Ch 814 - Passing the Tribulation

Alex let go of Lloyd's body, and it started slowly drifting away.

Linden swallowed, horrified. Alex had just killed a golden core warrior with one hand.

Zaxx nudged Linden. The nose of the flying ship was shining, indicating that the second gun was ready to fire.

Alex didn't pay much attention to the ship. He was too busy using the lightning tribulation as a brute-force method of increasing his strength. Although Alex was still a golden core warrior, his strength was already comparable to the nascent level.

Eighteen lightning bolts.

Twenty-seven.

Thirty-six.

The forty-fifth one came crashing down from the cloud.

Alex was relying on his aura of genuine essence to forcefully dissipate the bolts of heavenly lightning. Only he knew how dangerous it had been to kill Lloyd and absorb all this energy while this was going on.

The genuine essence was able to absorb all non-living things into Alex's body, turning them into pure energy. The different energies he was receiving from it were powerful, but they completely scrambled. Fortunately, the heavenly lightning was able to refine everything that he had just absorbed and separate it into elemental energies. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to handle it.

**

Linden looked at the ship's instruments. He had gone from exhilaration to terror in just a few moments.

There had now been more than forty bolts of heavenly lightning. Is this still a lightning tribulation? he wondered. Is this still a fight to transcend to the next level? Or is Alex just bathing in the lightning?

**

Alex saw the glowing barrel of the laser cannon and took out his celestial staff, using it to create a layer of ice that blocked the light from the sun and plunged the spacecraft into darkness.

There was a resounding explosion, and he realized it was the fifty-fourth bolt of tribulation lightning. He raised the celestial staff high into the air, where the incoming electricity would strike it.

The lightning extended downward along the staff. When it encountered the icy barrier that the staff had created, some of its force was lost. The remaining energy rushed straight toward the spaceship.

Linden fired the laser gun.

Facing the attack of a nascent-level weapon, Alex was surprisingly calm.

He gathered genuine essence in his hand, expecting that when the burst of laser fire reached his hand, it would explode.

Instead, the glowing ball of energy shot out of his hand, blocking the remaining tribulation lightning and deflecting it toward the ship. The powerful shields held up for a time, but finally buckled on the sixty-third strike.

The entire ship collapsed as its engine detonated, and the ship essentially turned into a nascent-level bomb. Linden and Zaxx barely got out in time.

Alex was within the area of the explosion, and he didn't know whether he had enough strength left to counter it. If not, it would kill him.

The eighty-first and last heavenly lightning bolt fell.

Up until now, Alex had used every technique he knew and all the energy at his command to keep the tribulation bolts from hitting him. He had nothing left—except for his own body, which was a hair's breadth away from ascending to godhood.

The bolt struck, and Alex felt himself being torn apart. When the agony passed, the first thing he did was laugh. He was still alive.

**

In the distance, Linden saw Alex reeling in pain and cracked a smile. The bastard was finally running out of resources.

He cast a powerful spell. Alex had to die before the tribulation clouds dissipated.

**

The tribulation was finished, and Alex had survived, but his golden core was broken, and uncontrolled genuine essence was running rampant in his body. He desperately needed to figure out how to control the surging energies inside him.

But Linden wasn't going to give him the time.

His spell hit Alex, who could feel it, but he was powerless to act. He fought for control while Linden attacked him without restraint.

In Alex's condition, he couldn't survive this for very long, and he was fresh out of ideas.

Then his genuine essence flared, and he held out his hand and brought it back under his control. His eyes began to shine with a golden light. "Linden, now you're going to die."

Linden took a few steps back. His usually unreadable eyes were filled with shock. Alex had successfully passed the tribulation under impossible circumstances, and had become even more powerful, and Linden knew he was in trouble.

No one should have been able to survive that, he thought.

Alex's smile turned menacing, and then he yelled out in a thunderous voice. The winds churned, and the clouds rolled in as the sky began to flicker. Primal energy surged, and everyone could feel it filling them and then surging out from their pores.

Alex stretched out his fist. Black clouds poured out from it, covering the sky and blocking out the sun. The mysterious golden flames once again ignited.

Linden knew that the energy Alex was gathering would multiply his ability to attack, so he had to stop him.

Unfortunately for him, he didn't get a chance to act. A multitude of shadows had appeared, obscuring everything as far as he could see. Alex's abilities were clearly getting stronger by the minute.

He seemed far too powerful for someone at his stage of development, and Linden began to worry that he might be defeated by someone who had just passed his tribulation.

"No!" he screamed. He gathered all the strength he could muster and hurled an attack with the power of a star, pinning all his hopes on a single strike. But Alex's body was emitting a huge amount of shielding energy, and Linden didn't even get close.

A satisfied smile appeared on Alex's face. Linden had tried to kill him, so Alex was going to squash him like a bug.