Shen Luo hurriedly leaped into the air and rescued Chan'er. The Chan masters who had escaped their confinement also helped one another flee.
Only after everyone had fled more than a thousand zhang did they dare stop and look back.
Amid the lightning filling the sky, Lin Da's body rapidly swelled. Black mist surged around him, and hideous ghost faces broke free of his body, trailing black ghostly fog as they circled him like wandering spirits.
"No..." Lin Da howled incessantly.
The golden lightning around him did not relent in the slightest. It blasted every one of those netherworld ghost faces to pieces, turning them into black smoke that dissipated completely.
High in the heavens, a golden pillar of lightning like a colossal column holding up the sky plunged from the center of the Thunder Pool, striking Lin Da squarely on the crown of his head.
Dazzling golden light washed over him like a torrential downpour. His body was instantly torn apart within it, reduced to dust and vanished. Only a Dragon-Eye Pill, black as crystal, survived the lightning strike intact and flew out.
The golden lightning pillar slammed into the earth. The violent impact sent waves of sand a hundred zhang high surging across the vast desert. That undiminished force seemed to pour straight into the earth's veins, triggering a chain of thunderous explosions.
Boom, boom, boom... rumble...
Beneath the desert, explosions of mounting force extended into its depths like beads on a string, continually blasting waves of sand into the air. A rift roughly a hundred zhang long emerged in the ground.
After an unknown length of time, all the explosions subsided. With the Thunder Tribulation over, the dark clouds in the sky vanished as well.
The three surviving members of the Sacred Lotus Altar had been struck