Eight thousand five hundred meters above the surface of the earth, the small blue sphere unraveled.
It didn’t burst, tear, or shatter. It unfurled with the easy, hypnotic grace of dark calligraphy ink blooming within a fine china bowl of clear spring water. At first, Lin Xiao’s semi-clear azure mantle swelled from forty inches to ten feet across, floating like a shimmering silk parachute in the high-sky void. But the spreading didn’t stop there.
Lin Xiao didn’t merely stretch his physical water’s skin. He opened the threshold of his internal dantian—the boundless Primordial Chaos Void that existed at the root of his soul—and brought its conceptual reality into the physical world.
The laws governing mass, volume, and shifted weight ceased to apply.
Ten feet became a hundred yards. A hundred yards became a mile. Within twenty seconds of unbroken, silent dilation, a huge, swirling disc of deep sapphire and starry black glass darkness spread across the heart of the storm, expanding until it spanned more than five miles across the upper air.
At its center, Lin Xiao’s mind remained perfectly centered, relaxed, and clear.
His panoramic senses had swelled to match his huge physical footprint. From this breathtaking vantage point five miles wide, the mortal world below took on an entirely new dimension. He could see the delicate heat updrafts rising from sunlit mountain valleys. He could track the flight paths of high-sky eagles veering away in confusion. And far to the east, past the jagged teeth of Cloud-Piercing Pass, he could see the distant, glittering roofs of country merchant cities glistening like scattered mica flakes on the horizon.
Directly below his center lay his safe hall—the Grand Defile, the clear streams, the terraced orchards. The tidy stone cottages built by Tie Shan and the bear-beast craftsmen. From this height, the entire safe hall looked like an emerald jewel nestled safely within the rugged embrace of the mountains.
Look at that view, Lin Xiao thought warmly, his awareness rippling smoothly across all five miles of his swelled fluid body. It’s like laying out a giant picnic blanket across a grassy park. Now, no matter where the soup spills, it stays right on the cloth.
To the outside world, however, this was a sky-high strange flaw. A bottomless cosmic maw carved into the very fabric of the sky. The outer edge was a ring of swirling azure fluid, soft and semi-clear like deep sea water. Meanwhile, the inside was a deep pit of pure, unformed ancient chaos. A realm where light, matter, and elemental energy had not yet been divided by the laws of heaven and earth. It radiated neither malevolence nor hunger. It radiated the deep, ancient silence of the universe before the first star was born.
A system tracking data box formed within Lin Xiao’s mindscape, documenting the never seen before spatial phenomenon:
And then, the physics of the storm began to invert.
Throughout the millions of years of training history across the Azure Cloud Realm, the relationship between heaven and earth during a sky-trial had always been strictly upright and strictly one-aimed. Heaven held the high ground. Earth was the recipient. The storm clouds gathered above, packed their sky wrath, and hurled destructive lightning downward toward the shivering mortal below. The mortal either endured the strikes or died.
Lin Xiao’s Primordial Chaos Devour Domain shattered that cosmic hierarchy in a single stroke.
The star-core possessed infinite fluid empty pocket drag. Because of that, the downward driving force of the ten-thousand-li storm was fully reversed. Instead of pressing downward toward the Grand Defile, the huge air pressure slope began flowing upward, dragged inexorably toward the five-mile azure maw.
Huge banks of black, void-charged thunderclouds, weighing billions of tons and crackling with trillions of volts of destructive star-fire, were seized by the gentle, irresistible current of the blue vortex.
The clouds didn’t explode. They didn’t resist. They were drawn inward in smooth. It spiraled ribbons, swirling helplessly around the outer edge of the azure disc like warm bathwater circling a drain. Millions of cubic meters of spark-charged mist poured directly into Lin Xiao’s void dantian. There, his innate power instantly stripped away their churning moving fury, filtering the raw energy into sweet, pure origin moisture that condensed into calm spiritual rain within his soul.
The heavens above the Grand Lonely Forest were literally being sucked into a blue funnel.
Ten miles away on Cloud-Piercing Pass, the thirty thousand traditional fighters watching through their bronze scrying mirrors were experiencing something far worse than fear.
They were experiencing the complete and permanent destruction of their religious cosmology.
Sect elders from Heavenly Sword Manor, Crimson Flame Pavilion, and Azure Cloud Sect fell to their knees in the cold mountain mud. Several aged formation masters began tearing their robes. They wept hysterically as their lifelong training dogmas collapsed around them like rotten timber.
“It inverted...” Elder Mo Qian whispered, his voice fully dead, his hands hanging limp at his sides. “The sky-trial... It isn’t striking down. It’s being pulled up.”
“The sky is being swallowed,” Elder Liu Chen babbled. His eyes were wide and vacant. He watched the five-mile blue vortex drain the stormclouds from the heavens. “In the sacred scriptures of the Dao Ancestor, the Heavenly Dao is the supreme father, the eternal judge, the unshakable mountain of cosmic truth! How can the judge be pulled into a well?! How can the mountain be eaten like a steamed bun?!”
“It’s a fiendgod...” a deacon from Heavenly Sword Manor cried. It pressed his forehead against the muddy wheel of a broken supply wagon. “It’s an ancient cosmic devourer from beyond the Great Void! We didn’t march to war against a beast city... We marched to war against the end of all things!”
Beside the weeping elders, Elder Yan Lie of Crimson Flame Pavilion stood frozen. The veteran fire master, who had spent two hundred years taming fiery spirits and commanding battle formations, looked at the five-mile azure disc with hollow eyes. For his entire life, he had believed that spiritual fire was the ultimate force of destruction, capable of reducing all matter to ash. But looking at that calm blue maw, Yan Lie understood the terrifying truth: you couldn’t burn a deep pit. You couldn’t scorch something that possessed no heat, no solid form, and no limits.
Grand Elder Xuan Ji was clinging to the frame of the scrying mirror like a drowning man clutching a piece of driftwood.
The blood leaking from his burst left eye had smeared across his cheek, crusting against his lips. But he seemed entirely unaware of it. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps that rattled through his dry chest like dry husks in an autumn wind.
“No...” Xuan Ji rasped, his voice cracking into a dry wheeze. “The Twin Dragons... The Fourth and Fifth waves are already formed! The Heavenly Dao can’t be devoured! The dragons will tear that blue void apart from the inside!”
Down on the watchtower overlooking the Grand Defile, Sword Saint Gu Qingfeng took a slow sip from his wine gourd, his grey eyes shining with deep enlightenment.
“Do you see it, Old Bear?” Gu Qingfeng murmured softly, gesturing toward the swirling high-sky disc with his willow twig. “That isn’t a technique. That isn’t an array. That’s the Dao of Boundless Emptiness. When you have no shape, nothing can cut you. When you claim no throne, nothing can overthrow you. The old men on the mountain think they can conquer the world by building higher towers. But this little fellow simply became the sky itself.”
Tie Shan nodded solemnly, his massive chest rumbling. “A forge master knows that the hottest fire needs the biggest bellows, Little Brother Gu. But our Sect Master isn’t the fire, and he isn’t the bellows. He’s the room the forge sits in.”
High above, as if answering Xuan Ji’s desperate clinging to sanity, the swirling eye of the storm reacted to the never seen before indignity.
The Heavenly Dao was not a sentient being. But it was an ancient, self-regulating cosmic system designed to enforce universal order. To have its sacred execution clouds sucked into an azure vortex like dirty dishwater was a strange flaw that triggered its most extreme retaliatory subroutines.
Deep within the swirling wall of clouds directly above Lin Xiao’s center, the surrounding violet twilight flared with world-ending intensity.
Two huge snake-like shapes detached themselves from the stormcore.
They were the Twin Purple Thunder Dragons of the Fourth and Fifth waves. Each beast was more than two thousand meters in length, their huge bodies composed of solid, ultra-dense violet star-fire that crackled with enough destructive potential to turn to steam entire mountain chains. Their horns were jagged lances of blinding white lightning. Their claws were curved scythes of pure cosmic severance. And their burning amethyst eyes glared down upon the five-mile blue disc with cold, unbending total ruin intent.
ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!
The twin beasts roared at the same time. That sound of such total fury the sound barrier between heaven and earth shattered. Diving downward in a spiraling double-helix flight path, they sped up toward the center of the azure star-core, intending to rip the spatial fabric apart and purge the insolent strange flaw from existence.
Down in the center of the five-mile vortex, Lin Xiao felt the huge downward rush of heat and electricity.
He looked up through his panoramic fluid senses. He saw the two huge, two-thousand-meter dragons diving straight toward his mouth, their fangs dripping with packed star-fire.
Lin Xiao didn’t summon a shield. He didn’t prepare a counter-spell.
Instead, two huge azure pseudopods—each three miles long, thick, soft, and infinitely elastic—surged upward from the left and right edges of his swirling vortex like a pair of playful blue arms reaching up to catch a falling ball.
“Oh, lovely,” Lin Xiao chuckled happily, his fluid thoughts echoing across the five-mile disc. “Two at once! Just like jumbo crispy tempura shrimp fresh from the fryer!”
“Host dantian intake tuned,” the Dao Spirit chimed smoothly. “Chopsticks deployed.”
Lin Xiao reached out.