Feeling the opponent's suddenly soaring, ocean-crushing divine pressure, Lu Jingming showed no fear. His battle intent only burned hotter.
Eightfold Thunder Interdict—he had only revealed five. The true killing moves were still to come.
Driven back by Lu Jingming's whip once, Tang San's already-cold face sank completely. The majesty and wrath belonging to a God King erupted.
The phantom of the Seagod Trident in his hand burst into unprecedented, dazzling divine light. The trident's body hummed, as if every sea on the Douluo star resonated with it, roaring thunderously.
"An ant dares profane divine might!"
Tang San's voice was icy and pitiless, carrying the weight of judgment.
"Let body and spirit be annihilated as the price, to remember that a God King cannot be insulted."
"Golden Thirteen Strikes!"
He stopped holding back and unleashed the Seagod's signature divine technique.
Though this was only a strand of divine sense, unable to exhibit his true God King-level strength, driven by the will of a God King its power was still enough to shake the cosmos.
"Unfettered Storm!"
The trident traced a profound trajectory. Rings of gold-blue light rippled outward like endless tides, instantly enveloping Lu Jingming.
This strike was not a direct assault but contained control—binding gods and locking souls, calming the storm and plunging the opponent into absolute restraint.
Lu Jingming felt the space around him congeal. The surging thunder seemed to grow sluggish, his movements abruptly slowing.
"Black Abyss—Wither!"
Without hesitation, Lu Jingming thrust the Black Abyss spear in his left hand. The pinpoint of ultimate black on the spear tip swelled, becoming a rotating micro black hole, ravenously devouring and breaking down the gold-blue rings of confinement.
The power of decay and death clashed violently with the Seagod's control, producing a tooth-aching, rending screech.
"A Thousand Years, Empty and Vast!"
In that instant, Tang San's second strike arrived.
The trident became ten thousand golden afterimages, as if traversing millennia, stabbing at Lu Jingming from every angle, the unreal and the real interwoven—inescapable.
"White Flower—Bloom!"
Lu Jingming's right-hand White Flower spear danced. Holy yet incisive spear-light bloomed like a world-cleansing lotus. Countless pure white petals imbued with the light of life whirled out, meeting every golden trident shadow with pinpoint accuracy.
The dense clanging collisions were like a torrential downpour. Each clash unleashed terrifying energy ripples.
"No Return!"
Tang San's eyes flashed cold. He seized the instant of Lu Jingming's guard and thrust a strike condensed to ultimate penetration.
Golden light gathered to a point, as if piercing time and space, ignoring all defense, targeting Lu Jingming's brow.
Thunder vortices spun in Lu Jingming's pupils. He neither dodged nor flinched. Holding Black Abyss and White Flower in a cross before him, black-red thunder and white-gold lightning interwove in an unprecedented fusion, becoming a spiral thunder-spear that met the "No Return" tip head-on.
Boom—!!
Extreme radiance erupted, swallowing all sound and sight. The terror of the blast spread outward like a planet exploding.
The next instant, both figures moved at once—
One gold-blue, one black-red, two lances of light tearing the sky, slamming into each other.
Trident against spear, divine skills unfurled.
From the ruins over eastern Mingdu all the way to the former city center in the south, they fought in a running battle.
Where they passed, space shattered like broken glass, collapsing, mending, and collapsing again.
Below, the ground was plowed by an invisible giant plow. Everything—ruins, metal, even the drifting energy particles—was reduced to the finest dust by the terrifying spillover of their exchange, utterly obliterated.
The world seemed to lose all color, leaving only pure black and white, gold-blue and black-red.
Only those two lights—embodying different divine seats and different wills—collided, crossed, parted, and collided again.
Each clash was like stars colliding, bursting with destructive brilliance.
Their duel also drew the attention of other Servants and powerhouses in battle.
In the high sky, sensing the collision of two divine auras, Feixiao paused; Celenova also cast her gaze downward. The four demigods were grievously wounded; if not for Celenova, they would have died beneath Feixiao's spear by now.
Jing Yuan, Cerydra, Hysilens, Aglaea, Jeanne, and Hoolay all hesitated for a heartbeat, then their assaults grew even fiercer.
Within the imperial palace, the fighting intensified further.
Xiao Wu, goaded by some inexplicable stimulus, grew somewhat manic; Artoria and Cu Chulainn were in dire peril.
Across all of Mingdu, the battle became ever more intense due to Tang San and Lu Jingming's fight. Everyone went all out in an instant, eager to finish their own opponents quickly.
In a blink, Lu Jingming and Seagod Tang San had exchanged over a thousand moves. The clash of divine power and the duel of laws had reached a white heat.
By virtue of his formidable divine body in Divineform, the terrifying energy endurance provided by his dual soul cores, and the properties of Black Abyss and White Flower, Lu Jingming forced a stalemate against Tang San's strand-of-divine-sense.
But he knew his Divineform's time was near its limit. His body's burden was at the breaking point, his soul wracked by tearing pain.
A fierce light flashed in Lu Jingming's eyes. He ignored everything, taking Tang San's elusive, thousand-ton killing move "White Cloud of a Thousand Years" with the Divineform-tempered shoulder armor.
A piercing impact and the fine crack of bone sounded. His throat sweetened; he forced down the surging blood and used the massive force to fling himself backward.
At the same time, his hands formed a complex seal before his chest, inciting the lightning of the heavens to riot.
"Eightfold Thunder Interdict, Sixth—Summon the Thunder Emperor!"
His shout was like thunder from the ninth heaven. Words became law.
Behind him, the gigantic, slowly rotating black-red thunder halo gave a sky-rending hum, detached, and hung overhead.
Countless black-red bolts of annihilating divine thunder poured forth like vassals paying homage to their emperor—from rifts in the void, from his pores, from the scorched earth below for ten thousand li—converging into the halo like rivers to the sea.
The halo swelled and deformed at a speed visible to the naked eye, in an instant becoming a dark sun over a hundred meter in diameter, made purely of annihilating thunder.
On its corona, billions of profound, ferocious thunder sigils flickered in and out, radiating a fearsome pressure that twisted the space-structure of the Douluo plane, nearly shattering it.
A heavenly might swept the world—the authority to govern the birth and death of ten thousand thunders, to judge all beings' sins.
Then a colossal pillar of black thunder, thick enough to blot out the sun and pure enough to devour all, descended like the last judgment of heaven's wrath, bearing absolute will to annihilate all things.
Where the pillar passed, space was not torn but returned directly to chaotic nothingness, locked onto the Seagod Tang San below.
For the first time, Tang San's expression grew grave. The trident phantom burst with azure light bright enough to pierce mountains and rivers, as if compressing the whole boundless sea into a point.
"Sun of the Sea!"
He roared, thrusting the trident.
A similarly massive, azure energy sun formed of endless heavy water and the Seagod's purest divine power surged to meet it. Its light was gentle, but it contained supreme might.
Rumble—!!!
The black thunder pillar and the azure sea-sun collided high in the sky.
There was no instant explosion—only extreme energy annihilation and a struggle of laws.
Black and blue energies entwined, corroded, and cancelled each other wildly, erupting with a roar that dimmed sun and moon. Each wisp of straying energy could instantly kill a Title Douluo.
"Seventh—Heaven's Funeral of Ten Thousand Thunders!"
Lu Jingming didn't wait for the outcome. He slammed both hands down on the void below. His face paled further, but his battle will burned like a star.
In an instant, centered on the collision point, the entire sky within sight was packed with billions of twisted, roaring, ferocious black-red thunder-dragons.
They seemed like doomsday beasts escaped from a thunder hell. Each was thick as a mountain ridge, its body flickering with the runes of the first six thunders.
Like a terminal storm, they poured down indiscriminately upon Tang San, smashing and self-detonating, instantly forging an absolute, god-burning, soul-extinguishing inferno of thunder, drowning Tang San and his Seagod domain.
The dragons' roars and explosions merged into a symphony of destruction, trying to drag the world into thunder's end-times.
Tang San's vast sea domain was compressed to the limit. The Golden Thirteen Strikes formed an absolute defense, countless golden trident shadows shredding the charging thunder-dragons.
But the dragons were endless, madly consuming his divine power and divine sense. His defensive ring quaked violently, shrinking bit by bit.
"Eighth—The End—Ten Thousand Thunders to Silence!"
Lu Jingming spat a mouthful of resplendent blood made entirely of divine power and thunder. Once freed, the divine blood became myriad eldritch blood-lightnings that curled back and enveloped him fully.
In that instant, Lu Jingming became thunder, and thunder became him—man and lightning as one, a supreme state.
He seemed like the first filament of lightning at the dawn of time—and also the final abode at the end of all things.
All sounds ceased. All radiance withdrew.
Only absolute, terminal stillness of annihilation spread from him, quietly yet irresistibly.
The roaring doomsday thunder-dragons, the black thunder pillar against the sea-sun, even Tang San's boundless Seagod domain—all, upon touching that terminal annihilation, were simply erased, soundlessly dissolving, breaking down, returning to nothing.
As if they had never existed.
"What?!"
Tang San's face finally changed drastically, horror appearing in his eyes.
He clearly felt even his divine power—and the very source of his divine sense—being dissolved and erased by that overbearing end-force.
He drove divine power and sense frantically to resist, but the terminal force's priority was terrifyingly high, and he was, after all, only a strand.
At the instant when his defenses were thinnest and his power briefly fell into silence—
Ssst!
A hair-fine black-red bolt, condensed with the power of the end, like a godslaying thorn born from the void, slipped through a defensive gap and pierced Tang San's left shoulder.
"Urgh!"
Tang San's figure convulsed. His left shoulder, formed of divine power, turned translucent and nearly collapsed. It didn't shatter fully, but his divine body was truly wounded.
The Seagod Tang San—wounded in the divine body by a mere mortal.
"You—!"
A tidal wave of rage exploded in Tang San's heart, instantly pushing back the corrosion of the end-force—an unforgivable humiliation.
Far off, Tang Wutong, sheltered by divine power, stood dumbfounded, her pink-blue eyes full of shock and confusion. She stared at the figure emerging from the lightning—pale-faced yet still proudly upright—as if to carve this moment into her soul forever.
It was her first time seeing anyone wound the father she believed invincible.
The Seagod's fury became a terrifying pressure that swept heaven and earth, like the roar of the entire ocean, crashing down.
Tang San's wrath erupted like an ancient submarine volcano, becoming palpable coercion that engulfed everything.
Countless massive sea pillars, each over a hundred meters thick, erupted without warning from the shattered earth, carrying torrential waves and destructive divine power, turning the already-ruined southern Mingdu into a surging sea of divine punishment.
Gales howled, rain poured like cataracts. The very sky was forcibly rewritten—clouds pressed low, electric serpents writhed—but even they seemed to tremble before the Seagod's wrath.
This was the majesty of a God King. Even a single strand of divine sense could seize the laws of a region, far beyond ordinary deities' reach.
Upon the boundless waters, an even more terrifying sight appeared—countless sky-piercing waterspouts drank the sea and, guided by divine power, merged into a towering colossus thousands of meters tall, its upper body buried in the clouds: the Seagod Giant.
Its form, forged of the deep sea's power and radiant divinity, had a blurred face yet an ancient, suffocating presence. Each breath called hurricanes and tsunamis. Its vast shadow nearly covered the entirety of Mingdu's ruins.
"Ant—you have chosen death!"
The icy divine snarl rolled like a billion thunders within the clouds. Its shockwaves swept thousands of kilometers. Even commoners hundreds of km away saw the colossal silhouette standing between heaven and earth and shivered under apocalyptic dread.
"The last strike!"
Gazing at the sky-blotting giant, Lu Jingming's expression tightened. Feeling the pain in his body and the pressure on his mind, he knew his Divineform was about to end, and he had only barely wounded Tang San's strand.
Even so, it was astounding—this was a God King's strand, and lodged within Tang Wutong no less, with power comparable to a full second-rank god's body.
If not for planar suppression, as a newly-minted Title Douluo merely borrowing a divine seat and true lightning to briefly assume Divineform, Lu Jingming might not have hurt Tang San at all.
Such a feat would shine through the ages.
History would record: Lu Jingming, the Doomsday Douluo, made a god bleed as a mortal—his name immortal.
"Xiao Ming, stop. Your spiritual sea is nearly dry. Your flesh is at the brink of collapse."
Makoto's anxious voice sounded in his mind.
Were it not for White Flower's vast creative force and the Greater Lord Rukkhadevata's Dendro Authority constantly repairing him, he would have disintegrated in the earlier exchanges.
But spiritual overdraft cannot be instantly mended. A mortal soul forcibly bearing a god's throne—ultimately too much.