Chapter 376: Angry, are we?

The single word dropped like an executioner’s iron coin, and Shen Yu moved.

He did not drop into a defensive crouch.

He did not erect a Qi screen.

Instead, he planted his bare feet into the coarse red dunes, his spine straight as an unsheathed saber, and began weaving his fingers through a blur of ancient, sharp mudras.

From his lips spilled a low, resonant cadence, the primordial cipher of the Celestial Devouring Seal.

It was the forbidden extension embedded within the deepest chambers of the “Primordial Yin-Yang Scripture”, a technique he got from the system when he defied the heavens during the Tenth Stage of Qi Condensation.

Its principle was madness itself, to forfeit all resistance, turn the mortal vessel into both lightning rod and crucible, and forcibly swallow the destructive fury of the heavens to refine it into pure, unblemished Yang essence.

Circulating the technique was walking the razor’s edge of absolute oblivion.

A single misplaced breath, a hair’s-breadth deviation in the meridian flow, and the violent voltage would detonate his flesh into red mist.

Yet Shen Yu had walked this path before.

His muscle memory, carved by past tribulations and guided by an ancient sovereign’s will, forced his turbulent Qi to align with absolute, lethal precision.

The colossal column of Violet-Abyssal Tribulation Lightning arrived.

BOOM——!

The strike descended like a mountain collapsing atop an ant.

The red sand beneath his feet was instantly vaporized into a glass trench thirty paces wide.

The kinetic force slammed straight into Shen Yu’s skull.

His tempered frame grooved inward, his knees sinking several inches into the crystalline slag.

CRACK!

A dull, agonizing snap echoed through his torso.

Even with 25% of his skeletal lattice forged into Asura-grade density, the raw cosmic fury fractured his left collarbone and splintered two newly healed ribs.

Blood sprayed from his mouth, his nostrils, and the rims of his eyes, sizzling into vapor the instant it met the violent electrical wash.

Yet he did not fall.

Right as the celestial fire threatened to dissolve his core, the final circuit of the Celestial Devouring Seal locked into place.

The ravenous vortex in his dantian roared, forcibly drawing the rampaging violet lightning out of his shattered flesh and funneling it into the internal crucible.

The destructive celestial power was stripped of its obliterating intent, violently purified, and converted into thick, searing streams of primordial Yang essence.

The concentrated Yang torrent slammed straight into the dormant depths of his Heaven-Seducing Celestial Bloodline.

HUMMMM——!

As if struck by divine flint, his bloodline flared into total overdrive.

Every pore across Shen Yu’s body split open to secrete a thick, shimmering vapor of intoxicating rose-gold.

It was not mere scent, it was an anomalous, reality-warping musk that saturated the air, seizing the local laws of attraction and twisting the surrounding atmospheric currents toward him in a frenzied, magnetic vortex.

Then, amidst the howling lightning and the lingering shockwaves, Shen Yu took a heavy, bone-rattling step forward.

He began shifting his limbs into the rigid, bone-carving stances of the First Lesson of the “Asura Blood-Forging Sutra”.

To practice physical body-refinement stances directly under the falling wrath of a Heavenly Tribulation was pure demonic insanity.

Every sweep of his arm tore his bleeding muscles, every stance-shift ground his fractured bones together like millstones.

Yet he did not care.

Pain was merely fuel.

With the purified Yang essence flooding his meridians and the Asura stances acting as the hammer, he used the remaining electrical currents to ruthlessly pound the Tenth Layer Foundation Platform in his dantian, forging the impossible taboo realm into unbreakable obsidian stone.

The newborn Tier-5 egg clutched tightly under his left arm pulsed violently, drinking the excess baptismal runoff, its heartbeat synchronizing with Shen Yu’s deliberate, heavy breathing.

Looking up into the churning, furious storm, Shen Yu bared his bloodied teeth in a sneer of pure, cold disdain.

He was like a fallen demonic immortal gazing upon the heavens with effortless contempt, silently asking if this pitiful display was all the cosmos could muster.

The combination of the sovereign’s tyrannical will and the overflowing rose-gold pheromones warped the very battlefield.

The atmospheric Qi went feral, swirling into a gargantuan, inward-surging funnel that spiraled straight down toward his bare frame.

Up on the distant cliffline, miles away, the hundreds of watching cultivators stood petrified.

“What is happening down there?!” a peak Foundation Establishment cultivator shrieked, stumbling back as the violent Qi storm whipped his robes into tatters.

“The tribulation lightning struck, but the energy didn’t scatter, it’s being dragged inward!”

Princess Yue Lingxi gasped, her icy eyes fluttering erratically as a primal, suffocating terror clamped down on her chest.

“The ambient Qi… it’s being devoured!”

A wave of instinctive dread washed over the ridge.

Cultivators who had spent decades clawing their way through blood and venom scrambled backward in sheer terror, abandoning their front-row perches along the jagged crags.

They could not see the man standing naked in the glass crater, but their souls screamed a singular, undeniable truth, whatever was down there was not a dormant relic waiting to be claimed, but a cosmic catastrophe in the making.

The shimmering, rose-gold vapor did not disperse under the violent gale.

Instead, it thickened, billowing off Shen Yu’s scorched skin in dense, undulating waves that saturated the molten glass crater and began a slow, insolent ascent into the churning sky.

It was not spiritual Qi, nor was it ordinary physical scent.

It was an archaic, reality-bending sovereign musk, a concentrated manifestation of the Heaven-Seducing Celestial Bloodline, a Primordial Bloodline, that seized the local atmospheric laws and pulled everything into its intoxicating orbit.

As the sweet, warm vapor drifted upward, curling like silken tendrils into the lower fringes of the stormhead, the vast celestial vortex overhead shuddered.

A bizarre, unnatural hesitation rippled through the firmament.

The Heavenly Dao’s will, cold and indifferent across eons, seemed to physically recoil from the approaching rose-gold haze.

It recognized this insidious essence.

Buried in the cosmic memory of the previous tribulation, when this very demon had shattered the boundary of the Qi Condensation realm, was the humiliating imprint of this exact intoxicating mist.

The vast consciousness behind the clouds remembered the maddening, boundary-blurring sensation, a profane, alluring magnetism that dared to stroke the absolute authority of the heavens like silk against skin.

For a heartbeat, the furious violet lightning coiled in hesitation, caught between ancient celestial instinct and an inexplicable, mesmerizing pull that threatened to unravel the executioner’s focus.

Then, as if violently jolted awake by its own shameful lapse, the sky went utterly berserk.

RUMBLE—— CRASH!

A deafening roar of absolute celestial humiliation detonated across the heavens.

The thunderhead did not merely churn, it boiled into a frantic, ink-black maelstrom, furious at its own wavering, incandescent with the rage of a judge who had almost been seduced by the prisoner at the chopping block.

The pale pink flush along the fringes was forcibly crushed beneath a suffocating wall of bruised violet and burning carmine.

The sky intended to wipe this mockery from the fabric of reality once and for all.

CRACKLE—— BOOM!

The second strike did not wait for the usual rhythm of the tribulation.

Two interwoven pillars of Carmine-Blood Retribution Lightning torn directly from the vortex’s core plunged downward with apocalyptic speed.

It was triple the girth of the first strike, descending with enough concussive mass to bore through mountain roots.

The violent electrical pressure alone collapsed the crater beneath Shen Yu’s feet another ten paces into the bedrock, superheating the vitrified sand into bubbling, incandescent slag.

Standing naked in the epicenter, his fractured ribs groaning and his bloodied hair whipping in the gale, Shen Yu felt the killing intent that could turn a Golden Core cultivator to grease in a microsecond.

His lips pulled back into a jagged, blood-flecked sneer.

“Angry, are we?”

-x-

A/N:

Schedule Update Notice

Moving forward, novel updates will be reduced to 3 chapters per week (M-W-F).

Rather than posting a paid chapter with a long personal explanation, I have shared the complete context on Discord.

Please check the #novel-announcements channel for all the details regarding this change.