Above the Starry Sky.
The thick, pale-white Tribulation Clouds grew denser, their color deepening—from white to grayish white, from grayish white to dark gray, and from dark gray to an inky hue that seemed to have settled in darkness for far too many years without ever seeing light.
It was not the ink-black of storm clouds, nor the ink-black of the void, but a color that had been compressed to the absolute extreme, stripped of all color until nothing remained but weight itself.
Chu Tian had used the Heavenly Tribulation to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Azure Heaven Clans.
Yet the Heavenly Tribulation would not end simply because the Azure Heaven Clans had been wiped out.
That expanse of Tribulation Clouds pressed over the starfield, over the heads of every onlooker, over the Sea of Corpses stretching for tens of thousands of zhang.
Chu Tian was still charging upward.
His body continuously exploded and reformed beneath the pursuit of the Five Great Treasures. Golden blood mist stood out with particular glare against the inky Tribulation Clouds.
His Great Thousand World shrank from twenty percent to fifteen percent, from fifteen percent to ten percent. Every reconstruction burned away what little origin power he had left.
But his speed did not slow, nor did his course deviate. Reflected in the inky Tribulation Clouds, his eyes shone like two dark-gold stars.
He could sense that something was awakening in the depths of the Tribulation Sea—not the Five Great Treasures, not the Eighteen Phantoms, but something more fundamental, more primordial.
The Heavenly Tribulation was brewing its final strike.
The center of the inky Tribulation Clouds began to cave inward.
It was not contraction, nor convergence, but a colossal vortex slowly opening at the heart of the Tribulation Clouds.
Around the vortex's edge was a