The light was blinding enough to burn through closed eyelids.
A five-hundred-foot sphere of tightly packed, white-hot solar star-fire hovered fifty paces above the Azure Cloud plaza. It hummed with the world-ending fury of a tiny star.
Below it, the marble flat stone slabs melted into pools of bubbling, orange glass. The wooden pillars of the outer pavilions burst into spontaneous flame. The hair on the necks of three thousand watching students began to scorch and curl.
Patriarch Zuo Zhen hovered ten feet in the air, his robes burned up down to a glowing black glass breastplate. His hands were thrust forward. He drove the tiny sun downward with the full, manic weight of his Mid Soul Formation domain.
“Burn!” Zuo Zhen screamed, blood boiling out from his nostrils and vaporizing into pink steam. “Burn to dust, you miserable ticks!”
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the defensive vectors.
Vector A: Evade laterally using high-speed glass steps. Lin Ke escapes the blast radius in twelve split seconds. Outcome: the tiny sun strikes the Great Hall. It burned to ash forty outer elders, eight hundred students, and the entire office record vault. Azure Cloud Sect ceases to exist.
Vector B: Direct barrier deployment using solid-state Soul Formation shielding. The five-hundred-foot star-fire mass carries fifty-two million kilojoules of heat energy. Lin Ke’s glassy glass spirit veins have zero heat swelling limit. When the heat hits his chest, the waveguides shatter into tiny shards. Lin Ke dies in 0.08 seconds.
