Noon arrived without daylight.
The midday sun vanished behind an iron-hard ceiling of pitch-black, iron-dense clouds that pressed down upon the Black Crag Basin like the lid of a sealed coffin. The surrounding heat plummeted thirty degrees in five minutes. Frost began to crystallize along the jagged rims of the dark rock cliffs. Meanwhile, the air grew thick with the choking stench of burnt sulfur and spark-charged cold air.
Outside the outer edge chain, panic had replaced discipline.
Captain Lu and his thirty hired blades had abandoned their wooden barricades, retreating sixty paces back toward the mouth of the gorge to huddle beneath heavy bronze-heavy Pavilions of Iron Wardenship. Even Zhao Wuji had climbed back inside his velvet-draped carriage. His pale face was pressed against the glass window. He watched the unnatural, churning vortex with genuine terror.
This was no ordinary Qi Gathering breakthrough storm.
In traditional training, reaching Foundation Establishment produced a gentle shower of spirit mist, perhaps a faint rainbow halo above the cave.
This was a Four-Nine Heavenly Sky-trial. A punitive sky strike reserved for rogue demons and ancient reincarnations. The Heavenly Dao compiler had parsed the un-backdoored, secret entity below and marked it for immediate garbage collection.
