In the seventeen seconds before the lightning struck, Hajime Kashimo's chant rang through the rain over the Abandoned Industrial Park as he concentrated his Cursed Energy.
"Separate the charges."
"Heaven draws."
"Earth receives."
"Open the lightning's path."
Qingxiao knew he could no longer retreat beyond the electric field's reach.
An unrestricted natural thunderstorm lit up the rusted factory grounds with towering pillars of searing white light, like divine punishment. Several steel girders weighing tons melted into red-hot molten iron.
Inside the scorched crater, Qingxiao stood quietly at the center of the impact, his body braced with all his strength to withstand it. His outer clothing and the surface layer of his skin had been burned away by the strike.
Across the curtain of rain, Hajime Kashimo, whose Cursed Energy was likewise nearly exhausted, stood propped on his half-ruined iron staff.
Qingxiao immediately forced his faintly trembling shoulders and back steady, standing tall in the center of the crater to face him from afar.
But with both Qingxiao's extreme physical regeneration and the Cursed Energy on his skin dissipating the force, the strike's penetrating damage had been greatly reduced.
Under the healing of Reverse Cursed Technique, the charred wounds visibly returned to normal.
To Qingxiao, this bolt of heavenly lightning, on which his opponent had staked everything, was merely the most satisfying test of their sparring match.
In the end, it had not even fully broken through his physical defenses.
"Looks like the power was pretty decent."
Who could have imagined that Hajime Kashimo's all-out killing blow, exhausting his Cursed Energy and harnessing heaven and earth, would serve only to truly pique Qingxiao's interest?
In the brief seventeen seconds before the lightning fell, Qingxiao had identified the attack's nature and completed an almost instinctive defensive response.
Hidden in a distant office