"

My colleague didn't answer because his phone was also playing the same video.

In the square beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris, tourists picnicking simultaneously looked down at their phones, then looked up at the sky at the same time.

There was nothing in the sky, but the person on the screen was in the sky.

A blonde girl tugged at her mother's skirt and asked, "Mom, is that an angel?" Her mother covered her mouth and did not answer.

The television screens in the windows of luxury stores on the Champs-Élysées have all been taken over, and the white gauze dresses on the screens create a strange echo with the wedding dresses displayed in the windows.

A bride who was trying on wedding dresses came out of the fitting room and saw all the shop assistants standing in front of the window in a daze. She followed their gaze and the bouquet in her hand fell to the ground.

On the Nasdaq screen in Times Square, New York, the stock market data disappeared instantly, replaced by a close-up of the pale white figure.

All the pedestrians crossing the street in the square stopped. The traffic lights changed from green to red and then back to green, but no one moved.

A taxi driver leaned out of his window and shouted to his colleague in the next lane, "What's going on?" The colleague pointed to his own in-car screen, which was also displaying the same image.

The crowd in Times Square went from astonishment to commotion, then from commotion to silence, with everyone looking up at the giant screens and holding their breath.

Global alert. All military satellites simultaneously locked onto the figure hovering in low Earth orbit.

The handsome president stood in front of the large screen in the White House underground command center, while his staff began to argue fiercely whether this was a reconnaissance mission by extraterrestrial civilizations.

An emergency meeting at the Pentagon was convened within four minutes. The Secretary of Defense said "verify identity" three times into the intercom, but no one could give him an answer.

The Department of Homeland Security's Counterterrorism Center has sounded the highest alert. All analysts on duty have been called to the conference room. The facial features of the person on the screen are being compared, and the result is zero. There is no record of this person in any database.

He appeared out of nowhere.

While they were still arguing, Liu Jin made a move.

He raised his hand and waved it across the vast Atlantic Ocean in the direction of the magnificent view.

The movement was extremely light, as if waving away a wisp of smoke in front of one's eyes.

They were not ignited, not detonated, and did not trigger any nuclear explosion chain reaction; they simply lit up.

The warhead core transformed into a ball of incandescent white light, which detached itself from the warhead. The warhead's metal outer shell remained intact, but the uranium and plutonium inside no longer followed any known physical laws.

They were taken over by some higher force, not hijacked, not hacked, not interfered with by any weapon system that humans could understand, but gently held in the hands of a gentle, almost divine force.

That power was like the morning sun filtering through the gap in the curtains, silent and unstoppable. It didn't trigger any protective mechanisms or sound any alarms; it simply and naturally, calmly, like turning the pages of a book, penetrated humanity's most complex defense system and gently extracted the fire hidden deep within.

Ninety-nine orbs of light rose from the launch silo, pierced through the submarine's hull, and passed through the concrete layers of the underground warehouse, trailing extremely thin golden tails, breaking through the atmosphere and converging on the figure suspended in near-Earth orbit.

There was no explosion, no mushroom cloud, and no one was injured.

The White House underground command center fell into dead silence.

His chief of staff behind him asked in a low voice, "Should we intercept them?" He did not answer.

The defense minister shouted "Activate emergency protocols" three times into the intercom, but there was only silence on the other end.

It's not that nobody heard it; it's that everyone knows it can't be intercepted.

Liu Jin sat cross-legged with his eyes closed in mid-air.

Ninety-nine nuclear bombs, each a ball of light, were compressed to their extreme, forming a sphere of solar fire. These were flames stolen from the depths of the atomic nucleus by humankind, a power capable of destroying civilization, and also a unique creation of humankind that was closest to the true essence of the sun's fire.

He formed a hand seal and slowly exhaled a breath of true solar fire.

The moment the true fire burst forth, the surrounding space was tinged with pale gold. It wasn't light, but the flame itself burning in the vacuum, ignoring the laws of physics and the ironclad rule that heat cannot be transferred in a vacuum, because the true fire of the sun needs no medium; it is the law itself.

The true fire slowly split in the void, dividing into two, then four, then eight, and finally ten.

Ten strands of true solar fire, each like an extremely fine golden thread, drifted slowly in the void, each thread's tip locking onto a set of light spheres.

Guided by ten strands of true solar fire, the ninety-nine orbs of light began to arrange themselves in an orderly fashion. First, they formed a huge golden halo around Liu Jin. Then, the halo slowly rotated, and the rotation speed became faster and faster. As they rotated, the ninety-nine orbs of light gradually arranged themselves into ten concentric rings. Each ring was composed of nine orbs of light, with the innermost ring having nine extra orbs.

Ten strands of true solar fire simultaneously penetrated the center of the ten rings.

Ninety-nine orbs of light began to deform at the same instant. First, they shrank, shrinking from the size of a fist to the size of a walnut, then from the size of a walnut to the size of a needle tip. After shrinking to the extreme, they suddenly expanded, exploding from the size of a needle tip into a ball of light as tall as a person.

Each ball of light was pulsating violently, its rhythm exactly matching the beating of a heart.

Then, from each burst of light, the outline of a pair of wings simultaneously emerged—wings of metal, wings of flesh and blood, wings purely formed from flames.

Each feather is a cluster of dancing solar flames; the wings unfold silently, yet all who witness it hold their breath.

The shape of those wings resembled both the wings of the golden crow in Eastern legends and the wingspan of the seraphim in Western depictions, but it was purer than any legend or description, because it was not a myth; it was a real, burning sun, refined by a fire-swallowing Taoist.

The ninety-nine orbs of light eventually coalesced into the prototypes of nine golden crows.

They circled around Liu Jin, slowly swirling, each flap of their wings leaving faint golden traces in the void. These traces lingered for a long time, weaving an increasingly dense net of light around Liu Jin.

But that wasn't enough. Liu Jin looked down at the nine golden crows. They were already perfect, with full wings and serene expressions. Each one possessed enough light to illuminate the entire earth.

But there are only nine of them. Ten strands of true solar fire require ten golden crows to complete the yin-yang cycle.

Liu Jin opened his eyes and looked at the screen. His gaze pierced through the screen, through the frantically scrolling comments in the live stream, through billions of eyes on Earth watching him, and landed in the direction of that Eastern country.

His expression remained unchanged on the screen, but the pale golden flame between his brows flickered slightly, as if waiting for a response.

In the command center of the Eastern country, an elderly man stood in front of a huge screen.

It did not fly toward any hypothetical target.

It flew straight into the sky, towards that pale white figure suspended in near-Earth orbit.

A very thin golden beam of light rose straight up from the horizon, pierced through the atmosphere, passed through the increasingly dense network of light in near-Earth orbit, and came to a steady stop in front of Liu Jin.

This moment needs no diplomatic rhetoric; the magnificent nuclear bomb was snatched away with a wave of the hand, while this one from the East was offered up willingly.

At the same instant, military analysts around the world understood the vast difference between the two actions.

Liu Jin reached out and caught the ball of light that the tenth nuclear bomb had transformed into.

He held it in his palm, looked down at it for a moment, and then exhaled the last wisp of true solar fire.

The tenth wisp of true solar fire drilled into the core of the light sphere, which exploded into a dazzling golden flame. The wings that emerged from the flame were more expansive than the previous nine, each feather like gold freshly pulled from a furnace, flowing with blazing white light.

The tenth golden crow raised its head and let out a silent cry, then flapped its wings and flew among the other nine golden crows, forming a perfect circle in the void.

Ten golden crows slowly circled around Liu Jin.

Their wings are pure solar fire, their eyes are points of light formed from the core of a nuclear bomb after being refined by the true fire of the sun, and their very existence is the ultimate cycle of yin and yang. Each golden crow absorbs and releases the energy of the surrounding space at a constant rate, neither radiating outwards to destroy nor collapsing inwards into silence, but simply burning quietly and eternally.

Every eye on Earth is watching these ten golden crows.

No one spoke, no one left comments, no one tweeted, and no one recorded videos.

The world fell into the same silence, not of fear, but of shock.

It was the first time that humanity had witnessed a nuclear bomb being dismantled into its most primitive form of energy and then refined into a beautiful form.

Liu Jin opened his mouth and swallowed the ten golden crows one by one.

With each one he swallowed, the pale golden flame between his brows burned a little brighter.

The first one went into his stomach, and his skin shone with a pale golden luster.

The second one entered the abdomen, and the Taiyin gauze robe unfolded on its own, the silvery-white cold light and the pale gold warm light intertwined to form a light robe that had never been seen before;

The third one entered the abdomen, and the Demon-Slaying Ribbon automatically extended, slowly spreading out in the void like a flowing golden river.

As the fourth one entered his abdomen, the Illusion Moon Mirror flew up from his waist and slowly rotated above his head. The reflection in the mirror was no longer the light of the moon, but a complete picture of ten golden crows circling the sun.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh golden crows—his entire body was completely enveloped in a layer of blazing white light, with only the pale golden flame between his brows piercing through the white light, growing brighter and brighter. The eighth, ninth, and tenth golden crows—after all ten had entered his body, his entire being transformed into a ball of blazing white light.

In the light, one could vaguely see the phantoms of countless flames: the deep blue Samadhi True Fire, the silvery-white Taiyin Fire, the dark red Red Lotus Karmic Fire, the pale gold Ten Thousand Lights, the pale yellow Lingzhi Demon Fire, the golden Sun True Fire, and the ten newly formed Golden Crows.

All the flames merged, rotated, and recombined at the anchor point of the real fragments, eventually transforming into a complete golden halo that hovered between his brows.

Then he stood up. The veil of moonlight had been removed, replaced by a robe of light woven from ten thousand flames. The hem of the robe fluttered silently in the vacuum, each flutter a movement of flames.

The demon-slaying ribbon transformed into a pale golden galaxy, flowing slowly behind him.

The Illusion Moon Mirror hangs above the left shoulder. The image of the golden crow and the sun in the mirror has solidified, becoming a celestial mirror that can shatter all illusions.

The Crimson Lotus Spear flew out from the inner scene, and the crimson lotus flower at the tip of the spear fully bloomed. The golden lines and sunlight along the edges of the petals breathed in sync with the wings of the ten golden crows.

Ten golden crows flew out from the folds of his robe and circled around him. Each one was only the size of a palm, but with each flap of their wings, the tides on Earth would twitch.

He looked down at the Earth.

From this height, the Earth appears as a blue glass bead, with clouds slowly drifting across its surface and the outlines of the landmass faintly discernible.

He saw the coastline of that Eastern country, the land where he was born, and the myriad lights of that land.

Then he looked up at the screen, at all the eyes on Earth that were watching him, and smiled slightly.

It wasn't a victorious laugh, a triumphant laugh, or a haughty laugh.

It's the kind of smile you get after finishing something tiring but worthwhile, and finally being able to breathe a sigh of relief.

He spoke, his voice calm and steady, as if speaking directly to each person through the void:

Liu Jin, a disciple of the Sanyi Sect, has become an immortal today.

Gentlemen,

mutual encouragement.