The instant lightning tore through the clouds, Chen Wuya suddenly clenched his left hand, and the blue cloth strap sank deep into his flesh. His right arm had long since gone numb, but he could feel the scorching heat crawling from his fingertips toward his shoulder, as if countless red-hot needles were threading through his meridians.
Mo Feng stood at the edge of the side beam, his folding fan hanging half-lowered, his eyes fixed intently on the direction of the temple gate. He made no further move, nor did he retreat. He merely lowered his body, as though he, too, had become part of this ruined temple.
The lightning serpent slammed into the remnants of the water formation's light screen and was deflected three inches to the side, lunging straight for Chen Wuya's open palm. This time, he did not dodge. Instead, he spread all five fingers and thrust his palm an inch forward into the thunderfire.
"Boom—"
His entire arm felt as though someone had smashed it from the inside out with an iron hammer, and his bones gave off faint cracking sounds. Tiny wounds burst across his skin, and the beads of blood that seeped out were instantly steamed into mist by the intense heat. But he clenched his back teeth and forcibly pressed that violent power downward, driving it toward his dantian.
The Misaligned Force surged backward through his body. It was no longer a wild horse fleeing passively, but had actively changed direction and charged into the lightning flow. Two utterly different forces collided violently where the Conception and Governing Vessels converged, jolting his five viscera out of place. His throat turned sweet, and a mouthful of blood rushed to his lips, only to be forcibly swallowed back down.
"It's not over yet." He spoke in a low voice, so hoarse that it was almost impossible to hear.
Crouching on the beam, Mo Feng watched Chen Wuya's trembling fingers remain firmly pressed against the center of the formation eye and could not help tightening his grip on the fan ribs. He had thought he was merely here to lend a hand, at most serving as a witness. But at this moment, he suddenly understood—this was not surviving a tribulation. This was rewriting the rules.
The thunder was still brewing in the heavens. The vortex of clouds spun faster and faster, and the aura of the second bolt had already pressed down.
Chen Wuya closed his eyes, and the soaked-through Calculation Classic from the corner of the academy wall surfaced in his mind. Everyone else calculated forward, but he alone had worked backward. His teacher had cursed him for being stupid, yet in the end, only he had been right.
"Since the proper path won't work..." He opened his eyes, and a trace of ghostly blue flickered deep within his pupils. "Then I'll write it backward."
He suddenly raised his hand and slapped his own left shoulder. The Misaligned Force traveled upward from his dantian in reverse, exploding into a distorted vortex at the Jianjing Acupoint. It was neither defense nor guidance. It was more like digging a new river channel through his meridians, one meant solely to receive the thunder about to arrive.
Mo Feng's pupils contracted. "Are you insane? That's a death acupoint!"
Before his voice had faded, the second bolt of lightning descended.
It was thicker and brighter than the first, carrying the might to tear heaven and earth apart as it cleaved straight into the temple. The water formation completely collapsed, silver dust scattering in all directions. The copper tubes before the shrine emitted a piercing hum and instantly glowed red.
Mo Feng did not intercept this strike.
He knew that if he acted now, he would instead ruin Chen Wuya's rhythm.
The instant the lightning entered his body, Chen Wuya's entire body suddenly arched, his back lifting off the ground, with only the crown of his head and his heels supporting him. His face twisted for a moment, yet the corners of his lips curved upward.
When the pain reached its utmost limit, he could actually smile.
The Misaligned Force poured backward along the lightning current, scouring through the Reverse Meridian he had forcibly opened. Those meridians that had originally been severed and blocked actually began reconnecting on their own under the dual impact of thunderfire and the Misaligned Force. Charred-black lines spread from his right arm to his chest, then wound from his chest up around his neck, finally converging at the Jade Pillow Acupoint behind his head.
He felt as though his sea of consciousness were being dissected by a blunt knife, with something reassembling itself inside.
Just then, the fragment hidden against his chest suddenly grew hot.
It was not merely hot on the surface. An ancient aura seeped out from within, like something that had slept for countless years finally awakening. The silk book floated up on its own and hovered half a foot before his chest. Strange characters he had never seen before emerged across the yellowed paper—strokes crooked, lines following an eerie course, astonishingly identical to the operating path of the Misaligned Force.
"So that's how it is..." he panted. "The Canglang Art was never meant to be practiced by following it."
The true incantation had always been wrong. Only by using wrongness to shatter wrongness could one touch its true meaning.
He abruptly bit through the tip of his tongue and spat a cloud of bloody mist into the air. The Misaligned Force floated alongside the droplets, forming a barely visible line—one end connected to his brow, the other pointing underground.
The earth trembled. A palm-sized stone slab slowly rose, engraved with half of a ruined formation diagram. Its pattern fit perfectly with the lines on the fragment.
"Rise!" he shouted in a low voice.
The stone slab shot into the air and crashed into the fragment. The instant the two touched, dazzling azure light erupted. The entire ruined temple shook violently. Roof tiles clattered down in great sheets, revealing a mass of roiling black clouds.
The azure light surged into Chen Wuya's body and raced wildly along the path of the Misaligned Force. The system's voice rang out in the depths of his consciousness:
[Complete cultivation-art template detected, beginning reconstruction of the "Canglang Art" operating logic... Error Rationalization verification passed, completion progress: one hundred percent.]
In an instant, all the fragments came together.
He finally saw the full shape of this cultivation art—it was not some fixed method of cultivation, but a kind of "error-correction mechanism." So long as its user could activate true qi through an unconventional path, no matter how absurd the movement or inverted the route, the system would automatically complete the missing links, turning crooked tricks into killing moves.
And now, the thunder tribulation had become the final piece of the puzzle.
The Misaligned Force fused with the power of thunder, transforming into a lightning serpent lying dormant in his dantian, ready to be summoned at any moment. A new skill condensed in his sea of consciousness into three characters: Canglang Misaligned Thunder.
He slowly exhaled, and the agitated force within his body finally settled into stillness. But at that moment, footsteps came from outside the temple, approaching from afar, their sticky sounds squelching through the wet mud.
There was more than one person.
Mo Feng immediately raised his head, his gaze turning faintly sharp.
Chen Wuya did not open his eyes. Instead, he quietly relaxed his left hand and let his body go limp. A trace of blood spilled from the corner of his lips, and his breathing grew weak and intermittent. He looked as though the lightning had struck him until he had only one breath left.
Mo Feng understood at once. Lowering his body, he silently withdrew into the shadows atop the beam, making even his breathing as light as possible.
The temple gate creaked open.
Three figures stood in the doorway, rainwater dripping from their sword scabbards. The leader was a young disciple with a pale face and a bandage wrapped around his right hand—the very one who had been accidentally injured in the narrow alley earlier. He stared at the figure on the ground and frowned. "Is that him? Did he really get struck dead by lightning?"
Another crouched down, checked his breath, and said in a low voice, "He's still breathing, but he probably won't last much longer."
The third sneered. "Alive is even better. The sect master wants the fragment of the 'Heavenly Machine Scroll'; he never said the person had to be dead. Search him and take him away."
As he spoke, that man reached toward Chen Wuya's chest.
Just as his fingertips were about to touch the fragment, Chen Wuya's right index finger moved almost imperceptibly.
Mo Feng narrowed his eyes atop the beam and tightened his grip on the fan handle.
The rain outside grew heavier, pounding against the surviving eaves of the ruined temple with a sharp, crackling sound.
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