In ten thousand years of recorded training history, every scholar, saint, and sovereign had treated the Heavenly Sky-trial with solemn, scared defense.
Whether one wielded ancient tortoise-shell shields, formed thousand-monk diamond defensive arrays, or swallowed forbidden longevity pills to endure the agony, the universal law of sky-trial was simple: survive the strike. You waited on the ground, rooted to the earth, praying that your flesh, your spiritual artifacts, and your ancestors’ blessings wouldn’t be burned away into black grease before the clouds exhausted their wrath.
Lin Xiao had no interest in waiting.
To him, waiting on the ground while the noodles were getting cold in the sky was an insult to both the chef and his own rumbling stomach.
High in the stratosphere, the five-mile-wide disc of semi-clear gold-violet jelly suddenly ceased its lazy bobbing. Instead of maintaining its spread-out saucer shape, Lin Xiao began to fold his outer edge inward. He pulled his mass into a dense, hyper-elastic sphere roughly two hundred meters across.
He tightly packed his fluid volume. Then, the surrounding air currents beneath him were drawn into a massive air-powered empty pocket. The internal non-Newtonian tension within his mantle coiled tighter and tighter, like a huge star-metal spring being wound by titan gears. Deep within his dantian, the awakened Nascent Soul embryo seemed to sense the upcoming banquet, clapping its tiny semi-clear hands and bubbling with eager excitement.
