The instant the five-colored light spread across the whole of the testing stone, Lin Jin went rigid in the center of the white jade platform.
A warm current slid slowly along the meridians of his limbs, from his fingertips up his arms and down to settle in the dantian below his navel.
Warm. Weightless.
It was a marvel he had never felt in his life.
A mortal body had never touched spiritual energy before, and now the fine currents of heaven and earth were pushing into him of their own accord, circulating slowly along his meridians until every inch of flesh and blood felt as though it had been soaked in warm water — tingling, and opening out.
Lin Jin narrowed his eyes slightly, unable to keep the smile off his mouth, sunk entirely in the newness of the sensation.
So this is spiritual energy entering the body.
So this is what cultivation feels like.
He stood quietly, full of anticipation for the pattern of his spirit root to surface on the stone, waiting for Lei Wujie to speak his talent aloud.
One breath. Two. Three.
The five colors on the testing stone raced about like mad things, and never once congealed into any fixed shape of a spirit root.
Nothing was left in the chamber but a shrill hum.
The contempt on Lei Wujie's face froze solid. His brows knitted tight and disbelief filled his eyes.
A test on a high-grade stone produced a result in an instant at the fastest, and at the very slowest never took more than three breaths.
He had cultivated for decades and watched countless disciples measured — mixed roots, single roots, mutated roots, every variety, and never once an error.
Never, not one time, had it been like this: the light of the stone rioting without cease, and not the slightest result appearing.
"That isn't right..."
Lei Wujie stepped forward, staring hard at the violently shuddering stone, and murmured under his breath.
"How can it be stuck? A high-grade testing stone cannot malfunction."
Chu Qingxue, standing to one side, came slowly back to herself as well, the panic in her chest pressed down for the moment by the strangeness of it.
Her cool eyes fixed on Lin Jin up on the white jade platform, full of confusion.
Spirit-testing was the most elementary art the sect had. Simple, stable, never a surprise in it.
How could it be dragging on this long?
And in that very moment, with the two of them baffled and locked in place —
The color went out of Lin Jin's face where he stood at the center of the platform.
The warm, weightless ease of a moment ago drained away, and in its place came a pain that erupted all at once.
The place of the dantian below his navel felt as though countless needles had been driven hard into it, and a tearing, swelling agony spread instantly through his meridians and out to every part of him.
Every muscle in him snapped tight and his teeth clenched.
"Ssss—"
The pain drove straight into his skull. Lin Jin let out a low involuntary bark of it, and light flared in his eyes.
He thought this was the sign of a spirit root fully awakening.
"My spirit root... it's coming out!"
Chu Qingxue: "?"
Lei Wujie: "?"
Both of them blanked at the same moment, entirely at a loss.
The test only drew energy; it did not shape the root. Since when did a spirit root awaken with agony attached?
But before either of them could think it through.
The sky above the entire Transmission Pavilion abruptly went dark.
Heavy black cloud had gathered at some point across a sky that had been cloudless and clear, and the mass of it rolled and churned, black and low, pressing a suffocating oppression down over the whole peak.
A gale came up out of nowhere and set the window lattices of the chamber rattling.
Deep in the cloud, fine motes of lightning rolled with a muffled weight, and low booms came down from the ninth heaven.
Tribulation lightning!
Genuine tribulation cloud, come to judge!
Every hair on Lei Wujie's body stood up. His pupils shrank hard, all the blood drained out of his face, and a head of cold sweat soaked the hair at his brow in an instant.
He had lived close to a hundred years and read through the sect's ancient records and registers. He had seen Foundation Establishment tribulations, Golden Core tribulations, Nascent Soul tribulations.
And in all of it, not half a word had ever mentioned that testing a spirit root could call down tribulation lightning.
The thing violated the plain order of heaven and earth.
"Impossible... this is absolutely impossible!"
Lei Wujie's voice shook. He wrenched his head around to Chu Qingxue beside him, his tone full of the most extreme alarm.
"Qingxue! Have you ever seen anything like this? A spirit test calling down tribulation lightning? There is no record of it anywhere in the old texts!"
Chu Qingxue was thoroughly dumbfounded.
That cool, composed face had broken completely, and her eyes were full of shock and blankness.
She had crossed over into this body and inherited every one of the original owner's memories.
Ten thousand years of Ethereal Sword Sect lineage, countless secret texts and ancient volumes — and she had never seen, never heard of a scene as absurd as this.
A simple entry-level spirit test, and it had called down a tribulation?
"I... I have never seen it."
There was a tremor in Chu Qingxue's voice that she could not quite keep out of it.
Outside the chamber, the outer sect disciples standing guard around the Transmission Pavilion registered the phenomenon in the sky on the instant.
One startled, uncertain voice after another rose up.
"Something's wrong! Why has the sky gone that black?"
"That's tribulation cloud! That's a heavenly tribulation!"
"Tribulation lightning only comes when someone breaks through a realm, doesn't it? Who's undergoing a tribulation here at the Transmission Pavilion?"
"Senior Brother Lei and Senior Sister Qingxue are inside! They're testing that mortal who just arrived!"
"A spirit test calling a tribulation? That's insane! That's tribulation power at Golden Core grade at the least!"
Disciples without number came crowding in, heads tilted back to the churning black cloud and the thunder overhead, horror all over their faces.
And Lin Jin, at the center of the chamber, could hear nothing at all of the alarm and the talk outside.
After the extremity of that pain, a force violent past measure and overwhelmingly strong flooded through his four limbs and hundred bones.
His consciousness floated up on the instant, and he entered a state of transcendence he had never known.
All the world's ten thousand things — the sound of the wind, the sound of the thunder, the tracks along which spiritual energy moved — every one of them printed itself into his mind with perfect clarity.
Every sense had been magnified without limit.
An enormous elation broke his thoughts apart.
He threw back his head and laughed aloud, and the wild sound of it rang through the sealed stone chamber.
"Hahaha! I knew it! I knew I'd be different!"
"What does a heavenly spirit root matter! What does it matter if the old texts have no record of it!"
"This is my talent! This is my opportunity! This is my cheat code!"
Lin Jin's eyes were scarlet, an ambition and an arrogance at their utmost churning in his chest.
"From this day on, I, Lin Jin, am destined to stand at the summit of this continent!"
"The whole cultivation world, every single person in it, will look up at me! Every living thing under heaven will submit to me!"
The thoughts multiplied wildly in his mind beyond his control.
Power. Strength. The summit. Unmatched by anyone.
And standing at his side, aloof and peerlessly beautiful, one of a kind: Chu Qingxue.
Senior Sister was the only person in this world who had been good to him. She was destined... to be his.
And the moment that thought surfaced, Lin Jin went abruptly still.
No.
Something is wrong.
He was not this kind of person.
He had never once been this arrogant, and he would certainly never produce this kind of overbearing, obsessive, everything-must-be-mine madness.
From the moment the tribulation lightning had come down, the inside of him had grown more and more agitated.
Desire without end, ambition without end, tyranny without end were forcing themselves into his mind and eating away at his own reason a piece at a time.
"What... what is happening to my heart..."
The scarlet in Lin Jin's eyes flickered light and dark, one half of him at the extremity of madness and the other at the extremity of clarity.
"My desires... they're being magnified without limit..."
And in that instant of his mind reeling.
CRACK—!
A shrill sound of shattering split the air.
The high-grade testing stone, weathered by long ages and reckoned indestructible, was suddenly covered over its whole surface with a dense mesh of fractures.
The five-colored light rioted, pouring wildly out along the cracks, and the whole stone shook so hard it seemed the next second would break it to pieces.
The situation had gone entirely out of control.
Chu Qingxue's pupils shrank. She snapped back to herself and called out sharply, her voice urgent.
"Senior Brother Lei! Stop! Cut off the transfer of spiritual power at once!"
Lei Wujie had lost his head already. Both hands clamped rigid on the seal, the veins standing at his temple, his voice edged with despair.
"I can't stop it! Once the energy has entered his dantian it locks solid! There is no breaking it off!"
Lin Jin's body lifted entirely clear of the ground, his feet leaving the white jade platform, the whole of him held up in midair by some invisible force.
Chu Qingxue did not hesitate for an instant.
The utterly pure power of a top-grade mutated water spirit root swept through her in a moment, her plain white dao dress stirring with no wind to move it, a gentle but overwhelming water-attribute energy filling the entire chamber at once.
She raised a hand and struck straight at the dantian meridians through which Lei Wujie was still circulating his power, meaning to disrupt the link by force and sever it.
And in the instant her own energy touched that channel —
A cold, tyrannical, greedy suction erupted out of Lin Jin's body.
Hummm—
The water energy in Chu Qingxue's palm went pouring down the channel toward Lin Jin's dantian, beyond her control.
And not only hers. The lightning energy Lei Wujie had passed in was seized and stripped away with it, held fast and taken by force.
Devouring.
Lin Jin's body was devouring every scrap of foreign spiritual power it touched.
No wonder Lei Wujie could not break the transfer. No wonder the test had gone completely out of hand.
The shock of it went through Chu Qingxue, and she called out hard and fast.
"Senior Brother Lei! Cease entirely, this instant! Seal your dantian! Cut off every circulation of power! Now! You will be badly hurt by the backlash!"
Lei Wujie's mind lurched. He did not dare delay for half a moment. He broke the seal in his hands apart by force, paid for it with the damage to his meridians, and clamped his own dantian shut against the flow.
And in the next instant.
The backlash detonated.
Puh—!
A mouthful of red blood came out of Lei Wujie's mouth.
He staggered several steps back, barely steadied himself, clutched at the agony in his dantian and looked up in disbelief at Lin Jin hanging in the air.
The young man's spiritual power was swelling out of control now, his clothes snapping and cracking with it.
The black tribulation cloud in the ninth heaven pressed all the way down, and the rolling lightning in it merged seamlessly with the power around his body.
The heavenly tribulation no longer seemed to be a judgment aimed at him.
It seemed more like...
A power that had become one with him.