novelraw Chapter 167: New Trial
Chapter 167: New Trial
Fifth Heavenly Tribulation Lightning.
It tore through Ye Jun’s body, making a blood pool beneath him. His newly forming Soul endured the worst of it, as his Will around it almost came undone.
The worst was that dying so many times, even if it was in a trial, affected his mentality. He wasn’t fine, as hints of madness still danced in his mind, but he was subduing it. But it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
’Can I even survive to enjoy the fruits of all this bullshit?’
Somehow, he was finding it hard to believe considering more Trials awaited him. He was already exhausted, both physically and mentally. Yet, he didn’t want to give up, for giving up meant death.
’And I am not dying here...not like this.’
He gritted his teeth and quickly stabilized his Soul, knowing the next trial was going to start anytime soon....and soon it did.
The White Void around him began to shimmer out of existence as another world descended upon him, becoming his new Reality.
The wind hit him first.
Ye Jun’s body slammed forward against something hard and warm, his vision filling with sky and cloud and the howling, screaming pressure of air moving faster than he thought.
The roar in his ears was so absolute that for the first heartbeat he couldn’t tell which direction was down. Then his stomach caught up with him, and he understood.
He was on something. And that something was falling.
’The hell is this start! Curse you, Heavenly Dao!!’
Iron chains bit into his wrists, ankles, and waist, looping tight against a surface of dark scaled hide that stretched away from him in every direction like the slope of a small mountain.
His Qi tried to circulate and met a wall. His meridians felt sluggish, every technique muffled at the source. His physical strength had been drained down to something close to mortal.
’What...the fuck.’
He blinked against the wind and forced his head to lift.
The view broke his mind for half a second.
He was on the back of a creature so vast that the clouds were beneath them. The thing’s body curved away from him in both directions, scaled, ridged, longer than he could see. Vast wings beat once, slow and labored, sending a pressure wave across the upper sky.
The world below was a distant patchwork of land and ocean, the curve of the horizon visible.
Three enormous spears, each the length of a towering hill, were embedded along the creature’s flanks. Light bled from where they were lodged, golden and faintly heavenly, and the creature’s blood ran down its scales in rivers that the wind tore apart into red mist.
It was dying.
And as it died, the sky was dying with it.
Storms were spiraling outward in every direction from its body, clouds boiling into impossible shapes, lightning racing horizontally between cloud banks.
The wind around the creature was visible, twisted into shimmering arcs that sliced clean through the air. Ye Jun saw a cloud the size of a province get cut in half by a single gust as it passed by.
’The winds...are coming from it?’
He could feel it. The creature’s panic was the storm. The two were the same thing.
’And those chains.’
He quickly tested them. Qi suppressed, strength suppressed, and techniques sealed. He couldn’t even reach for Crushing Mountain Fist or Burning Sun’s Blast; they sat in his mind like locked doors. His Yang Seed circulation was reduced to a trickle.
’No brute force. Got it.’ Ye Jun thought, trying to assess the situation. ’If it’s a trial, there will be solutions.’
He laughed, low and a little ragged. The madness from the Hunt Trial was still inside him somewhere, sitting just beneath his memories, and it tugged at his lips into a grin without his permission. ’Cute. Real cute.’
Then the creature lurched, and Ye Jun’s stomach climbed into his throat.
It was losing altitude as the creature began to descend. Each wingbeat caught less air than the last. Below them the cloud layer was getting closer, and below the clouds, the world.
If this thing hit the ground at this size, the impact would kill him along with whatever continent it landed on.
’I need off these chains.’
He twisted in his bindings and looked at where they joined the creature’s hide. Unfortunately, the iron was embedded into the scales themselves.
He couldn’t break them, but the scale they were anchored to was loose, the spear wound nearest to him having shaken the hide free.
He worked his shoulder, then his hip. Centimeter by centimeter, he wormed against the wind, the chains scraping his skin raw but the loose scale shifting with him.
The pressure tearing at his back was the kind of wind that, if it caught him fully, would peel him off this beast and send him into the sky to die.
He felt it then...the pattern.
The Gale Pressure Chamber memory surfaced without him calling for it. Hours of standing in that chamber with crosswinds clawing at his stance, learning which way to lean before each gust arrived, learning to feel the pressure drop that came a breath before the worst of it.
This wind was a thousand times worse. But it was the same shape and followed the same logic.
’Wait for the lull. Move on the lull.’
He waited, body pressed flat to the hide. The shimmering arcs of cut air shifted overhead. The pressure dipped for half a breath and, in that short moment, he moved.
The chain scraped free of the loose scale. The winds also returned, slamming him back against the hide, but he was already three handspans further along the beast’s flank.
He repeated it, again and again.
’I will reach you!’
Ten breaths later, the chain came loose, then his ankle, and finally his waist.
Ye Jun lay flat against the dark scales, free, with the wind trying to kill him from every direction at once and his cultivation still suppressed.
’Okay. Now what?’