Loa stepped into the core zone again.
This time, those terrifying pillars of lightning did not appear. The pitch-black, scorched rock beneath his feet lay as still as death. Only a few tiny arcs occasionally leaped from the cracks, circled his feet, then shrank back inside.
He walked slowly, planting every step firmly.
His eyes stayed fixed ahead.
The farther he went, the stranger the air felt.
It was neither cold nor hot, but a peculiar sense of pressure—like the sky hanging low before a storm, so stifling he could barely breathe. His skin tingled, every hair standing on end. That reaction only occurred when the concentration of Thunder Element reached its limit.
Loa slowed his steps and made his breathing as faint as possible.
Then he saw it.
Fifty meters ahead stood a pool roughly six meters across.
There was no water in it.
There was lightning.
Thick, blue-white, liquid lightning churned slowly inside the pool. Unlike the gently spreading Thunder Tide in Thunderstorm Lake, this lightning rolled in clumps like boiling magma, bursting apart and merging again. Each exploding Lightning Arc splashed droplets of lightning a foot high. When those droplets fell back into the pool, they stirred up fresh Lightning Arcs.
A Thunder Pool.
A Thunder Pool filled with lightning turned to liquid!
Loa held his breath.
A tree stood in the center.
The tree had long since died. Its trunk was charred black, cracked like a dried riverbed, with carbonized wood exposed wherever the bark had peeled away. Yet a tender shoot extended at an angle from the top of that blackened trunk-vivid green and delicate, the complete opposite of the withered tree beneath it.
A fruit hung from the shoot.
It was fist-sized and silver-blue all over, its skin as smooth as glass. Light faintly