The sky didn’t merely crack. It blew up with the bone-shaking fury of a collapsing star.
For three painful seconds, the universal laws of sound and light seemed to tear free from their moorings. The swirling vortex of ten thousand li tightened wildly inward. Its charcoal-black clouds folded into dense, high-pressure rings of gravity force. Then, with a sound like ten thousand great bronze temple bells shattering against iron anvils at the same time, the sky high sky tore wide open.
Three huge pillars of pure, blazing bright royal purple lightning plunged from the stratosphere.
Each bolt was as wide as an ancient redwood trunk. It measured more than forty feet across. They didn’t zigzag or scatter into uneven branches like ordinary storm lightning. They fell with terrifying, sharp-angled care. Three solid columns of packed Yang-Thunder star-fire, bound together by the unbending execution decree of the Heavenly Dao. They pierced the lower cloud layers. Then, the surrounding air white-hot instantly, invisible the air into a shimmering violet aura that turned the entire eastern province into blinding, shadowless daylight.
Ten miles away on Cloud-Piercing Pass, thirty thousand fighters screamed all at once.
The visual bright glare was so intense that even through enchanted scrying mirrors, hundreds of students clutched their eyes in agony as tears streamed down their cheeks. Two seconds later, the blasting blast wave arrived.
BOOOOOOOOOOM!
The sound was not a sound wave. It was a physical battering ram of tightly packed air. Along the ridges of the pass, ancient pine trees snapped like brittle kindling, their trunks splintering into thousands of flying shards. Boulders weighing five tons were shoved yards down the scree slopes. Weaker Qi Gathering students were thrown off their feet, tumbling into the briars, while even Nascent Soul elders like Yan Lie and Liu Chen had to plant their boots deep into the bedrock, raising protective spirit barriers to keep from being blasted backward into the gorges.
“Hold the array!” Elder Mo Qian shrieked, coughing as dry dust and crushed gravel filled the air. “Stabilize the mirrors! What happened to the defile?!”
Down in the Grand Defile, the landscape had ceased to exist.
Where the lush meadow of wild clover, sweet chamomile, and bubbling mountain brooks had stood moments before, there was only a huge, steaming deep pit. The three lightning pillars had came together upon a single exact point, obliterating everything within a five-hundred-foot radius. The topsoil, the grass, the granite boulders, and the underground water channels had not been blown away. They had been instantly boiled away by heat levels exceeding four thousand five hundred degrees of sky thunder-fire.
The walls of the crater plunged eighty feet straight down into the earth. Their sheer was dark rock surfaces glowing with cherry-red and blinding white heat. At the very bottom of the pit, the bedrock had fully melted. An eighty-foot-wide pool of molten dark rock glass bubbled and churned, streaming waves of white-hot heat qi that caused the air above the crater to warp and shimmer like oil poured into a fire. Stray gravel rolling down the lip of the crater dissolved into liquid fire before it even touched the glowing surface.
A dense cloud of white stone steam and spark-charged ozone boiled upward into the sky. He carried the heavy, acrid stench of scorched minerals.
Silence fell over the mountain range once more.
It was a terrible, choking stillness. The birds had long since fled. The wind had been burned out of the canyon. And the trees along the crater’s edge were nothing more than glowing charcoal skeletons standing in the violet twilight.
On the distant ridge, thirty thousand pairs of eyes strained to peer into the smoking pit through the bronze scrying mirrors.
“Merciful heavens...” Elder Liu Chen whispered, his voice trembling so wildly his teeth clicked together. “The entire bedrock was turned to liquid glass. The spiritual essence of the earth itself was burned up.”
“It’s gone,” whispered a young Heavenly Sword student, falling to his knees in the dirt. “Nothing made of flesh and blood could survive that. Even our sect’s old family mountain-protecting turtle would have been boiled to vapor in half a heartbeat.”
Grand Elder Xuan Ji stood at the edge of the scrying circle. The mud caking his face had dried into a cracked, pale crust. But his bloodshot eyes burned with triumphant, vindictive satisfaction.
“Did you see it?!” Xuan Ji hissed, his fingers curling into victorious claws. “Did you see the righteous fury of heaven?! That arrogant puddle of demonic water thought it could mock the traditional sects! It thought it could wave its filthy jelly tendril at thirty thousand students of the Dao! Now, look at its grave! It didn’t even have time to scream! It was evaporated down to the spiritual level! Not a single molecule of its water remains in this realm!”
Xuan Ji raised his trembling arms toward the swirling purple clouds, shouting with all the strength left in his withered lungs: “Righteousness is eternal! The demonic pest has been destroyed by the Heavenly Dao! The Grand Lonely Forest belongs to Heavenly Sword Manor!”
Around him, a few deacons began to cheer tentatively, their shouts echoing weakly along the rocky ridge. But Abbot Hui Lun of Pure Lotus Abbey didn’t cheer. The venerable monk stood motionless. It grabbed his sandalwood prayer beads, his eyes closed as he murmured silent funeral sutras for the deceased spirit.
Yet down in the crater, eighty feet below the shattered surface of the earth, something was moving.
Deep within the pool of bubbling molten dark rock glass, nestled beneath thirty feet of liquid red-hot rock that would have melted immortal star-iron into melted rock waste, a rhythmic, gentle pulse began to beat.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It didn’t sound like a dying heartbeat. It sounded like the steady, contented rhythm of an infant resting peacefully in a warm bath.
Inside Lin Xiao’s mind, a series of glowing archival runes flickered into being, untroubled by the ocean of magma surrounding him:
Ooooh, Lin Xiao thought drowsily, his mind drifting through a state of pure, sublime relaxation. Oh, wow. That is... That is shockingly nice.
When the three huge columns of purple lightning had dropped from the heavens, Lin Xiao had not resisted. Resisting an oncoming force, as any decent logistics manager knew, was the fastest way to cause total collapse. If a hundred-ton freight container was dropped onto a rigid steel plate, the plate bent and snapped. But if it was dropped into an infinitely deep body of water, the water simply parted, cradled the mass, absorbed the moving driving force. Then it settled back into smooth ripples.
The 120 million metric tons of cosmic striking force struck his forty-inch body. Then, Lin Xiao’s non-Newtonian fluid matrix had engaged automatically. His dilatant water’s skin absorbed the first impact shock. At the same time, his internal Primordial Chaos Void opened wide to welcome the spark flood.
Instead of burning his jelly, the three bolts of packed Yang-Thunder had poured directly into his core.
The feeling was impossible to describe using mortal words. It was like leaping into an outdoor fiery hot spring in the middle of a freezing mountain blizzard. Every single droplet of his fluid body was tingling with an electric, effervescent life-force. The terrifying heat of over four thousand degrees of molten stone didn’t scald him at all. His inherent [Thermal Nullification] and Ancient Water Origin power simply treated the boiling dark rock like a very thick, pleasantly warm mud bath.
It’s like those fancy sulfur stone baths Old Ba was talking about, Lin Xiao mused. That let his fluid mass gently expand outward into the liquid stone. Prickly, warm, and deeply relaxing. It fully unclogs the pores. Well, if I had pores.
Deep within his core, the real transformation was taking place.
The Primordial Chaos Golden Core, which had been strained to critical capacity by the squeezing of Xuan Ji’s ten-thousand-sword array, was drinking the purple lightning essence like a very thirsty traveler in a desert oasis. The golden sphere spun within the azure void. Its crystal-clear surface took in the raw Yang-Thunder star-fire without leaving behind a single trace of toxic residue. Fine violet fractures spread across the core’s outer shell, not from total collapse, but from the irresistible pressure of something amazing preparing to break free from within.
“Host dantian tracking data checked,” the Dao Spirit chimed, her cool voice carrying a clear note of analytical satisfaction. “Waves One, Two, and Three have been fully metabolized. Absorbed moving and spark energy has successfully converted forty-two percent of the Golden Core shell into refined ancient origin fluid. Zero heat degradation detected. Host mass remains one hundred percent intact.”
Forty-two percent already? Lin Xiao asked, feeling wonderfully energized. That’s pretty fast. And honestly? The flavor isn’t bad at all.
At the bottom of the smoking deep pit, the thick red pool of molten glass began to churn.
A series of large, glossy bubbles rose to the surface of the magma, bursting with soft, wet plops: bloop... Bloop... Shhhk.
Slowly, effortlessly, parting the glowing red stone like a duck gliding across a warm pond, a smooth, semi-clear dome of sapphire jelly rose toward the surface of the molten pit.
And from that little blue dome, a clear sound drifted up through the steam.