Days passed. At the summit of the Heavenly Dao Sect, thunder almost never ceased. Every day, purple lightning struck down from the sky, precisely blasting toward Spirit Spring Cave and making the entire mountain tremble faintly. At first, the disciples of the Heavenly Dao Sect panicked, but they gradually grew accustomed to it. They could even use the thunder as a timekeeper—the thunder at noon was always the loudest, for that was when Shen Xiu assaulted the day's bottleneck.
Shen Xiu had already lost count of how many lightning tribulations he had endured. After the seventh level of the Saint Emperor Realm, the power of lightning tribulation required for each breakthrough was several times greater than before, while the tribulations themselves surged in might accordingly. The lightning tribulation from the seventh level to the eighth contained gold amid its purple, and within that gold was a thread of black—that was the color from the deepest reaches of the laws of the Heavenly Dao, the color of chaos before the universe was born.
That black lightning tribulation had nearly taken his life.
He remembered it clearly. That day was the twenty-fifth day before the end of the half-year deadline. He sat cross-legged within Spirit Spring Cave. The thunder source within his body had already expanded to an astonishing extent, like a miniature star slowly rotating within his dantian and radiating purple-gold light. His cultivation had stabilized at the peak of the seventh level of the Saint Emperor Realm, and he could break through to the eighth level at any moment.
The sky split open.
It was not storm clouds gathering, nor flashing lightning and rolling thunder. The sky itself had torn open with a fissure. Like a black scar, it stretched across the skies above the Heavenly Dao Sect, extending from