Chapter 10

Shen Mengji had already been at the peak of Foundation Establishment. All he needed was an opportunity to break through.

But that opportunity was something some people could spend their entire lives without finding, while others could trigger a tribulation after eating two grains of rice.

Fuyi formed a hand seal and opened the defensive grand array above the Divine Creation Sect, then smiled and said, “Mengji has been at the peak of Foundation Establishment for many years, with a deep accumulation. Breaking through now is only natural. It’s actually a good thing.”

A forced breakthrough and one that came when the water had arrived and the channel formed were two different concepts. The former might leave behind hidden dangers, while the latter benefited one’s path.

Up in the sky, Lu Yan saw the familiar golden lines slowly merge into the black clouds.

Shen Mengji stood up, and a bolt of tribulation lightning crashed down.

“Boom—”

The silver dragon let out a thunderous roar. Shen Mengji neither dodged nor avoided it. A folding fan silently appeared in his palm. The fan surface unfolded, and with a flick of Shen Mengji’s right hand, an array slowly rose from the fan and collided with the tribulation lightning.

The array transformed into a huge defensive net, firmly blocking the first bolt outside.

Fuyi narrowed her eyes as she observed and said, “A Golden Core tribulation has nine bolts in total. Don’t worry about Mengji. He’s probably already rehearsed this breakthrough many times in his divine sense.”

The residual might of the tribulation lightning scattered outward. Crackling arcs of electricity followed the water and spread across the remaining rice fields.

Lu Yan: “…”

Oh, right. Water conducts electricity!

The Spirit-Gathering Arrays beneath the rice fields seemed to have been activated by the tribulation lightning. Spiritual energy surged and formed vortices of all sizes, interweaving in midair and echoing the black clouds above. The scene was extremely magnificent.

The second bolt of lightning did not fall for a long time.

With a snap, Fuyi tightened her grip on the Dawn and Dusk Sword. “This isn’t good.”

Tribulation lightning was the natural enemy of Demon cultivators. He Nian was hiding behind Fuyi, and now he poked his head out and asked, “How is it not good?”

Fuyi looked at the accumulating tribulation lightning and the churning vortices of spiritual energy and said, “This kind of spiritual energy flow… the Heavenly Dao will think it’s a provocation. The power of the tribulation lightning may double!”

Double!!

Lu Yan felt his vision go black. Could his fields still survive this?

No. He couldn’t just sit and wait for disaster.

Seeing that the second bolt of tribulation lightning was about to finish brewing, Lu Yan’s mind flashed back to the scene after Fuyi’s last tribulation, as well as that strange dream…

Might as well go all in. Lu Yan shook off Fuyi’s hand, slapped a speed talisman onto himself, and his small figure instantly stood at the edge of the rice field. At the same time, the tribulation lightning poured down with unstoppable force.

“Little Junior Brother!”

“Little ancestor, do you want to die?!”

Fuyi and He Nian cried out in alarm at the same time.

With a speed talisman stuck to him, Lu Yan was like a light, drifting bird. In the blink of an eye, he appeared within the range covered by the tribulation lightning. Above his head were densely packed black clouds, and not far away stood Shen Mengji, who was ready at any moment to receive the second bolt of lightning.

There was nowhere to hide.

The hand Fuyi used to hold her sword bulged with blue veins. Her pupils were dark and heavy, and sword intent began spilling out uncontrollably.

As soon as He Nian saw that look in her eyes, he thought, This is bad. Without caring about his image, at the instant Fuyi was about to rush forward, he clung tightly to Fuyi’s thigh. Enduring the damage brought by her sword intent, he shouted, “Auntie, you’re Nascent Soul, Nascent Soul! Do you want Shen Mengji and the little ancestor to die under the tribulation lightning?!”

Lu Yan was only in Qi Refining. The spiritual energy field formed by his own body might not even be as large as the vortices created by those three Spirit-Gathering Arrays. The Heavenly Dao might not necessarily be able to identify him. Moreover, this little ancestor had quite a few life-saving items on him, including the hairpin tying up his hair and that Daoist robe embroidered with runes. He should be able to get through it.

Fuyi was different. She was a Nascent Soul mighty figure. Once she entered the range of the tribulation lightning, the entire Qionggu Peak would probably be reduced to ash.

“Boom—”

A lightning dragon so dazzling it almost blinded people swooped down. The array Shen Mengji had left behind during the first bolt shattered in an instant. Then, layer upon layer of arrays rose from the fan surface, only to be split apart one after another.

Fuyi stared fixedly at that bolt of tribulation lightning. Gnashing her back teeth, she squeezed out two words filled with murderous aura. “Heavenly Dao!”

Lu Yan held the Buwang Brush in his hand and did not move in the slightest before the tribulation lightning. The little bun on his head had already been blown loose by the residual force, and the wooden hairpin had fallen somewhere unknown. His black hair streamed behind him, set against his pure white Daoist robe and the silver-white lightning. In his pitch-black eyes, countless golden lines shifted constantly, transforming into array runes one after another, some useful and some useless. He also murmured softly, “Heavenly Dao…”

“Rumble—”

The final array on Shen Mengji’s fan surface shattered, enveloping his entire person inside.

As for Lu Yan—

He Nian, watching from afar, swallowed hard twice. The hands he had wrapped around Fuyi’s thigh loosened weakly, and he fell backward onto the ground. At this moment, he recalled the five hundred years of his bird life, which was neither especially long nor especially short, and asked himself whether he had ever seen or even heard of such a deranged and law-defying scene. Trembling, He Nian stretched out a hand, his large eyes filled with doubt toward this entire world. “What the hell is this?!”

Fuyi did not correct He Nian’s foul language. At this moment, her whole body was also full of question marks.

The worst situation they had imagined had not happened at all.

Lu Yan, Uncle-Master Lu Bupo, simply stood there quietly, the hem of his Daoist robe lifted and fluttering by the air waves. There was not the slightest thing wrong with him.

The tribulation lightning seemed to have grown eyes. It did not touch Lu Yan at all. The instant it fell, it urgently curved around the direction where Lu Yan stood, causing this grand and imposing bolt of tribulation lightning to have a chunk missing from midair. It looked extremely undignified.

Lu Yan raised his brows.

Behind him, the rice fields rustled.

Shen Mengji had been struck by lightning until his hair exploded outward. Since he was wearing a black Daoist robe, it was impossible to tell whether he was injured, but he looked like there was nothing seriously wrong.

The third bolt of tribulation lightning did not accumulate power. It fell in an ordinary way, a proper, standard Golden Core tribulation, as though it had never seen the spiritual energy vortices formed by the Spirit-Gathering Arrays at all. Avoiding Lu Yan’s direction, it cracked down again and again.

Shen Mengji spun the fan between his fingers, and it suddenly flew out. The fan disassembled in midair. The fan surface spread open and became the center of a circle, while the fan ribs copied themselves one after another. Together with the center, they formed a huge Eight Trigrams Array. Spiritual power leaked outward and braced against this wave of tribulation lightning, whose power had somewhat weakened.

…

No matter how many deep breaths He Nian took, he could not calm down. Demon cultivators had a fixed tribulation every hundred years, which meant that after a Demon race member awakened spiritual intelligence, they would face a lightning tribulation every hundred years. If they passed, their cultivation would increase greatly. If they failed, their soul would scatter and vanish. He Nian had painstakingly passed five tribulations, and during his five-hundred-year grand tribulation, he had nearly been roasted into a plated dish by the tribulation lightning.

And the result? The result!!

He Nian did not dare curse, afraid that if the Heavenly Dao heard him, it would make the tribulation lightning curve around and strike him. In the end, he could only choke out one sentence. “So this is what it means to be the Heavenly Dao’s own son?”

Loved, loved.

Fuyi suddenly remembered when she had finished her Nascent Soul tribulation.

At the time, Lu Yan had been held in Pei Zhan’s arms. He had reached out and touched her hair before the residual might of the tribulation lightning had even left her body.

Just like now, the residual might of the tribulation lightning hidden within Fuyi’s body had rapidly disappeared the moment it was touched. Even the hidden injuries left behind from her Golden Core tribulation had quietly vanished along with it. Yet Lu Yan, who had not had the slightest cultivation at the time, had been completely fine.

No wonder Senior Brother Sect Leader had been so shocked.

So that was it!

In an instant, Fuyi figured out the crucial point. She lowered her eyes to look at He Nian, who was still full of envy, jealousy, and hatred. The Dawn and Dusk Sword was repeatedly pulled out a little and pushed back in, the sound of the blade rubbing crisp yet full of threat. “Fat bird, what did you see today?”

“You’re the fat one, your whole family is—” He Nian instinctively shot back, but after seeing Fuyi’s gloomy gaze and hearing the constant zheng, zheng sound of the Dawn and Dusk Sword being shifted, he felt all the feathers on his body about to explode. Out of an animal’s instinct, He Nian silently curled himself into a ball and raised three fingers to the sky. “I didn’t see anything!”

Who did not want to avoid lightning tribulations?

Over the past thousand years, countless geniuses had fallen beneath tribulation lightning. Ascension had become a legend that could be yearned for but not reached. If people found out at this moment that Lu Yan could avoid tribulation lightning…

He Nian’s heart sank.

No one could resist this temptation. At that time, Lu Yan would inevitably become a tool for avoiding tribulation lightning. Even a force as enormous as the Divine Creation Sect would not be able to withstand the pressure of the entire cultivation world.

So this absolutely must not spread!

Qionggu Peak was already located in a remote area to begin with, and at this moment, aside from the four people present, no one else had seen anything. Fuyi deliberately flew high into the air and looked all around, striving to leave not a single hidden danger behind.

Lu Yan had originally had a faint guess in his heart. Now that the guess had been confirmed, he calmly sat cross-legged and used the Buwang Brush to carve arrays and runes onto a jade slip.

Thanks to the tribulation lightning, Lu Yan observed several combinations that had never appeared in any array compendium or detailed rune explanation. While he still remembered them, he hurriedly recorded them, leaving them for experiments in the future.

Shen Mengji’s one-nine Golden Core tribulation had already entered its final phase. Using the power of the last two bolts of tribulation lightning, he integrated the spiritual energy, continuously compressing it until it formed a Golden Core.

That fan was held in Shen Mengji’s palm, undergoing the tempering of the tribulation lightning together with him.

Lu Yan raised his head and glanced over.

After connecting to the network, Shen Mengji’s reaction speed was anything but ordinary. He was a rare dual cultivator of arrays and runes. The transformation between arrays and runes had not the slightest seam. It was as though he did not need to think at all; with the flow of spiritual energy, each stroke formed in one go. That fan should be Shen Mengji’s life-bound magical artifact. It was flexible and ever-changing, opening the eyes of Lu Yan, who had never seen much of the world.

The tribulation lightning finally ended. The black clouds lingered reluctantly above Lu Yan’s head for a while before they finally scattered and left completely.

While Shen Mengji was still meditating and digesting everything, Fuyi arrived in front of Lu Yan in one step. After waiting for Little Junior Brother to put down his brush and stretch his limbs twice, she lifted Lu Yan up with one hand.

It was exactly like picking up a cat. She grabbed the clothes at the back of Lu Yan’s neck, leaving his feet off the ground, effortlessly.

Lu Yan hugged the jade slip tightly. “…”

Fuyi ground her teeth. “You’ve gotten capable, haven’t you?”

Lu Yan blinked and imitated a cat, showing an innocent expression as he acted cute. “Senior Sister~”

The sword cultivator was cold and merciless. “Useless.”

Lu Yan worked hard to tilt his head. From the corner of his eye, he saw that although there were still ripples in the water across his remaining four fields, the rice had all uniformly turned orange-yellow. Relying on the fact that he was still young, Lu Yan shamelessly threw himself into Fuyi’s arms. “Senior Sister, I was wrong! Senior Sister, look, our spirit rice is ripe!”

The ripening of the spirit rice successfully changed the subject. Fuyi grabbed Little Junior Brother by the clothes at the back of his neck and set him down. “Tribulation lightning can do that too?”

Lu Yan put away the jade slip and tasted each field one by one. From the field with high-grade spirit stones to the one with low-grade spirit stones, the texture gradually became more substantial. Unlike the field with supreme-grade spirit stones, which melted into spiritual energy as soon as it entered the mouth, the one with the best texture should be the field without a Spirit-Gathering Array. Its spiritual energy was the weakest, but its mouthfeel was closest to that of ordinary rice.

The water in the fields was not wasted either. Lu Yan sorted it into categories and packed it into his Qiankun Bag for future use.

Fuyi was stuffed with several cloth bags by Lu Yan, each one filled to the brim with spirit rice. Her arms full of Little Junior Brother’s sugar-coated shells, Fuyi immediately forgot what she had originally been planning to do. Her eyes seemed to have three words written in them: I’m rich!

He Nian was not left out either. He hugged a cloth bag and cherished each mouthful as he nibbled on the rice, so happy he was almost bubbling.

Lu Yan wiped the sweat from his forehead and secretly made a “plan succeeded” gesture in his heart.

On the other side, Shen Mengji slowly opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was his little uncle-master secretly laughing.

The scene from when he was undergoing his tribulation flooded into his mind. Belatedly, Shen Mengji snapped onto the network, got up, and strode over to Lu Yan.

A shadow fell over him. Lu Yan said in surprise, “Erji!”

Shen Erji wore a grave expression. “Little Uncle-Master, entering the range of tribulation lightning without permission is very dangerous!”

Lu Yan: “…”

Oh-ho.

Fuyi’s ears were sharp. One after the other, she and Shen Mengji surrounded Lu Yan. “Exactly! And you even tried to bribe Senior Sister. That adds another level to your crime!”

He Nian chimed in from the side like a parrot. “Another level, another level!”

Lu Yan: “…”

Today’s Divine Creation Sect was also very harmonious between master and disciples.

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