Origin of White Thunder

Wang Hao watched the dense cluster of eyeballs slowly approach, its devouring power even more terrifying than before. Space was being compressed, time was being devoured, and even consciousness began to blur—the Night Fiend had sucked dry all the energy within this cocoon, leaving only the act of devouring itself.

And his trump card—the eighth palm of the Heaven Imprisoning Earth Overturning Palm had been unleashed, leaving his right arm half crippled. The fifth sword of the Heaven Cleaving Nine Swords had been drawn, leaving his soul exhausted. The ninth floor of the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower was only open a crack, far from being fully activated.

What else did he have?

Wang Hao closed his eyes.

In his mind surfaced a piece of intelligence the check-in system had given him a few days ago at Severed Heaven Ridge—

"Deep within the ruins of the Crimson Moon, the embers of the heavenly tribulation remain unextinguished. If guided by the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower, one might be able to penetrate the ninth floor at the limits of life and death."

He hadn't thought much about it then. Because he had absolutely no intention of going to the Crimson Moon ruins, let alone thrusting the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower into the Night Fiend's body.

Well, look at him now. There was no need to go to the Crimson Moon ruins; the remnant heavenly tribulation lightning inside the Night Fiend was even denser than the embers in the ruins. He had thrust it in, but the ninth floor had only opened a crack.

The intelligence said "penetrate the ninth floor at the limits of life and death"—

The limits of life and death.

Wang Hao was too familiar with these words. Since crossing over, when had his breakthroughs not been on the brink of death? Forging his skin while being hunted down, opening his orifices while almost dying in the internal strife of the Heaven's Pride Gang, True Intent Realm while being possessed by something bizarre, and Astral Energy Realm while undergoing a tribulation and being besieged by four pavilions simultaneously.

His path of martial arts was a tightrope repeatedly jumping back and forth across the line of death.

Now it was time to jump again.

Wang Hao opened his eyes, looked at the ever-approaching cluster of eyeballs, and moved his still-functional left hand.

"Old Wei."

Wei Zhongxian replied, "This old slave is here."

"No matter what happens later, do not make a move. Keep your useful body and return to guard the imperial city for Us."

Something flashed in Wei Zhongxian's cloudy eyes, but he merely lowered his head. "This old slave obeys the decree."

Wang Hao then looked at the New Emperor Sword. "You piece of trash, what rank can you upgrade to for Us after eating this meal?"

The New Emperor Sword was furious. "I am not trash! I'm about to reach the eighth realm!"

"Alright," Wang Hao smiled. "Then We will give you a chance—later, when We pierce through the cocoon, you charge in and devour as much as you can."

"But it's full of eyeballs inside—"

"Devour the eyeballs!"

"..." The New Emperor Sword fell silent for a moment, and then the artifact spirit's voice became exceptionally serious. "Tyrant, if you die, who will rank me?"

Wang Hao said, "Earn your own ranking."

After saying that, he took a step forward.

The remaining power of national destiny poured into his left arm, and he slapped his palm onto the base of the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower, which was already inserted into the cocoon wall.

The tower shook violently.

The door to the ninth floor opened another fraction.

White lightning poured down on Wang Hao like a waterfall. His meridians felt as if they were being subjected to death by a thousand cuts, and every acupoint was screaming. But Wang Hao did not let go; instead, he pressed his entire body against it, using himself as a lightning rod to let the white lightning course through his entire body before pouring it back into the tower.

"Thunder Abyss Demon Suppression."

"Ninth Floor—"

"Open!"

Boom!

The moment the white lightning penetrated his body, Wang Hao heard the sound of his own bones.

It wasn't shattering.

It was resonance.

Like an ancient bell that had been silent for ten thousand years, being struck for the first time.

The bell tolled from deep within his bone marrow, traveling all the way up his spine, passing through his skull, and exploding in the deepest part of his consciousness. At that moment, Wang Hao's vision became extremely strange—he saw two worlds simultaneously.

One world was the black void inside the Night Fiend's cocoon, where the dense cluster of vertical pupils was madly approaching, its devouring power piercing his skin like countless cold needles.

The other world was a realm of pure white. White lightning, white light, white void. There was nothing in the void except a tower.

The ninth floor—the tower door was tightly shut.

But through the crack in the door, an eye was looking at him.

Wang Hao couldn't see the entirety of that eye. The crack was too narrow, revealing only a sliver. But just this sliver made his entire soul tremble. It wasn't fear; it was a more primal instinctual reaction—like a rabbit seeing a dragon, like a mortal seeing the heavens.

The ninth floor of the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower was not simply imprisoning a lightning tribulation this time.

It was a wisp of the Heavenly Dao's will, a Heavenly Dao completely enraged by the Night Fiend.

This realization wasn't something he thought of; it was directly poured into his consciousness the moment that eye looked at him through the crack. Like a piece of minimalist intelligence, with no superfluous descriptions, merely stating a fact.

The tower door opened.

It wasn't blown open by Wang Hao. It was pushed open from the inside by that eye.

The moment the door swung open, Wang Hao finally saw the entirety of the ninth floor. Inside the tower, there was no stampede of ten thousand lightning bolts as he had imagined, no army of thousands formed from lightning. There was only one extremely simple thing—an arc of white lightning, suspended in the center of the tower, like a quietly sleeping silkworm cocoon.

"The origin of white lightning," a voice said. "A core fragment of the heavenly tribulation. It is not lightning naturally generated by heaven and earth, but the debris left behind when the Heavenly Dao split the chaos. The Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower has never imprisoned such a lightning tribulation, and no one has ever been able to control it."

Wang Hao stared at that white lightning cocoon and asked, "What are the conditions to control it?"

"There are no conditions," the voice said. "It will not submit to anyone's control. It will only choose—whether to coexist with you."

"Coexist?"

"Your life in exchange for its awakening. You live, it lives. You die, it slumbers. There is no middle ground."

After hearing this, Wang Hao said only one word.

"Exchange."

Boom!

The white lightning cocoon exploded.

The ninth floor of the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower was completely activated once again. Unlike the last time, this time, all the small pavilions on the ninth floor of the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower opened.

In reality, Wei Zhongxian saw a scene he would never forget for the rest of his life.

Wang Hao pressed both hands against the base of the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower, his entire body swallowed by white lightning. His dragon robe turned to ash in the lightning, revealing a body wrapped in white lightning. Countless fine lightning patterns surfaced on his skin, starting from his fingertips, spreading across the backs of his hands, forearms, shoulders, chest, and neck, finally climbing onto his cheeks.

Those were not tattoos; they were meridians. The white lightning poured into his meridians, carving lightning patterns into every inch of his flesh and blood. With every lightning pattern completed, his aura surged significantly. The bottleneck at the peak of the Qi Controlling Realm was crushed into powder by the white lightning, and his cultivation directly broke through to the early stage of the Sky Soaring Realm.

But this was only the beginning. The white lightning wasn't here to help him break through; it was here to coexist with him. The price of coexistence was—every inch of his flesh and blood had to be tempered by the white lightning to the point where it could bear the debris of the Heavenly Dao.

The pain of this level of tempering could not be described with words. Wang Hao gritted his teeth, not uttering a single sound. His pupils had already been dyed pure white by the lightning, and a very fine lightning pattern faintly surfaced in the center of his pupils. The shape of that lightning pattern was exactly the same as the white lightning cocoon on the ninth floor of the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppressing Tower.

The cluster of Night Fiend vertical pupils inside the cocoon sensed something was wrong. It felt the aura of the white lightning, an aura that was not a threat to it—it was a natural enemy, but also its greatest aid if it could fuse with it.

But this time, the Night Fiend and Xie Wujiu had already merged. There was no longer the massive amount of eerie energy to offset the lightning tribulation like before. Like a rabbit catching the scent of a dragon's breath, fear seeped deep into its instincts. The densely packed eyeballs began to retreat madly. The power of devouring stopped attacking and instead desperately contracted, trying to escape from this rising cluster of white lightning.

But it was too late.

Wang Hao looked down at the Thunder Abyss Demon Suppression Pagoda that had already pierced into the wall of the cocoon. All nine floors of the pagoda lit up. The lightning from the first to the eighth floor was now completely dyed white, like eight steps climbing up step by step, ultimately converging at the ninth floor. The pavilion opened, connecting through to the ninth floor.

The door of the ninth floor opened completely.

An extremely thin thread of white lightning reached out from the pagoda door. It was not the tentative overflow from before, but a conscious extension with a clear purpose. The white lightning thread slowly reached toward that cluster of densely packed vertical pupils. Its movement was not fast, but it gave off an inescapable sense of destiny.

The cluster of vertical pupils exploded. Literally exploded. Countless eyeballs shrieked simultaneously, the sound so piercing that it almost tore through the soul. Wei Zhongxian let out a muffled groan, blood seeping from both his ears. The New Emperor Sword even rolled directly on the ground, its artifact spirit screaming, Stop screaming, stop screaming, stop screaming! I will call you daddy, alright?!

The vertical pupils stopped screaming because the white lightning thread had already touched the outermost eyeball.

The moment it touched, that eyeball vanished. It was not shattered, it was not blown apart; it just vanished. Like snow falling on a branding iron, it vaporized directly, leaving not a single trace behind.

This was the white lightning. The fragments of thunder used by the Heavenly Dao to cleave through primal chaos. It was not fire, not electricity, not energy—it was the very concept of destruction itself.

The second, the third, the tenth, the hundredth—the white lightning thread gently swept past, and the eyeballs vanished in swathes, like pencil marks erased by an eraser. The cluster of vertical pupils fled frantically, but the cocoon was only so big. It had retracted all its tentacles to crush Wang Hao, only to end up spinning a cocoon around itself—literally spinning a cocoon around itself; the idiom was terrifyingly apt right now. When it wanted to escape, it found it had nowhere to go.

Wang Hao walked step by step toward the core of the vertical pupils. The white lightning roamed over his body like a docile pet. With every step he took, the white lightning thread extended a foot forward. The cluster of vertical pupils continuously shrank, from the size of a house to the size of a millstone, from the size of a millstone to the size of a fist, until only the most core vertical pupil remained—that purest black eyeball that had opened first.

It retreated no further. Not because it did not want to, but because there was nowhere left to retreat. It shrank back into its most primitive form, attempting to use the highest concentration of devouring power to forcefully withstand the white lightning thread.

The white lightning thread pierced into the black eyeball. Sizzle—like a red-hot iron skewer inserted into butter, the eyeball trembled violently as devouring power surged out madly, trying to swallow the white lightning. But it could not swallow it. The white lightning was not energy; it was a rule. Rules could not be swallowed; they would only cause a backlash.

The black eyeball began to dissolve, peeling open layer by layer from the outside in, revealing what was inside—

Wang Hao narrowed his eyes. He clearly saw the core of the eyeball—it was an extremely condensed black crystal, the size of a fist, pitch-black all over. Countless fine nightmare patterns flowed across its surface, like a concentrated heart of a nightmare. Beside this crystal floated a silvery-white mark. The mark was circular, with countless stellar trajectories carved in the middle, resembling a pattern that concentrated an entire sea of stars.

The foundation of the Heavenly Mystery Pavilion. When Xie Wujiu merged with the Night Fiend, he also integrated the core of the Heavenly Mystery Pavilion's ten-thousand-year heritage into the main body of the Night Fiend. Now that the Night Fiend had been stripped away by the white lightning, this Star Sea Mark was exposed.

Wang Hao's eyes instantly lit up. Not because of the Heavenly Mystery Pavilion's heritage—well, partly because of that. But more importantly, the aura flowing within that Star Sea Mark was clearly the pure origin of the stars. The Night Fiend lived by devouring, and Xie Wujiu had swallowed quite a few things after merging with the Night Fiend. Now that the Night Fiend had been melted by the white lightning, all those devoured things were condensed within that black crystal.

The entire fortune.

The ten-thousand-year fortune of the Heavenly Mystery Pavilion, plus everything Xie Wujiu had swallowed after merging with the Night Fiend, was all right here.

Wang Hao's expression straightened, instantly switching from mission accomplished to looting mode. He reached out his hand, and the white lightning thread gently wrapped around the black crystal and the Star Sea Mark, extracting them from the dissolving eyeball.

The black eyeball let out a final mournful wail and dissipated completely.

The cocoon began to collapse.