CH7: Ultimate Tribulation Horus Zeus

The Thunder Eagle sect had no code or rituals to bring us together as a group. Our religion was cultivation to reach immortality. Our culture was the Eagle Strike martial art and fixation on positioning and striking techniques. Turning a shock fragment into an arrow with a technique was considered a very Thunder Eagle thing to do. We enjoyed our lightning and storm fragments.

Techniques that defended were looked down on. The best block was not to be there, but what happens when you must block or risk doom? Destruction is the only answer, so the Thunder Eagle Sect's teaching was disastrous for anyone seeking the nascent soul realm.

Lui Fang should have worked on anti-lightning defensive techniques. Thunderbird wings could have been used to power a powerful defense against lightning. Instead of focusing on herself and what she could personally do, she chose to rely on Elder Yu and was fucked because of it.

My observations were an excuse to devour the big heavenly lightning coming my way. Pressure could easily slide through physical matter, and it was almost imperceptible if I made the pressure thinner than a chain of molecules. I stretched them out, sliding them over hundreds of yards at a time, one after the other, until tens of thousands stretched out of my soul. The small bubble of pressure remained around my soul, dense and rounded to throw off physical blows.

With no mind, it was the pressure itself that held my consciousness, with my soul as its record. I could do things and maneuver far better than I ever had within a body.

Long dark hairs invisible to the naked eye reached up to the heavens. Blasts of heavenly lightning lashed down, leaving the spot around Lui Fang free of destruction. While I was inside her, I had time to experiment. Once I left, I imagined I would be preyed upon by all kinds of vicious soul predators. The moment I left her body, I had to find another, hopefully, one that was brain-dead or even undeveloped. Perhaps I could try the village below if there were any survivors.

I sent some of my hair down to feel for any mortals and found nothing. Only blackened bones and ash covered the ground for vast stretches of land. What amounted to hundreds of millions of people in the many empires that littered the valleys below ruled by the Thunder Eagle Sect was ash. A massive power base had been lost because Elder Yu and Lui Fang wanted to use my selfless love to protect her from heaven's wrath.

I might have chuckled if I still had a sense of humor. A soul had only lingering emotions, and even those lasted only shortly after I reviewed my records and understood myself. Did they think I was like those wispy souls barely condensed to the liquid floor and left to rot in chaos? Of course, they did. Why would I have been anything different from the hundreds of love-sick girls pining after Elder Yu? Some of them even carried his children or had given birth to them. Most never knew they were being sacrificed until after it happened, and their souls were rendered into a pink amniotic liquid.

My soul was also very different from theirs. I compressed it and fed it for over a decade. Naturally, after a decade of feeding, it adapted to filter in food through my pressure, and that same pressure condensed my soul, maintaining its small size. The pressure of the human pill furnace couldn't hope to match what I already did to myself.

While I was a fool, they were poor studies.

To my perception, I was a tiny pinprick of processing power with tens of thousands of tiny hairs feeling for and reacting to a constant rain of lightning. Pillars of lightning crashed upon the ground, spreading all around, glassing the soil, and breaking through barriers and even hidden realms. Something immense and delicious wasted power slowly descended as my hair reached for it. The beast didn't shy away or change its path. It willingly crawled toward me.

As it descended, I wondered if my mouth was big enough to eat whatever it was. Waves of heavenly lightning passed down my hair only to fail to penetrate my pressure sphere, so I consumed it with my soul space.

My body shifted as Lui Fang slowly rose in the air. "I'm not afraid of you anymore." Lui Fang roared.

I would be impressed if I wasn't doing all the work. More hairs stretched out, but despite their number, Lui Fang remained unaware of them. They were a new development that was only possible due to the change the heavenly lightning had on my soul. Tiny strands of heavenly lightning mixed with my pressure, making it easier to perceive feedback. Thoughts were more manageable, but thankfully, I felt no sexual attraction to Lui Fang anymore.

This wasn't an act of selfless protection on my part. At any time, if this proved to be too dangerous, I could rip my way out of her flesh and pull myself miles away in an instant. Only the meal hovering above felt too tempting to pass up. The heavenly lightning wasn't enough to coat my vast soul yet. I needed far more of it to get the full effect.

I thought about how I would eat the massive horse before me. Maybe Lui Fang would be beneficial. Her body would be a great filter, and she wanted to ascend, right? This was her big moment; all she had to do was survive.

…

Blood still seared from her ears. Her eardrums had burst long ago and soon burst again after she took a pill to heal them. It was less trouble to let them bleed. The sect was in ruins, and she was alone. Her clan lived in the nearby Cloud Hill fortress city. It was near enough and in the Ascalon Empire. The tribulation had laid waste to it like everything else nearby for hundreds of miles. This was the kind of extinction event told of in hushed whispers.

She felt a lump form in the pit of her stomach as Horus Zeus descended lazily, blasting the remains of the sect with the beats of its wings. Ash rose high in the air from millions of corpses flowing into the beast, giving greater depths to its form, making it more real. This was a backlash from the heavens themselves. If she couldn't beat it, the beast would regain life and terrorize the world again. In legend, a peak existence took the might of 10,000 peak Mortal Severing experts to bring down.

It must be an Atom. Some dregs of his existence still protected her from the lightning. Maybe he truly loved her, and she was a fool for denying him. If she could, she planned to make it up to him in the next life.

The beast flapped its wings, and pillars fell everywhere but on her. Hidden realms were ripped open, and the dao seedlings within were struck without mercy, like the hands of some god shielding her with a circle of protection like a dome wrapped around her, leaving only her protected.

She flew up and roared a challenge at the beast. "What are you waiting for?"

The great beast's eyes, all 15 of them, narrowed onto her, and the great beast tucked its wings and dove. She screamed as the world shook from the sheer force this creature, without its own will, put on this mortal world. Under lightning, the fabric of reality gave a law magnified with heavenly chi.

Lui Fang watched the being fall in slow motion. Her life flashed before her eyes, and all she had was regret for all the chances she missed out on. Elder Yu or Atom, either choice would do. She didn't have to die a virgin.

Bolts of lightning lit millions of tiny threads aimed at her core. Was it some attack to cripple her before the main body struck? She couldn't escape the lightning that passed through her body, and she screamed. Pain unlike anything she had ever experienced swept through her, lighting her nerves on fire in an unending deluge of torture while a heat erupted in her guts, not her core. She felt the pain there.

…

It took a little doing, but a peak core cultivator's body was a sturdy resource. I created a place to dump off the excess heavenly lightning by connecting my hair to her nervous system. This wasn't because I was reaching my limit far from it. I wanted to see what reaching the limit for an average soul looked like so I could scale it to myself. The only problem was how much more powerful my soul was than others.

I could quickly tell that by looking at her soul with pressure hair and determining how saturated it was with heavenly lightning. Then, I could compare the saturation rate with my own and extrapolate a number. If this soul has this much saturation after this much lightning, I can compare that amount of lightning to what I've already consumed and get a rough number.

I felt this wouldn't be enough to saturate my soul thoroughly, and I didn't know what that would look like. Soul saturation seemed to be the key to reaching the nascent soul realm. I had a theory that it worked like an electro-magnet or something similar. A charge ran through the soul, attracting chi and forming a shell of that chi around the soul to facilitate the nascent soul rebirth.

That might be how the soul space was opened and connected to the body.

I felt vibrations, and Lui Fang was already screaming. The beast wasn't even in my grasp, and she was already screaming. I checked her soul saturation, and it wasn't entirely yet, so she would have to continue screaming.

It was pitiful that she screamed from only a little shock. I would probably make fun of her for her apparent weakness if I had the emotions.

…

It kept falling slowly, its mere aura gripping her in wires of pain. All she could do was watch as the lightning gathered around it concentrated more on her, but the monster had yet to reach her fully. Time seemed to stretch as her focus turned fully over to the pain. Her body shook, and she tried to fall, but something held her in place. She lost control of her faculties and felt her voice tear as she screamed.

Something was happening to her body, and the lightning gathered as if directed by something to a tiny spot in her chest. It was filling something up slowly and carefully as the monster descended.

It happened before she knew it. Lui Fang reached her limit, and the power settled in her chest. The lightning and pain stopped. She felt the way open to the nascent soul realm. All she needed was time to cultivate.

From her spatial ring, she pulled free an escape treasure. Lui Fang wasn't a hero. Even if the true Horus Zeus emerged and attacked the world, it wasn't her problem. Someone would face it, and she would live.

A red jade spear appeared in her hand, and space rippled. She saw a green fairy appear over her shoulder and smirk at her. "Are we going to slay it?" Scathach, the rune spear, asked.

She used the treasure and felt something in her stomach rip. Wires wrapped around her, and the spear stopped her escape attempt. Pain erupted in her head, and the world went black.

…

That was close, and Lui Fang almost ruined my opportunity. I couldn't have that. A purple-haired woman dressed in green with glowing red eyes and massive breasts glared at me in Lui Fang's stomach. The weapon spirit pushed small intestines wider as she stared at him. Her wings touched slimy walls, and she shivered in disgust. A glob of something landed in her hair, and she screamed and tried to clean herself up, only for the gut to close around her.

She fought off the guts while I tried to figure out how I got color from vibrations. I wrapped a few hairs around the fairy and pulled her through the slime closer to my pressure sphere. Then I chucked her into my soul space. Somehow, the spear Lui Fang wielded appeared there, too, and the entity finally touched the edge of my hair.

"Let me out of here!" a scream rang out into the tens of thousands-mile radius of my soul space.

I ignored it and focused on the dragon. It was more solid than flesh, more real than anything my hair had touched before, and it had the same connections to Lui Fang's body that I had used before I stood her up and hacked into her eyes, senses, and even parts of her brain.

Hormones poured through her in a drug-fueled haze to my soul. They weren't the same as what I experienced before. I shove those thoughts aside. What I wanted was to see the thing.

I saw it in full color: a dragon with three heads, five eyes on each, eagle beaks instead of snouts, and black ash mixed with the gold of its scales. According to Lui Fang, the creature was in the middle of incarnating.

Millions of hairs stretched to the sky, slipping through the lightning and ash into the creature's depths. Something was there, a crystalline structure made of black ash strung together by its near-immortal laws.

Was this an opportunity? I licked my lips on Lui Fang's body and shifted my hips back and forth provocatively. Hormones were so much trouble. They made me think I was in love, so I offered Lui Fang everything.

She was primed to reach her nascent soul, and I was just a soul. To truly possess my own body, I needed it to have never started cultivation before. That meant an infant or a peasant. Even some farmers practice cultivation to ease farm work.

The dragon roared with the sound of a million thunderclaps. I placed my hands behind my head, enjoying the feeling of a body at the peak of the core realm.

I reached my hand out, and from my soul space, an arrow fired at speeds unbound by physical laws. It did not travel through space; my hair had already grasped my target. My soul arrow pierced the core of the dragon and shattered its incarnation. The arrow continued flying high in the air. Who knew if it would leave the atmosphere or come down? It was out of my control.

The beast roared in horror and outrage, and I pulled with my hair. It fell, and I opened Lui Fang's mouth wide and stretched out my tongue like I was catching a snowflake instead of a dragon. I closed her eyes and opened small paths into my soul space with my myriad hairs. As the dragon fell, I stripped the flesh, the scales, and the bones.

As gravity took hold of the dragon, it vanished bit by bit, losing its scales and becoming muscle, bone, and finally, a clump of vanishing organs. All of it filled my soul space, but only a single electrical drop of blood dropped to catch in Lui Fang's mouth.

I immediately dropped control over the body, withdrew my hair, and went to work on the dragon's corpse.