The column of packed sky starlight dropped like a blazing bright spear hurled by an enraged god.
Eighty yards in width, burning with the fury of fifty thousand burned up spirit stones, the Seven Star Annihilation Beam struck the floor of the Grand Defile. The sheer speed of the strike spark-charged the surrounding air in a fraction of a split second. That turned the air into a shimmering empty pocket tunnel of roaring white-gold star-fire. Granite outcrops along the canyon rim shattered from the sound blast wave alone. The bubbling mountain brook instantly evaporated into a towering geyser of scalding steam.
In the dead center of that world-ending strike sat forty inches of semi-clear blue slime.
To Grand Elder Xuan Ji, peering down through the scrying crystal of the Sky-Cleaver with bared teeth, this was the moment of total, unquestioned victory. In the history of the Eastern Training Sector, nothing made of mortal flesh or elemental water had ever survived the focused beam of the Big Dipper Matrix. The beam possessed enough focused moving mass to punch through three mountain ridges and boil an underground river into dry vapor.
The beam hit Lin Xiao’s top membrane.
There was no explosion of blue fluid. There was no sizzle of evaporating steam.
Instead, the moment three point eight billion jin of downward moving driving force collided with Lin Xiao’s surface, his ancient cellular structure underwent an instant dilatant phase shift.
His fluid body didn’t yield like water. Nor did it resist like brittle stone. Under extreme sideways tearing force, the non-Newtonian bonds of his ancient chaos mass locked into a hyper-elastic, iron-hard moving-shiny lattice.
Lin Xiao squished.
Under the huge weight of the dropping pillar of light, his plump, round forty-inch ball-shaped form tightly packed downward. He flattened like a lump of dough struck by a huge wooden mallet. It stretched horizontally into a wide, glistening disc five meters across. His semi-clear blue jelly glowed with blinding internal sapphire bright glare as the sheer air pressure forced surrounding spiritual energy directly into his fluid core.
Inside his flattened body, Lin Xiao’s semi-clear gaze blinked cheerfully through the blinding golden glare.
Ooooh, Lin Xiao thought, feeling the huge downward pressure wash across his fluid mantle. That’s a very firm press. It’s like having twenty heavy winter quilts stacked on top of you while lying on a heated brick bed. The tension in my lower jelly is working itself right out!
“Host,” the Omniscient Dao Spirit’s voice rang in his mind, cool and fully unperturbed by the cataclysm. “Surface squeezing has reached maximum elastic multiplier. Potential striking force stored within your internal chaos lattice: three point seven eight billion jin. Rebound vector tuned to eighty-two point four degrees.”
“Let’s send it back,” Lin Xiao replied happily. “It’s too bright down here anyway. I can barely see my teacup.”
“Engaging Primordial Chaos Rebound Matrix.”
Deep within Lin Xiao’s flattened five-meter disc, the stored striking force reached its total limit. The coiled spring of his ancient mass refused to compress a single tiny fraction of an inch further.
Then, Lin Xiao pushed back.
BOOOOOOOOING!
It wasn’t the sound of a magical explosion. It wasn’t the crack of thunder or the roar of an erupting volcano.
It was an elastic, rubbery, high-hum echo—a sound like the world’s most huge rubber band snapping against empty space with enough force to vibrate the teeth of every living being within thirty miles.
The five-meter pancake of blue jelly bowed upward, curved its surface into a curved reflector. Then he let loose the entire three point eight billion jin of striking force in a single, instant elastic rebound.
The golden beam of starlight didn’t scatter into the ground.
It bounced.
Ninety-nine point seven percent of the incoming downward destruction was inverted into an upward upright vector. The huge column of white-gold star-fire shot straight back into the heavens at twelve times the speed of sound. It screamed up the exact same spark-charged sky tunnel it had just carved through the clouds.
Up on the Sky-Cleaver, Grand Elder Xuan Ji’s triumphant laughter died in his throat as the world beneath him exploded into blinding reverse daylight.
“What in the name of the Ancestors—” Xuan Ji shrieked, throwing his arms up to shield his eyes.
The reflected beam struck the central focal node of the Seven Star Array with pinpoint, total care.
The seven war-galleons had designed their runic pylons to channel and project energy downward, not to absorb a hyper-moving inverted strike from below. Three point eight billion jin of their own packed starlight slammed back into the focal pylon matrix. Then, the delicate deep ringing hum of the entire fleet shattered like a crystal cup dropped onto a stone floor.
CRACK-BOOM!
The master energy channels aboard all seven flagship galleons blew out in a timed together cascade of blinding sparks.
Aboard the Sky-Cleaver, the main spirit-stone reactor burst its brass release valves. A geyser of white-hot steam and shattered jade shards erupted through the center deck, blowing the mainmast cleanly off its mountings and sending the golden dragon figurehead tumbling into the clouds.
“The keels are blown!” Captain Zhao screamed, clinging to the shattered steering wheel as the flagship tilted wildly forty degrees to port. “The floating runes are dissolving! Helms are non-responsive! Dump the backup ballast! Dump the spirit stones!”
Across the sky, the amazing Seven Star fleet collapsed into total aerial chaos.
The seven huge warships, their linked pylons cut and their forward thrust arrays smoking, began listing and drifting helplessly like wounded kites caught in an autumn squall. Hulls scraped against hulls with painful groans of tearing bronze. Galleons spun drunkenly in circles. Their golden sails burned from backup spark arcs, as backup war-horns wailed across the upper air in desperate, panicked distress signals.
Down on the floor of the Grand Defile, the air cleared in an instant.
The blinding golden light vanished, replaced once more by the clean, crisp mountain sunlight filtering through the canyon mist.
In the center of the grassy clearing, the five-meter pancake of blue jelly gathered its edges together, rippling with fluid grace as it drew its mass back toward the center. With a cheerful, wet shhk-pop, Lin Xiao snapped back into his perfect, plump, forty-inch ball-shaped form.
He wobbled twice, settling comfortably into the crushed green clover.
Not a single droplet of his fluid mass had been boiled away. Not a single scratch marked his semi-clear sapphire surface.
However, deep inside his core, something deep had changed.
The huge sky squeezing—thousands of pounds of striking force acting as an accidental sky pestle—had forced a huge influx of surrounding spiritual energy through his permeable membrane. Deep within his internal void, the Primordial Chaos Golden Core was spinning at a never seen before, dizzying speed. A deep, ringing hum shook through his fluid mantle, tingling with rich, effervescent bubbles of golden-violet light.
A crisp, semi-clear blue screen chimed into Lin Xiao’s spiritual sight:
Lin Xiao let out a long, contented burp that smelled faintly of sweet plum wine and spark-charged starlight.
My word, Lin Xiao thought, gently stretching two blue pseudopods into the air to massage his sides. That was quite a bounce. My core feels fully full, like I just polished off three bowls of braised pork belly and an entire pot of glutinous rice balls. It’s wonderfully fizzy.
“Host,” the Dao Spirit informed him in her calm, deadpan tone. “Your internal Primordial Chaos Golden Core has absorbed nine hundred and eighty thousand units of moving squeezing qi. Internal saturation has advanced from fifty-five point six percent directly to eighty-nine point two percent. Core load-bearing limits are approaching critical stretch.”
“Is that good?” Lin Xiao asked.
“From a training perspective, you have effectively turned a world-ending sky-high bombardment into a free high-pressure core massage,” the Dao Spirit replied smoothly. “Hostile naval assets, conversely, are currently dropping toward the surrounding tree canopy at end-post gliding speed.”
High on the southern ridge, Sword Saint Gu Qingfeng stared into the sky with his wine gourd suspended halfway to his mouth.
A single drop of Jade-Dew Wine fell from the gourd’s rim, landing unnoticed upon his bare knee.
Beside him, Tie Shan’s jaw had dropped so far that his gray beard touched his furry chest. The titan bear smith slowly raised his five-hundred-jin hammer, looked at the head of the tool, then looked down at the tiny, round blue blob wobbling happily in the clover below.
“Did... Did that boy just bounce thirty billion jin of star-fire with his backside?” Tie Shan asked, his voice a confused rasp.
Gu Qingfeng slowly lowered his wine gourd. A broad, crooked grin spread across the old swordsman’s face, his eyes gleaming with mad, respectful delight.
“Old Bear,” Gu Qingfeng whispered. He shook his head until his gray hair danced in the wind. “I told you eighty years ago. True strength isn’t about being hard. True strength is water. When the hammer strikes iron, the iron eventually cracks. But when the hammer strikes water... The water just splashes you right in the face.”
Above the western peaks, the disabled war-galleons groaned as their emergency drift-anchors dragged through the pine boughs, coming to a scraping, undignified halt across the lower ridges.