Chapter 36: Chapter 36. Dantian Completion and The Heavenly Lightning

Necrotize stood with his eyes fixed on the sky, the wind moving through his hair. The clouds above churned in a massive slow rotation and his gaze tracked them with sharp, unwavering focus. Beside him, Catherine stared upward with her mouth slightly open, and then she heard herself say the word.

"Heavenly Tribulation."

She couldn’t understand why it was happening. It shouldn’t be happening. A heavenly tribulation only descended when a cultivator crossed a specific threshold, a major stage boundary. Lyra had only just awakened her Dantian. By any logic Catherine knew, the tribulation shouldn’t arrive until she had completed three full major stages and stepped into the fourth. So why was it here now?

Catherine lowered her gaze and swept it across the garden. Lyra sat cross-legged on the ground her eyes closed and completely absorbed in her refinement, unaware of anything happening around her. A few steps away, Elizabeth stood staring at the sky sweat were running down her face and confusion written across every feature. And Necrotize is still staring upward hands in his pockets and his expression unreadable.

Elizabeth couldn’t hold the question back any longer.

"Lord Necrotize, what’s happening? Why are those clouds rotating like that above the entire academy?"

Necrotize looked at her. He saw the faint fear in her face. Then in the same unhurried tone he used for most things, he explained.

"What you’re seeing is called a Heavenly Tribulation. Think of it as a test." He paused briefly. "When we decided to allow mortals to use our essence, we built a trial into the arrangement alongside it. If a mortal seeks power that exceeds what their current state should allow, they must first pass a test. That test is the Heavenly Tribulation."

He let that settle before continuing.

"You can think of it as a universal law, it activates anywhere, for any mortal who reaches beyond their natural limits. In a sense, it’s a small strike from us, the Ancient Origins. Not a powerful one but it can draw on no more than one percent of our collective strength, and even that isn’t fully used. But if the cultivator survives it, they’re permitted to advance. If they don’t," he left the ending where it was, "that’s as far as their journey goes."

Elizabeth absorbed every word carefully. It explained what was happening around her, at least in structure. Then she looked at Lyra, still seated, still refining, eyes still closed, and something moved through Elizabeth’s expression that didn’t have a clean name.

***

Lyra’s Dantian had reached seventy percent.

She could feel something happening outside herself, something enormous, something in the air and in the ground, pressing at the edges of her awareness. She didn’t know what it was. And she didn’t reach for the answer. Her mind held one thought only.

Fill it. See it through to the end.

She slowly with her almost focus continued to fill the Dantian.

Ninety percent.

Ninety-three.

Ninety-seven.

Ninety-nine.

One hundred.

The moment the last drop fell into place, something happened inside her that she had no words for. The light didn’t appear outside, it bloomed within her, rising from her lower abdomen and spreading through every channel in her body until she felt it at the edges of her fingertips, the crown of her head, the soles of her feet.

Warmth. The kind that came from inside rather than from anything outside.

And then her senses shifted.

She could hear further. Smell things she hadn’t noticed before. She could feel the microscopic grains of dust drifting on the air against her skin, could distinguish them, in a way that would have seemed impossible five minutes ago.

She opened her eyes.

And froze.

The world around her had gone dark. Not gradually, it had simply changed, like something had decided the light was no longer relevant. A wind moved through the garden that had no warmth in it at all. And when she looked up,

Her eyes nearly left her head.

The entire sky above the academy was blanketed in black cloud. Churning, rotating, with the academy at the centre of the vortex. Occasional threads of lightning flickered between the masses of cloud, brief and sharp and completely silent from this distance.

"What’s happening?" she said, rising slowly from the ground.

Everyone turned toward her at the sound of her voice.

Catherine took one look at her standing there and made a decision, she tucked whatever was showing on her face behind a warm smile, crossed to Lyra, and cupped her cheek gently.

"You did wonderfully, dear."

Lyra received the touch without moving away. It was a kind of contact she had never experienced, something she had no category for, and it settled over her like something she hadn’t known she was missing. Then...

RUMBLE.

The clouds above released a sound that wasn’t just heard, it was felt. The ground trembled faintly with it. Every head turned skyward in the same instant.

Seeing the open confusion on Lyra’s face, Catherine explained quickly, the Heavenly Tribulation, what it meant, why it had come.

Lyra repeated the name slowly. "Heavenly Tribulation."

And then, without warning, a different kind of thought moved through her.

Am I going to fail again? Can I really carry the hope people place in me? Will everyone around me end up hurt because of this? Will I always be the one who causes others pain?

Necrotize caught it.

He looked directly at her.

"You’ve done well. Whatever happens now, no one here will come to any harm because of it. You don’t need to carry that."

Lyra held his gaze for a long moment. Then, quietly, she smiled.

"Okay."

And then the centre of the vortex began to glow.

A white light gathered inside the churning black clouds, building slowly, brightening with each rotation. Catherine braced herself, shoulders squared, weight settled. Elizabeth and Lyra both stared upward with their full attention. Necrotize looked up as well, his expression completely cold and still.

And then, calmly, he drew one hand from his pocket.

The light inside the clouds intensified. The rotation tightened.

Suuuu,

A bolt of lightning descended on the academy.

Not like any lightning that belonged to the natural world. A natural bolt might span five to ten centimetres at its widest. This one had a diameter equal to the entire academy grounds.

Catherine, Lyra, and Elizabeth stared with their mouths open.

Before any of them could process what they were seeing, the strike had already crossed half the distance between the sky and the earth. Before Elizabeth’s eyes could even finish blinking, it was already almost upon them. There was no time to understand it, no time to react to it, everything was moving at a speed that outpaced comprehension entirely.

The lightning hung in the air just above the academy.

And then...

Boom.