Chapter 49: A Thunder Immortal?!
"Impossible..."
The words escaped Xu Shan’s lips, his composure fracturing into a million pieces. The expert stumbled backward, his swords trembling violently in his grasp. He stared at the Nine Heavens Thunder Prison, watching as Lin Yuan simply walked out of it as if stepping through a mild spring mist.
Lin Yuan stood completely unharmed, his expression incredibly profound, his mind still adrift.
The unyielding mountain resists the storm and is slowly carved away, but the hollow valley embraces the wind and becomes its master.
To grasp the lightning with force is to hold only fire and ash; to become the lightning is to command the very heavens.
Lin Yuan had not fought the thunder. He had understood it. He had peered past the imitation and touched the true essence of the Heavenly Tribulation hidden within.
Slowly, effortlessly, Lin Yuan stretched out his left hand toward the thunder prison he had just exited.
What happened next completely shattered the Dao Hearts of the remaining Xu Clan experts.
The roaring purple lightning that made up the Nine Heavens Thunder Prison abruptly ceased its violent bombardment. Like a legion of ferocious beasts suddenly recognizing their true sovereign, the millions of lightning arcs halted, and then surged directly toward Lin Yuan. They did not strike him, rather, they flowed into his outstretched palm, swirling around his fingertips.
Patriarch Xu Canghai was in utter shock, his jaw dropping as he lost all connection to his thunder prison.
"The Thunder Prison!" Xu Canghai shrieked. "He is devouring the Thunder Prison!"
Lin Yuan’s pupils deepened, watching the pure, tribulation-laced energy swirl into his meridians. "Since even a fraction of the heavenly tribulation thunder essence is hidden within this," Lin Yuan murmured, "such thunder won’t go to waste."
As the essence of the Thunder Prison flooded his body, it literally transformed him.
Right before the eyes of the Xu Clan experts, Lin Yuan took on a completely new look. The tribulation lightning wove itself into the very fabric of his being, replacing his previous garments with something truly transcendent.
His tall and slender figure was now wearing an elegant black-and-white Daoist robe that seemed to swallow the surrounding light. The fabric was embroidered with golden patterns that mirrored the trajectories of various stars. His ethereal black hair, now grown long, flowed freely behind him, gathered elegantly at the crown in a simple yet dignified style, while a few loose strands perfectly framed his sharp, handsome features.
But the most terrifying change was his eyes.
The crimson glow had vanished. His pupils had turned a deep purple. His calm eyes carried a faint depth, holding the terrifying silence that precedes a world-ending storm. He no longer looked like an early-stage Core Formation cultivator. He possessed the absolute bearing of a young immortal who had long since grown accustomed to standing high above the trivial struggles of ordinary mortals.
"He’s emanating thunder aura!" Xu Zifeng screamed, his youthful face twisted in sheer panic, completely forgetting his carefree persona. "Thunder aura! How is this possible?! He isn’t human... he is a Thunder Immortal!"
"A Thunder Immortal..." Xu Shan echoed, his voice hollow, his spirit completely broken by the overwhelming, divine presence standing before them.
Lin Yuan slowly opened his purple gaze fully, locking onto Xu Shan.
Death Gaze!
The black lightning manifested within Lin Yuan’s purple pupils. It crossed the distance instantly.
Xu Shan did not even have the chance to raise his swords. The black lightning slammed into his mind, his soul instantly eradicated. The cultivator went entirely limp, plummeting from the sky like a stone, dead before he even began his descent.
Seeing that Xu Shan was executed with a mere look, the last shred of Xu Zifeng’s sanity snapped.
"No! No! I am not dying here!" Xu Zifeng shrieked. He poured every single ounce of his qi into his flying wine gourd, turning his back on his Xu Canghai and fleeing toward the horizon with desperate speed.
Xu Canghai, witnessing the dismantling of his clan’s powerhouses and the cowardly desertion of his own subordinate, was driven completely mad by the humiliation.
"Coward!" Xu Canghai roared, his expression turning into a mask of wrath.
He channeled his late-stage Core Formation qi, raising his hand and violently thrusting it forward. A massive handprint shot across the sky, infinitely faster than the fleeing Xu Zifeng.
BOOM!
The giant handprint slammed directly into Xu Zifeng’s back, crushing the expert and his wine gourd into a mist of blood.
"Remember I told you not to flee!" Xu Canghai screamed at the falling mist of blood, his chest heaving, his mind fractured by the sheer impossibility of the last five minutes. He had just executed his own clan’s expert in a fit of despair.
"You talk too much."
The voice did not come from in front of the Clan Head. It came from directly beside his right ear.
Xu Canghai’s blood froze, as he rapidly expanded his Thunder Sense,
Through his comprehension of the thunder’s origin, Lin Yuan had naturally picked up several innate thunder arts. One of them was the Thunder Step. But Lin Yuan did not harness the loud nature of a lightning strike, he had harnessed the stealth of thunder—the undetectable silence that exists in the microsecond before the lightning actually strikes.
He had bypassed the Xu Canghai Thunder Sense effortlessly, appearing at his side like an invisible phantom.
Xu Canghai whipped his head around, coming face-to-face with Lin Yuan’s deep, calm purple pupils.
Before the Thunder Lord could even attempt to raise a defensive barrier or weave a spell, Lin Yuan simply raised his right hand and delivered a casual, almost dismissive flick of his finger against Xu Canghai’s lower abdomen.
CRACK.
It was a soft sound, but to Xu Canghai, it was louder than the end of the world.
The force struck his dantian, and his late-stage Golden Core—the culmination of two centuries of ruthless cultivation—violently shattered into dust.
"Gah—!" Xu Canghai coughed up a massive mouthful of blood, his eyes rolling back in sheer agony.
Instantly, his terrifying late-stage Core Formation aura rapidly deflated like a pierced balloon. Within a single breath, he plummeted to the mid-stage. A breath later, the early-stage. The rapid hemorrhaging of his spiritual foundation did not stop until he violently crashed into the Foundation Establishment realm, and even then, his cultivation continued to rapidly drop.
His cultivation was completely destroyed.
Without giving Xu Canghai a chance to fall to the ground below, Lin Yuan waved his arm. A portion of the tribulation thunder he had absorbed from the prison swirled outward, rapidly wrapping Xu Canghai inside a dense sphere of lightning.
Suspended helplessly within the spherical cage, his cultivation destroyed and his legacy stolen, Xu Canghai thrashed weakly against the surface.
"I am the Thunder Lord!" Xu Canghai screamed. "I am the ruler of this City! You cannot do this to me!"
Lin Yuan did not even bother to look back at the him. His purple eyes were fixed entirely on the distant horizon, toward the outer-city where his wife resided.
With a single thought, Lin Yuan blurred into a streak of lightning. He shot across the sky toward the outer city at an incredible speed, and the lightning sphere holding Xu Canghai, was dragged effortlessly behind him.