The moment Sect Master Thorne ignited his Spirit Soul, the environment of the North Spire surrendered its last vestiges of stability. A Fourth Realm cultivator's self-detonation was not a simple explosion; it was a localized collapse of spiritual laws. The white light radiating from Thorne began to hiss as it came into contact with the atmosphere, turning the oxygen into a corrosive, emerald gas that ate through stone as if it were parchment.
Wei Chen stood less than ten paces away, his figure a silhouette of absolute stillness against the backdrop of an erasing world. To any other observer, this transition would be madness. Wei Chen had only just finished tempering his Twilight Meridians the previous night, formally stepping into the first substage of Realm 2. In the traditional path of cultivation, a practitioner would spend years, if not decades, saturating those veins before daring to condense a Core.
But Wei Chen was not a traditional practitioner. His foundation was built on the duality of everything, and nothing at the same time.
"You think your life-force is a weapon, Thorne," Wei Chen murmured, his voice cutting through the roar of the emerald fire. "But to me, you are merely the high-grade fuel I lacked. I do not have the luxury of time, you have provided a shortcut through your spite."
As Thorne's body reached the supercritical point, he lunged. He was no longer a man; he was a screaming comet of white-hot Spirit Soul intent of absolute annihilation. At that exact microsecond, the sky above Eos-Prime finally fractured. The first movement of the Tribulation of the Forbidden Chord descended—a spear of ink-black lightning that didn't aim for the mountain, but for the "Impossibility" that Wei Chen represented.
Wei Chen's hands moved in a slow, circular motion, activating his Absolute duality.
"Inversion," he whispered.
The Paradoxical nature of his existence flared to life. He didn't block Thorne's explosion; he invited it. Using his newly opened meridians as conduits, he pulled the terrifying Yang-heat of the fourth-realm detonation into his left arm. Simultaneously, he reached out with his right, catching the lunar, soul-chilling cold of the Tribulation lightning.
The two forces—one the peak of mortal sacrifice, the other the peak of celestial judgment—met in the center of his Dantian.
The physical toll was immense. Wei Chen's dark jade skin began to crack, gold and silver light bleeding from the fissures as his Realm 2 meridians groaned under the sheer volume of energy. This was the "rushed" breakthrough, a gambit that would have turned any other cultivator into a red mist. But Wei Chen utilized the pressure. He used the external force of the Tribulation to hammer the internal explosion of Thorne's soul into a singular, compressed point.
He was using the heavens as his hammer and a Sect Master's soul as his anvil.
"Master!" Liara's voice was a faint echo. She and the Shadow had been blown back by the atmospheric displacement, retreating to the southern peaks as the North Spire began to literally implode.
The shockwave didn't expand; it contracted. The North Spire, the High Sanctum, and the ruined bridge were pulled toward Wei Chen as if he were a gravitational singularity. This was the absolute duality—the ability to dictate the flow of opposing forces. The white explosion was sucked into the black void of the lightning, and within Wei Chen's Dantian, the liquid Qi of Realm 2 didn't just flow; it solidified.
A violent, rhythmic thrumming began to radiate from his chest—the heartbeat of a nascent yin yang Core. It was a sphere of swirling violet and gold, forged from the theft of a King's end and a God's anger.
Wei Chen sat cross-legged in the center of the void where the mountain peak used to be. His Realm 2 foundation had been consumed, acting as the kindling for this new, terrifying Realm 3 existence. He was no longer just a scholar of frequencies. He had forcibly carved his way into the ranks of the Core Condensation masters in a single, bloody afternoon.
He breathed out, and a cloud of grey ash—all that remained of Sect Master Thorne—fluttered from his lips.
"Substandard fuel," Wei Chen remarked, his blindfold remarkably still in the vacuum. "But it served its purpose."
High above, the Tribulation clouds didn't dissipate. They grew silent, a heavy, expectant pause before the second movement began. The heavens had realized that their first strike hadn't killed the cancer; it had only hardened it.