After returning from the War God Sect, Loa arranged a sparring match with Fain. They set it for three months later, on the vast North Sea. As the two people on the Yulan Continent whose understanding of the Lightning Law came closest to the Deity level, both looked forward to the exchange.
Loa returned to New Wushan Town, and his days grew peaceful again.
He rose before dawn every day to cultivate in the clearing behind the Blacksmith Shop. Wangcai lay nearby watching, occasionally getting shocked by an arc spilling from Loa's body. With a yelp, he would jump up and run aside, then edge back after a while. Wuzhui stood farther away, dark golden eyes half-closed, tail swishing gently.
The days passed.
Loa's cultivation entered its most critical stage. His seventh cervical vertebra seemed to have entered somewhere warm, with the temperature of a sun-warmed stone. The final breakthrough had actually become less painful.
A month later.
On a deserted mountaintop northeast of New Wushan Town.
Loa sat cross-legged. Dawn had yet to break. A gray-white line marked the eastern horizon, and the stars had not entirely faded. Wind surged up from the valley, snapping his robes. Wangcai and Wuzhui had not accompanied him. He had come alone.
He focused his entire mind inside his body.
Within his dantian, the Saint Realm Heart rotated slowly. Azure and violet intertwined, while gray-white annihilation power sank into the deepest part like a sleeping beast. But it was not today's protagonist.
His spine was.
Loa's inner sight traveled upward from his sacrum and coccyx. The five segments of his sacrococcygeal domain had long since reached perfection. Now they hummed deeply, like the tremors of ancient earth veins. The five segments of his lumbar domain surged with power like a tsunami, each vertebra