Chapter 377: Then Strike Harder!

Shen Yu shifted his weight through the bubbling slag, his feet anchoring into the boiling stone as if rooting into an ancient altar.

The smell of his own scorched flesh rose with the rose-gold haze, but his blood-matted hair whipped back from a face that bore only cold derision.

He locked his legs into the second rigid stance of the “Asura Blood-Forging Sutra”.

SNAP— CRACK!

The fractured ribs inside his chest screamed as the posture forced his torso into an unnatural, brutal arch.

Bone fragments ground against living tissue, sending blinding white agony straight into his brainstem.

He didn’t blink.

He used that agony like a sharpened chisel, driving his focus down to a needlepoint, while his right arm swept up to cradle the unhatched egg tight against his chest, leaving his left palm facing the descending apocalypse.

“Then strike harder!”

BOOM——!

The interwoven pillars of Carmine-Blood Lightning slammed down like twin falling pillars of heaven.

The sound did not travel as a roar, it detonated as a concussive shockwave that obliterated the soundscape entirely, leaving only a high, deafening vacuum.

The bedrock beneath Shen Yu gave way, collapsing another fifteen paces downward, forging a smooth, glass-lined pit that bubbled with liquid fire.

The sheer destructive will of the strike crushed down on his shoulders.

CRUNCH.

His left collarbone, already fractured, snapped clean through, the jagged edge tearing outward against the skin.

His left knee buckled under the weight of ten thousand tons of cosmic retribution, the joint threatening to invert.

Blood vomited from his mouth in a thick, clotted arc, instantly vaporized into scarlet mist by the searing heat.

‘Now!’

Within the crucible of his dantian, the Celestial Devouring Seal spun to its absolute limit, the vortex screaming like a dying star.

Instead of letting the twin lightning dragons ground out into the earth and tear his flesh to ribbons, Shen Yu forcibly clamped his lower meridians shut, turning his entire torso into a sealed chamber.

He swallowed the raw, furious carmine lightning down through his left palm, dragging it straight across his fractured collarbone, into his central meridian, and slamming it into the internal vortex.

HISSSS— CRACKLE!

The destructive intent fought back like a living beast, burning the walls of his spiritual pathways to charred ash.

But the “Primordial Yin-Yang Scripture” did not allow it to run wild.

The technique acted as a supreme separator, the Absolute Yin frost lingering in his marrow chilled the lightning’s erratic vibration, while the Supreme Yang current seized the raw celestial voltage, refining it, compressing it, and stripping away the sky’s vindictive wrath until only pure, unblemished Primordial Yang Liquid remained.

That molten golden liquid cascaded straight down onto his dantian’s foundation.

CLANG——!

A metallic ring, deep and ancient as an immortal bell, echoed from the center of his body.

The shadowy, incomplete Tenth Layer Foundation Platform absorbed the Yang deluge.

The raw lightning acted as the supreme celestial hammer, each strike pounding the tenth platform, hardening its jagged edges, smoothing its obsidian surface, and carving ancient, forbidden runes of the Asura directly into its core.

The tenth platform wasn’t merely forming, it was being tempered under the personal wrath of the heavens.

Beside his heart, the beast egg went into a frenzy.

THUMP-THUMP. THUMP-THUMP.

The dual-colored shell, bathed in the overflowing carmine electrical wash, drank the excess lightning like sweet nectar.

The hairline fissures that ran along the central seam widened by a fraction of an inch, venting thick streams of black-and-white primordial vapor that coiled around Shen Yu’s ribs, actively soothing the charred meat and knitting the torn muscles over his broken collarbone.

Then, the true anomaly flared.

As the refined Yang essence saturated every cell, Shen Yu’s Heaven-Seducing Celestial Bloodline didn’t just activate, it combusted.

WHOOSH.

The rose-gold vapor pouring from his pores exploded outward, transforming from a subtle mist into a radiant, rolling fog that engulfed the entire glass crater.

The air grew thick, humid, and heavy with an intoxicating, primordial sweetness.

The rose-gold tide rolled upward, defying the downward pressure of the storm, climbing the very lightning pillars that were trying to kill him.

It coiled around the descending carmine thunder, stroking it, soothing its violent frequencies, and bleeding into the lower belly of the dark thunderclouds above.

High in the heavens, the churning vortex froze.

The oppressive, world-ending gravity suddenly slipped.

The violet and carmine serpents coiling within the clouds lost their sharp, jagged trajectories, their movements becoming sluggish, lazy, almost rhythmic.

The vast, cosmic will that commanded the storm seemed to shudder, bewildered and ensnared by the reality-bending pheromones of a bloodline that once brought celestial maidens and sovereign entities to their knees.

The edge of the black cloud once again flushed with a vivid, undeniable shade of crimson-rose.

Shen Yu slowly straightened his buckled knee.

His charred skin was sloughing off, revealing new, pale flesh underneath that gleamed with faint golden script.

He stood amidst the bubbling slag of the crater, clutching the pulsing, cracking egg, and tilted his head toward the wavering, blushing heavens.

He let out a low, breathy laugh that vibrated with mocking intimacy.

“Is that the best you can do, sweety?”

Miles away, atop the jagged cliffs, Princess Yue Lingxi’s breath caught in her throat.

She couldn’t see the man in the pit, but the sudden shift in the air had reached the ridges.

The terrifying, suffocating pressure of the Heavenly Dao had abruptly warped.

A faint, distant scent, sweet, dangerous, and impossibly alluring, drifted across the scorched winds, brushing past her senses.

Her royal guards gripped their weapons, their eyes wide with unnatural confusion, their instincts warring between primal terror and an inexplicable, maddening urge to prostrate themselves toward the distant, obscured shore.

“Princess…” one guard whispered, his voice trembling, sweat dripping from his chin.

“The… the sky… why does the lightning feel like it’s hesitating?”

Yue Lingxi didn’t answer.

Her knuckles turned white around her frost crescents as she stared at the blushing edges of the apocalypse, a cold dread sinking into her bones.

Above the crater, the silence stretched, taut as a bowstring pulled past its breaking point.

Then, the heavens realized they had been played for a fool a second time.

The rosy flush vanished, swallowed by an abyss of absolute, ink-black darkness as the celestial vortex contracted to a terrifying, concentrated pinpoint.

The sky wasn’t just angry anymore.

It was preparing to erase the entire realm.