novelraw Chapter 170: Sky Realm Powerhouse
Chapter 170: Sky Realm Powerhouse
The First Yellow Tribulation ended with Ye Jun’s success, but the thunderstorm clouds above his head didn’t disappear. In fact, they grew larger and filled with more lightning than ever.
The whole White Gale Pavilion was bombarded by the residual lightning, and they were enough to kill even cultivators. But before they could land, a transparent dome above the mountain range blocked every single one of them and dispersed them back into the atmosphere.
Disciples stopped whatever they were doing and stared at the heavens in awe, surprised to see such a spectacle right before them.
However, the outside didn’t share this calm and peace of the Pavilion. The White Gale City had already shut its gates and employed its top security measures.
All because of the waves of Spiritual Beasts advancing towards the White Gale Pavilion, creating earthquakes from their combined forces of movement.
Air shifted around, creating typhoons and bringing disaster to small settlements at the edges of the region under White Gale City. Yet all of this was just an aftermath of what the Pavilion was actually facing.
Or rather, what Song Ying was facing.
She hovered a kilometre above in the air, looking down at the vast horde of Spiritual Beasts coming closer and closer to the White Gale Pavilion, all hungry for the piece of Tribulation Lightning that Ye Jun had attracted.
Fortunately, she didn’t sense any Tier 6 Spiritual Beasts, otherwise things would have been different. She was confident in defeating Tier 6 Spiritual Beasts, but in a Beast Wave, it was different.
"Tsk! Mistress should have sent someone with proper combat abilities," Song Ying clicked her tongue in annoyance.
Although she was a Peak-Stage Sky Realm powerhouse, she wasn’t a fighter. She was an assassin trained to kill even the deadliest beings hidden in the best security, or simply to protect her Young Miss from such assassinations.
In a direct fight against a fellow Sky Realm powerhouse, she would most likely lose. And now, she actually had to defend against an entire army of Spiritual Beasts.
She sighed. "Whatever! This is worth the trouble if he can survive it."
The beasts were almost reaching the base of the mountain range, a small distance away from the numerous Array Formations. That was when she wanted to act, as she wanted to preserve the Array Formations for now.
’Things can get hectic later, so it’s better to save some strength.’
As for preserving her own strength, that wasn’t a problem considering the current Beast Wave posed no threat to her. It couldn’t even get her to take them seriously.
"A bunch of worms trying to wear a Golden Crown."
Beneath her, the slopes of the White Gale Pavilion stretched out in their ordered tiers of training fields, disciple residences, formation arrays, and the deeper sanctums hidden in the folds of the mountain.
The whole range was lit faintly from above by the residue of the Sixth Tribulation that had finished only minutes ago, the air still humming with leftover Yellow Lightning.
That lightning had drawn them in.
The Beast Wave came up the eastern side in a tide that covered the lower forests entirely. Tier Two, Tier Three, packs of Tier Four beasts moving with the coordinated hunger of creatures that had smelled Heavenly Insights and decided to feed.
Wolves the size of horses, serpents whose scales burned with their own poison, great cats whose stripes shifted with the wind. Thousands of them, advancing in a wave that would have wiped out a lesser sects in less than an hour.
Song Ying watched them come and felt nothing close to alarm. ’They are a nuisance.’
She raised one hand casually, the wrist barely turning, but the atmospheric Qi around the mountain answered her the way a trained dog answered its master.
A pressure that had nothing to do with wind settled across the eastern side, and every beast within that pressure felt its bones grow heavier. Tier Threes flattened to the ground. Tier Twos died outright, hearts crushed by the weight of a Sky Realm cultivator’s intent.
The Tier Fours snarled and pushed against it. Their resistance amused her, the way a child’s resistance amused an adult.
Even though her affinity wasn’t related to direct combat, it meant nothing before the absolute power granted to her by the Sky Realm.
She drew a sword from the air itself. There was no scabbard, simply a length of pale blue light that condensed into her hand because she had decided it should.
The sword was not a weapon she carried, it was a shape her Qi liked to take, and that was enough at her cultivation. Or at least enough to wipe out weaklings.
Then, she finally moved.
A Sky Realm cultivator did not fly the way mortals imagined flight. She did not flap her wings like birds, did not soar, did not arc through the air.
She simply was at one point of the sky, and then she was at another, the space between dissolving under her step the way frost dissolved under sunlight.
She crossed more than a kilometre in a single step and her sword was already moving when she arrived.
The first Tier Four beast, a massive striped feline whose claws could carve through Soul Tempering cultivators, did not see the strike.
There was no strike to see.
Song Ying’s blade passed through the air where the beast’s neck was, and the air remembered being cut even after the blade had moved on.
The beast’s head fell from its body a heartbeat after the fact, as if reality had needed a moment to catch up with what Song Ying had already decided.
But it didn’t matter to her, as she just kept moving.
A serpent the length of a small river rose up to strike at her. She turned her shoulder a finger’s width to the side, and the serpent’s entire spine came apart along a line she had drawn through the air with her gaze.
A pack of wolves leapt at her flank, and she swept her free hand across them, and the atmospheric Qi swept with her, and the wolves became a fine red mist that drifted down the slope on the wind.
"Foolish as always," Song Ying sighed. "Keep chasing after the Heavenly Dao even if it burns you, takes everything away from you..."
Mortals had a saying about cultivators at her level. Mortals were ants. They were correct, but the metaphor was insufficient.
The wolves were not ants to her. The wolves were a thought she chose to have, and the moment she stopped thinking about them, they ceased.
Song Ying moved through the wave like a sword moved through still water. The eastern side was cleared in minutes.
The lower forests, where the heaviest concentration of beasts had massed, became a graveyard so quickly that the survivors at the back of the wave hadn’t yet realized the front had collapsed.
She passed through them, and the passing was the killing, and the killing was barely worth her attention.
Her mind was elsewhere.
It was on the cave deep within the Ancestral Site, where the Soul Anchoring Formation glowed at its peak, holding the young man inside it stable through one of the most punishing Soul Tempering ascensions she had witnessed in three centuries.
Six Tribulations already. The boy had taken the First Yellow and not died. She had felt it from her position in the sky, the way an old soldier felt a familiar thunder.
He was the Young Miss’s lover.
That fact alone would have earned him her protection. The Song Clan did not waste resources on weak men, and if the Young Miss had chosen him, then he was worth choosing.
But Song Ying had also seen his cultivation up close once, briefly, and had registered the shape of his Fate.
Whatever the boy was, the heavens themselves had opinions about him. His Tribulations were proof of that. A Soul Tempering cultivator was not supposed to draw Yellow Lightning. He had drawn two.
There would be a third, she had a feeling about that.
She felt the sky begin to gather even as she finished cutting through the last cluster of Tier Three wolves.
The clouds above the Ancestral Site darkened again, faster this time, the residue of the Sixth Tribulation feeding directly into the formation of the Seventh.
Yellow Qi began to spiral overhead, denser than before, the storm building with a weight that pressed down on the entire mountain range.
The Beast Wave that had been broken on the eastern slopes was already being replenished from the deeper forests of the Black Wind Wildlands, and this time the new arrivals were not Tier Four.
She felt the Tier Fives before she saw them through her Soul Sense.
Five of them, advancing from the southern side in a slow, deliberate style. Tier Five Spiritual Beasts were the equivalent of Earth Realm cultivators, and they came not in mindless hunger but in calculation.
A great wolf with two heads, its fur darker than night. A bear-shaped thing with bone plates growing through its skin. A serpent whose eyes were closed but whose tongue tasted the air for Qi. Two more behind them, slower, watching.
They had felt the second Yellow Tribulation, so they had decided it was worth the climb.
Song Ying turned her shoulders toward them, and her pale blue sword shifted in her hand. Tier Five would actually require her attention. Certainly not effort, but definitely her attention. She would have to look at them while she killed them.
’Hold on, boy. One more storm and I can rest... hopefully.’
That was when she felt the second sky tear open.
It was not above the Ancestral Site, though. It was above the peak where the Young Miss kept her abode.
Song Ying’s head snapped toward it before her thoughts caught up, and the sword in her hand drifted half an inch lower as her grip slackened in shock.
The sky over the Young Miss’s residence had begun to gather a Tribulation Storm of its own. However, it was not Yellow. It was blue, a cold pale blue that matched the color of glacial ice under a winter moon, and it was building faster and heavier than anything Song Ying had felt in a very long time.
The pressure rolling off it was not the pressure of a Soul Tempering Tribulation. It was the pressure of an Origin Core breakthrough, and the color of it spoke of the Young Miss’s Dao, the bloodline ice that the Song Clan had carried for generations and that Song Liangxue had been refining since she was a child.
The Young Miss was ascending.
Song Ying had known it was coming. The Young Miss had been at the peak of Soul Tempering for two months now, and her Qi Core had been gathering the last of its substance.
But she had not expected it to break tonight, not in the middle of the boy’s ascension, and not with a Tribulation that heavy.
A Blue Tribulation at Origin Core breakthrough was rare. The Young Miss was attracting one without effort.
"Young Miss," Song Ying murmured, the word slipping out before she could catch it.
Two ascensions on the same mountain range, on the same day, both drawing Tribulations that should not have been possible at their stages. The heavens were paying attention to the White Gale Pavilion tonight in a way that they had not in centuries.
And Song Ying could only be in one place at a time.
The Tier Fives kept climbing the southern side. The Yellow Tribulation gathered over the Ancestral Site. The Blue Tribulation gathered over the Young Miss’s abode.
Song Ying stood in the sky between all three, her pale blue sword in her hand, and for the first time since she had reached the Sky Realm, she felt the edge of something close to urgency.