The recoil of Lin Xiao’s release didn’t sound like an animal jumping. It sounded like an ancient siege giant crossbow snapping its master bowstring.
BOING-CRACK!
At the bottom of the five-hundred-foot crater, the solid dark rock bedrock shattered outward in a spiderweb of deep, jagged fissures. The sheer moving rebound was so huge that thousands of tons of cooling rock were crushed into fine powder, throwing up a dense ring of white dust that blasted outward against the canyon walls like the blast wave of an exploding powder magazine.
And from the center of that crushed stone, a streak of brilliant sapphire light shot straight into the heavens.
Lin Xiao had tightly packed his non-Newtonian body down to the thickness of iron-hard metal star-iron. That turned the moving shock of three sky lightning bolts into pure upward clockwork forward thrust. The moment he released his water’s skin, his fluid mass swelled with explosive high-pressure violence.
He broke the sound barrier within the first ten feet.
CRACK!
A brilliant, cone-shaped vapor cloud of condensed moisture blossomed around his semi-clear blue body, trailing behind him like a comet’s tail as he tore through the lower air. The air screamed in protest as he ripped upward. It passed two hundred meters, five hundred meters, a thousand meters in the span of a single breath. The wind roared past his curved eyes in an ear-splitting gale, but to Lin Xiao’s fluid senses, the sensation was pure, intoxicating freedom.
Whaaaaa-ha-ha! Lin Xiao cheered internally, his jelly stretching into a sleek, wind-cutting teardrop shape. The ground fell away below. Now this is traveling! Forget riding in stuffy wooden carriages or wobbling on flying swords! Just wind yourself up and let fly!
Below him, the Grand Defile rapidly shrank into a tiny green trench bordered by jagged gray ridges.
From two thousand meters in the air, the true beauty of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall was laid bare before him. He could see the neat, terraced spirit-rice paddies that Su Ling’er had organized along the riverbanks, glistening like jade mirrors in the strange violet light. He could see the spiraling stone chimneys of Tie Shan’s communal forge shop halls, puffing sweet woodsmoke into the trees. The clear water chutes that carried mountain spring water to every household. Even the little herds of white spirit sheep, huddled safely inside their timber pens beneath the watchtowers, looked like scattered grains of puffed rice on a dark green cloth.
Look at that, Lin Xiao thought warmly, feeling a deep surge of pride in his fluid core. That’s our home. We built all of that from empty dirt and wild brambles. No way I’m letting some noisy storm blow all that hard work away.
High above, however, the target was approaching at terrifying speed.
The underbelly of the ten-thousand-li sky-trial vortex was a terrifying spectacle of cosmic power. Mountains of black storm clouds churned like boiling pitch, laced with jagged, pulsing arteries of royal purple star-fire. The surrounding heat dropped drastically, plunging through freezing layers that turned sky moisture into needle-sharp ice crystals that pinged harmlessly off Lin Xiao’s rubbery blue skin.
Three thousand meters. Five thousand meters. Seven thousand meters.
Lin Xiao pierced the lower stratus layer, bursting through dense banks of spark-charged mist like a cannonball plunging through damp cotton. The air here was so soaked with raw Yang-Thunder that his entire sapphire mantle began to glow with intense lavender fire, crackling with tiny lightning bolts that danced along his smooth curve in fine, detailed, glowing patterns.
At eight thousand five hundred meters above the earth, Lin Xiao punched directly into the eye of the storm.
A system box recorded the historic ascent:
Ten miles away, on the high crags of Cloud-Piercing Pass, the scene on the bronze scrying mirrors had triggered a total collapse of human sanity.
Elder Mo Qian was clutching his own cheeks so hard his fingernails broke the skin. His tall jade hairpin snapped in two, tumbling into the gravel, but he didn’t even notice. His eyes were glued to the glowing projection in sheer, pure horror.
“He... He didn’t hide...” Mo Qian stammered, his voice choked with dust and terror. “He didn’t burrow into the bedrock... He leaped!”
“He leaped into the sky?!” Elder Liu Chen shrieked, grabbing two handfuls of his white beard and yanking until strands came loose. “Nobody leaps into the sky-trial! In the history of the four mortal continents, across three hundred dynasties and a hundred thousand years of recorded training, who has ever jumped toward heavenly lightning?!”
“Madness!” screamed a core student from the Azure Cloud Sect, collapsing backward against a baggage wagon. “He’s attacking the Heavenly Dao! The demon is trying to assassinate the heavens!”
Around the scrying mirrors, hundreds of young swordsmen were openly trembling. For their entire lives, their sect masters had taught them that training was a path of respect, obedience, and cautious posture with cosmic laws. You spent decades meditating on ancient stone tablets, burning incense, reciting old family scriptures, and preparing arrays of spirit magic charms just to survive the mild three-bolt golden sky-trial of the Golden Core realm. Even then, the survival rate was barely fifty percent.
Yet here was an azure blob of water-jelly—an entity without a single bone in its body—using the bedrock of the earth as a trampoline to launch itself into the highest heavens, chasing down the Ninth-Tier Sky-trial like a dog chasing a tossed bone.
“Grand Elder,” a deacon whispered, his face ashen. “What technique is that? Is that the ancient Void-Shattering Leap of the Northern Demon Sects?”
Grand Elder Xuan Ji stood frozen before the mirror. His left eye was a sickening orb of burst blood. But his right eye stared at the blue streak piercing the clouds with an expression of numbed, spirit dread.
The old man’s mind, already strained by hundreds of years of failed breakthroughs and the creeping terror of mortality, simply couldn’t process what he was seeing.
In traditional doctrine, the Heavenly Sky-trial was the supreme, unquestionable will of the cosmos. It was the divine headsman before which all mortal beings, whether human emperors or ancient spirit beasts, had to kneel in trembling respect, begging for survival and relying on old family spirit treasures to endure the punishment. You prayed to the heavens. You feared the heavens. You accepted the wrath of the heavens.
You didn’t launch yourself off the ground like a child’s rubber ball and fly eight thousand meters straight into the headsman’s face!
“It’s suicide...” Xuan Ji whispered, his voice trembling like a dry leaf caught in an autumn gale. “The stormcore... The center of the vortex holds the packed origin star-fire of the Ninth Tier. A single breath of that air will burn up the dantian of a Soul Formation grandmaster! It will be burned into nothingness before it even reaches the eye! It has to be! IT HAS TO BE!”
Beside the trembling coalition leaders, Abbot Hui Lun of Pure Lotus Abbey slowly opened his eyes.
The venerable abbot looked not at the panicked fighters. But up at the black sky where the tiny blue star was climbing. A deep, almost sorrowful calm settled over the monk’s weathered features. He raised his palms together in a respectful Buddhist salute. He whispered a single line from an ancient scripture that had not been spoken in five thousand years:
“The fool sees a storm and cowers. The seeker sees a mountain and climbs. But the ancient spirit returns to the waters from whence the cosmos flowed.”
Down along the tree line near the Grand Defile, Sword Saint Gu Qingfeng took another long pull from his wine gourd, his grey hair whipping wildly in the spark downdraft.
“Old Bear,” Gu Qingfeng remarked, pointing his willow twig up toward the clouds. “Did you see that launch angle? Pure moving squeezing. No wasted spiritual qi, no grand hand seals, just raw, plain spring mechanics. That little fellow has a better grasp of flight path than half the artillery masters in the royal legions.”
Tie Shan laughed with deep, rumbling pride, resting his massive calloused hands on the handle knob of his forge hammer. “Artillery masters? Little Brother Gu, that boy watched me temper titan-springs for three weeks straight! He knows exactly how much force steel can hold before it gives! And unlike steel, that jelly of his never reaches its breaking point. It just absorbs, bends, and bounces back twice as hard!”
High above the world, inside the eye of the storm, the clouds were astonishingly quiet.
It was an eerie, majestic stillness. Surrounded by walls of black cloud rising ten miles into the upper air like the castle walls of a sky castle, the center of the vortex was a vast, open arena of twilight purple. In the center of this circular void, jagged rifts of cosmic energy pulsed with rhythmic, thrumming power. The air was thin and freezing, but thick with the heavy scent of burning stars and spark-charged ozone.
Lin Xiao reached the apex of his leap.
For a moment, he hung suspended in mid-air, weightless beneath the crown of the universe. The freezing high-sky air was invigorating, tingling against his water’s skin like iced plum tea on a boiling hot summer afternoon.
Directly in front of him, two huge masses of purple star-fire were rapidly coalescing. They were twisting, coiling, and condensing into the shapes of two huge, horned serpents—the Twin Purple Thunder Dragons of the fourth and fifth sky-trial waves, each more than two thousand meters long. Their eyes burned with the cold, merciless judgment of cosmic law.
Lin Xiao looked at the two massive lightning beasts.
Then, his curved white eyes narrowed into a pair of cheerful, welcoming crescents.
“Ah,” Lin Xiao murmured happily, letting his mass begin to unfold in the thin air. “The kitchen staff is finally bringing out the main course. Dao Spirit, let’s make sure we have enough table space for both of them.”
“Deploying Primordial Chaos Devour Domain,” the Dao Spirit responded with clean, steady care. “outer edge spreading authorized. Spatial ingestion sky-slit unlocked.”
Lin Xiao opened his core.