The pressure streaming from the lake felt like a physical wall of lead.
Chi Lian hovered thirty feet above the boiling surface, supported by three thick geysers of high-pressure crimson foam. His flesh was no longer pale. It was an angry, semi-clear violet, through which thick, pulsating black veins could be seen writhing like leech-like worms beneath the skin.
He had committed the ultimate taboo of demonic bio-training. He had directly hardwired his living lower dantian into the lake’s earth-heat pool.
By using the blood of a hundred sacrificed fighters as an external, unmetered memory pool, he had artificially overclocked his spiritual throughput beyond the Foundation Establishment boundary. He crossed into the raw, destructive threshold of Half-Step Golden Core.
WHIP-CRACK.
The twenty-foot tentacle of crystal-hardened blood-glass lashed out from Chi Lian’s left shoulder.
The strike was so fast that the air tightly packed with a sonic boom. That created a visible blast wave that ripped across the limestone ledge.
A five-foot-thick granite support pillar twenty paces from Lin Ke took the glancing edge of the whip.
