The air in the mountain valley ceased to behave like a breathable gas.
With a bone-chilling shriek of evil laughter that echoed from the clouds to the bedrock, Elder Han Gu thrust both skeletal hands downward. His skin-stitched robes billowed in an unnatural gale of black corpse-vapor as he let loose the full, unbridled spiritual gravity of his Early Nascent Soul realm.
In the immortal training world, the boundary between Foundation Establishment and the Nascent Soul was not merely a step across a threshold. It was an impassable deep gap carved between mortals and demigods. A Nascent Soul fighter had forged a spiritual infant within their dantian, attuning their very soul to the local laws of heaven and earth. Such a master exerted their will. Then, reality itself bowed under the weight of their domain. Mountain peaks cracked, rivers reversed their flow, and weaker practitioners suffered instant soul collapse before a single strike was traded.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
An invisible hammer of blood-red gravity force slammed downward across a three-mile radius.
The effect was instant and horrific. The grass in the open meadows was crushed flat against the mud, water being squeezed wildly from the damp earth like juice from a trodden grape. Fifty yards away from the porch, the massive timbers of the lower supply sheds groaned in agony, their cedar posts bowing under a crushing load of one hundred and forty thousand kilopascals. Along the stone railings, ancient mortar ground to white powder, drifting away in the unnatural empty pocket created by the sudden downward shear.
Even the mightiest defenders of the safe hall buckled under the brutal sky assault.
Tie Shan, whose iron-marrow constitution and star-bronze arm had held twenty thousand charging boars without yielding an inch, let out a harsh, rasping grunt. His massive paw drove his five-hundred-jin smithing hammer deep into the granite terrace flat stone slabs as his knees were forced downward. The heavy plates of his star-iron armor shrieked, metal grinding against metal as the huge gravity load bore down upon his broad shoulders. Sweat poured through his thick iron-grey fur, sizzling as it dripped onto the tightly packed stone.
“By the mountain roots...” Tie Shan ground out between clenched teeth, veins bulging along his neck like thick hemp ropes. “It feels as though the entire northern ridge was dropped directly onto my collarbones! The very air is heavy as lead!”
Behind him, Su Ling’er was forced onto one knee. Her nine-fold spirit-silk strings snapped taut around her in a defensive dome of pale jade light. But the crushing red pressure was causing the barrier to flicker wildly with spiderweb fractures. With fierce, protective motherly instinct, she gathered three trembling young fox cubs beneath her voluminous vermilion robes. She used her own three tails as a living shield while her breath came in ragged, painful gasps. Her jade-like teeth bit into her lower lip, fighting off the sickening nausea streaming from the demonic elder’s domain.
Nearby, two badger scouts who had been carrying wooden buckets of broth collapsed flat onto their stomachs, their breath knocked clean out of their lungs as the wooden staves splintered into toothpicks under the crushing overhead weight.
Down on the meadow, thousands of wild beasts lay fully numbed, pinned flat in the mud, unable to lift their snouts even a fraction of an inch as the demonic aura sought to freeze their bloodlines solid. The mighty blood-rhinos whimpered like frightened puppies, their armored plates shaking in terror.
High above, Han Gu leaned forward on his blood cloud, his deathly skeletal face splitting into a wide, jagged sneer of pure sadism.
“Kneel! Wither! Crumble into bone-dust, you worthless vermin!” Han Gu howled, his voice shaking with the supreme arrogance of an apex hunting beast. “See the glory of the Nascent Soul domain! For three hundred years, this ancestor has harvested the blood of righteous grand elders and mortal kings alike! Before this ancestor’s divine pressure, your flesh shall liquefy, your bones shall splinter. Your souls shall crawl into my cooking pot like starving dogs!”
He shifted his black glass gaze toward the stone railing, expecting to witness the ultimate satisfaction. The arrogant little blue demon beast being squashed into a puddle of foul. It boiled jelly under the unbearable sky hammer. In Han Gu’s mind, a mere water-affinity slime had no defensive back shell, no bone skeleton, and no foundation core capable of resisting a sky domain of this size.
Instead, Han Gu’s sneer froze mid-snarl.
Sitting exactly at the center of the heaviest gravity vortex, perched upon the carved railing as though watching a pleasant afternoon sunset, was Lin Xiao.
The blue slime had not popped.
He hadn’t flattened into grease. He hadn’t splattered against the flat stone slabs in painful defeat.
In fact, his semi-clear sapphire body had merely tightly packed by about twenty percent, changing from a floating round sphere into a slightly squat, delightfully plump oval cushion. The crushing red gravity waves slammed into his mass. Then, his non-Newtonian, impact-hardening fluid matrix right away redistributed the striking force across his entire atom-deep structure.
The choking force, capable of crushing iron plate like parchment, simply washed through his boundless Primordial Chaos dantian. There, the moving blast waves were stopped into harmless ripples of water’s skin.
To Lin Xiao, it didn’t feel like the wrath of an ancient demigod.
In his last mortal life, Lin Xiao had endured seventy-hour work weeks managing high-stakes intermodal shipping manifests under screaming corporate directors who threatened him with termination every Tuesday. That kind of psychological pressure had given him chronic migraines, acid reflux, and ruined lower-back bones.
Compared to that soul-crushing corporate existence, this spiritual domain was positively gentle. It felt remarkably like an exceptionally heavy, delightfully warm weighted blanket on a chilly winter morning, with the firm, invigorating kneading of a high-end luxury massage chair.
“Ahhh,” Lin Xiao murmured in deep internal comfort, waving rhythmically as little ripples of starlight traveled across his azure skin. “You know, Dao Spirit, my lower outer edge was feeling a bit tense after rolling down that granite chimney earlier. This pressure is actually quite relaxing. It’s hitting all the right pressure points along my equator.”
“Test confirmed, Host,” the Dao Spirit chimed in her cool, unflappable flat voice. “Host’s Primordial Chaos fluid composition possesses infinite impact-hardening plasticity. External sky squeezing is currently being converted into passive elastic potential energy. However, biometric tracking data indicates Lady Ling’er and Commander Tie Shan are sustaining severe musculoskeletal strain.”
Lin Xiao’s crescent white eyes right away snapped into sharp, focused circles.
He glanced to his left. He saw Tie Shan’s knees grinding against the stone, teeth bared in stubborn defiance. He saw Su Ling’er trembling beneath the weight, shielding the weeping cubs with her own body. He saw the badger scouts gasping for breath beneath the splintered wood.
The cozy contentment vanished instantly from Lin Xiao’s core.
“Showing off is fine,” Lin Xiao thought, a cool, quiet edge entering his mental voice. “Bullying little children and making my friends grovel in the dirt isn’t. Let’s redirect some of this breeze.”
Lin Xiao gave a sharp, deliberate pulse of his core.
Instead of merely absorbing the gravity force into his dantian, he engaged his [Chaos Surface Inversion]. His azure body swelled outward by three feet, then tightened with the care of a high-pressure air-powered valve.
THWUM-THWUM.
A set of nested, azure sound rings radiated outward from his body across the porch floor. The soothing blue ripples washed over Tie Shan and Su Ling’er. Then, the choking red gravity field was cleanly split in two, parting around them like a raging river diverted by a solid granite boulder.
Tie Shan gasped, feeling the crushing weight vanish from his shoulders in an instant. He rose to his full seven-foot height with a savage shake of his shaggy head, star-iron armor clanking as he planted his hammer with renewed vigor.
“Haaaaah!” Tie Shan drew in a massive breath of sweet air, rolling his broad shoulders. “That feels like stepping out of a mine cave into the spring sunshine!”
Su Ling’er let out a soft, shuddering breath. Her pale jade barrier settled back into calm peace as the fox cubs poked their little black noses out from beneath her hem, no longer shivering. She brushed back a stray strand of silk-like hair, gazing toward Lin Xiao with undisguised awe.
“Master’s power... It nullified a Nascent Soul domain without even standing up,” Su Ling’er whispered, her tails swaying in deep respect.
Up in the heavens, Elder Han Gu’s eyes were nearly popping from his sunken sockets.
The demonic elder stood frozen atop his blood-mist platform. He grabbed his dragon-bone staff with hands that were visibly trembling. For three hundred years, he had traveled the length and breadth of the Azure Cloud Realm. He had trampled mortal principalities, slaughtered rogue fighters, and clashed with righteous sect grandmasters.
Never in his three hundred years of existence had he witnessed an entity beneath the Nascent Soul realm survive his unrestrained domain pressure. Let alone a shapeless, boneless blue jelly creature that absorbed his heavenly might like a feather bed and casually wiped away his spiritual field with a wobble!
“Impossible...” Han Gu rasped, his voice cracking with rising panic and frantic denial. “IMPOSSIBLE! You have no bones! You have no spirit veins! You’re a low-tier fluid spirit beast, nothing more than wild river foam given base mind! Why do your organs not rupture?! Why do you not bleed?!”
Lin Xiao gave a bouncy, cheerful hop on the stone railing, landing with a soft, rubbery sploosh.
“Well, friend, that’s the beauty of being a slime,” Lin Xiao’s clear voice rang through the sky. He carried across the silent mountains with cheerful, conversational warmth. “No bones means no broken bones. No spirit veins means no qi blockages. And as for bleeding... Honestly, why would anyone want to be filled with red juice that spills everywhere when you trip? It seems like an awful lot of upkeep.”
He extended a slender blue slime arm, pointing it casually toward the floating elder.
“You’ve been shouting and throwing your weight around for ten minutes, Elder Han. Your throat must be very thirsty. Why don’t you bring that huge bronze kettle down here, land your cloud, and let’s have a civilized chat?”