Chapter 374: The Misunderstood Tribulation

Outside the grand entrance of the Asura Desolate Realm, the desolate valley remained steeped in tense, suffocating quiet.

Dozens of high-tier spirit vessels, ornate floating carriages, and beast-drawn war chariots hovered above the jagged valleys.

The various sects and imperial delegations had been encamped for well over three days, waiting for the spatial barrier of the realm to weaken so the surviving disciples could be expelled.

Elders from the various empires gathered in loose circles atop the highest crag, exchanging polite pleasantries laced with thinly veiled hostility.

City Lord Wu Shan stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his sharp eyes fixed on the shimmering, crimson spatial rift pulsating between two colossal stone spires.

Beside him stood Elder Wu Min of the Crimson Lotus Empire, lazily stroking his flowing white beard while swirling a cup of warmed spiritual wine.

“Only one week has passed out here,” Elder Wu Min remarked, his voice smooth but calculating as his eyes lingered on the shimmering boundary.

“Three full weeks remain before the outer gate opens. Yet with the realm’s inverted temporal flow, six months within for every single month outside, our juniors have already endured over a month of slaughter inside. I wonder how your son and that strange youngster from Thousand Waves City are faring, Wu Shan?”

Wu Shan gave a chuckle, though his gaze remained anchored to the churning spatial rift. “The Asura Desolate Realm has always been a meat grinder of natural selection. My boy and the few who entered with him from Thousand Waves City know the stakes. If they manage to walk out with their limbs intact, it is already a blessing from the ancestors.”

A few paces away, a woman in flowing, glacier-blue robes stood aloof, surrounded by a faint perimeter of drifting frost.

She was Elder Han from the Glacial Moon Empire.

Her face was as cold as carved jade, her slender fingers resting lightly on the pommel of her frost-etched rapier.

“Survival is secondary,” Elder Han said in a frigid, crystalline tone.

“The core inheritance at the heart of the tomb is what matters. Those without sufficient background or divine talent will only turn into stepping stones for true geniuses.”

“Keke… the Ice Maiden speaks true.”

A raspy, unpleasant voice echoed from the shadows of an emerald jade palanquin.

An old man with an intensely hunched back and withered, tree-bark skin slowly limped forward, leaning heavily on a bone staff carved from the femur of a demonic beast.

It was Elder Zong of the Great Venomous Empire, a notorious Nascent Soul monster from the Thousand Poison Sect.

Green, foul-smelling vapor drifted lazily from the wide cuffs of Elder Zong’s robes, withering the sparse mountain grass to blackened sludge beneath his slippers. His yellowed, rheumy eyes gleamed with smug cruelty.

“My young nephew, Du Sha, entered with our sect’s finest venom-masters,” Elder Zong wheezed, his thin lips peeling back to reveal rotting, blackened gums.

“In an enclosed ancient tomb riddled with restrictions, who can match the toxic arts of my Thousand Poison Sect? The final harvest has already been decided.”

City Lord Wu Shan merely frowned, while Elder Han’s icy expression hardened with cold disdain.

“Hmph,” Elder Han sneered, her frost aura flaring sharp as daggers.

“Your nephew is merely at the peak of Foundation Establishment. Do not forget that several juniors from our Glacial Empire and the neighboring imperial courts entered with Early Golden Core realm cultivation. Against true realm suppression, your petty parlor tricks of venom mean nothing.”

Elder Zong let out a grating, rasping cackle, not bothered in the slightest

“Heh, raw cultivation alone means little when blood curdles in the veins. Besides, my nephew carries a bonded Tier-3 mutant—”

RUMBLE——!

Suddenly, the heaven and earth beneath their feet violently shuddered.

The mountain peaks groaned, dislodging avalanches of boulders down the jagged ravines.

The spiritual Qi of the surrounding thousand li abruptly halted its natural flow, instantly freezing in place as if suppressed by the descending hand of an ancient god.

“What is this?!” Elder Wu’s wine cup shattered in his grip, hot liquor spilling over his fingers as he snapped his head toward the firmament.

The clear, pale-blue sky directly above the Asura Desolate Realm’s spatial rift was torn open.

Within the span of three breaths, suffocating, pitch-black clouds surged out from the void, boiling into a colossal, spiraling vortex that spanned hundreds of li across the horizon.

The clouds were so dense they completely swallowed the sun, plunging the valley into an eerie, blood-tinted twilight.

CRACKLE—— BOOM!

Thick arcs of violet and carmine tribulation lightning tore through the dark clouds like thrashing dragons, radiating a terrifying, primordial aura of cosmic destruction.

The raw heavenly pressure was so heavy that even the floating spirit vessels creaked under the weight, forced down hundreds of feet toward the rocky crags.

The gathered elders, all powerful cultivators who had seen centuries of storms, felt their blood run cold.

“Heavenly Tribulation?!” Elder Han of the Glacial Empire gasped, the icy aloofness on her face utterly shattering into disbelief.

Her frost aura was instantly suppressed back into her body.

“How can there be Tribulation Lightning forming over here?!”

“Im… impossible!” City Lord Wu Shan took a stumbling step forward, his divine sense trembling as it touched the periphery of the storm.

“The spatial laws of the Asura Desolate Realm restrict entry strictly to those beneath the early stage Golden Core realm! A mere junior cannot summon heavenly lightning, this violates the Heavenly Dao!”

The hunched old man from the Thousand Poison Sect gripped his bone staff so tightly his knuckles turned white. Elder Mo’s yellow eyes bulged with manic greed and shock.

“It isn’t a cultivator breaking through,” Elder Mo hissed, his raspy voice trembling with erratic excitement.

“Look at the color of that lightning! Violet-Abyssal and Carmine-Blood thunder! That is the Heavenly-Dao Retribution!”

“An ancient divine artifact…” Elder Wu of the Crimson Lotus Empire breathed, his eyes glowing with sudden, feverish intensity.

“The tomb… it must have held a sealed, ancient weapon! Or perhaps an ancient Heaven-grade pill that has developed a spirit after thousands of years! The seal has broken inside the realm, and the heavens are descending to obliterate it before it can manifest in our world!”

“A sentient Heaven-grade treasure awakening from slumber!” a rogue Core Formation cultivator shouted from a nearby peak, his voice thick with unbridled desire.

“Only an artifact that defies the natural order could draw such personal celestial wrath!”

Every elder on the mountain peaks stood frozen, their hearts pounding against their ribs.

The arrogance, sect rivalries, and petty disputes from moments ago were instantly forgotten, replaced by raw, suffocating awe as they stared at the wrathful eye of the storm forming over the spatial rift.

None of them could have ever fathomed that the terrifying, heaven-defying anomaly was not a dormant divine artifact, nor an ancient pill, but a single, naked junior, or rather a senior standing on a blood-red shore, smiling demonically into the face of heaven.

Inside the vast, fractured perimeter of the Asura Desolate Realm, the sudden heavenly descent struck like the end of the world.

The realm was an ancient, shattered minor plane composed of jagged obsidian plains, toxic bone-swamps, and crumbling stone ruins.

For the past five weeks, hundreds of surviving Foundation Establishment cultivators from various empires had been desperately scouring the outskirts for scraps of ancient herbs and low-tier spirit minerals, constantly on edge, waiting for the exit rift to open.

Then, the entire sky turned pitch-black.

CRACKLE—— BOOM!

The earth groaned as the sky cracked open like brittle glaze.

A terrifying, cosmic gravity crashed downward from the bruised crimson clouds, instantly flattening the sparse, petrified forests to splintered firewood.

Every flying spiritual beast across the realm plummeted out of the sky like dead stones, their wings paralyzed by the pure celestial terror radiating from the firmament.

The toxic swamps began to boil violently, and ancient spirit stones embedded in the ruins fractured under the sheer atmospheric density.

In the southern bone-valleys, a cluster of surviving core disciples from the Glacial Empire dropped to their knees, their swords vibrating violently in their scabbards as if weeping.

“Senior Sister… what is that?!” a young disciple choked out, coughing up pale blood as the overwhelming spiritual pressure squeezed his lungs

“Is the minor realm collapsing?! Are the spatial barriers tearing apart?!”

The leading female disciple, her pale face slick with cold sweat, looked up into the eye of the swirling vortex spanning across the distant, uncharted horizons.

“That isn’t a realm collapse,” she whispered, her voice trembling in raw, unadulterated awe.

“That is the Heavenly Dao’s Retribution!”

Far to the west, amidst the smoldering volcanic crags, a lone, battered figure lay slumped against a black boulder.

It was Du Sha.

His once-pristine green embroidered robes were charred and stained with dry blood, his right knee bandaged in crude splints where Shen Yu had pulverized the bone.

The spatial talisman had successfully teleported him across thousands of li to the outer reaches of the realm, saving his life, but the spiritual backlash from his butchered childhood serpent and the loss of his ancestral poison had left his dantian severely damaged.

Feeling the earth-shattering vibration, Du Sha dragged himself upright on trembling arms, looking toward the far center of the realm.

When he saw the terrifying, violet-carmine vortex of tribulation thunder gathering in the direction of the altar he had fled from, his pale face drained of every remaining drop of color.

“The… the Tier-5 Beast Egg…” Du Sha muttered, his cracked lips trembling in a mixture of hysterical disbelief and burning jealousy.

“It hatched?!”