Free Web NovelChapter 35: Chapter 35. Heavenly Tribulation
"If you mess this up, you will die?"
Lyra absorbed those words and let them sink in fully. Whatever lingering distraction had been left in her dissolved. Her entire focus narrowed onto Catherine, every word, every instruction, taken in completely.
"I’m going to channel Qi into you now. It will travel through your Meridians and enter your Dantian. The moment it does, it will awaken your dormant Dantian for the first time." Catherine’s voice remained level, precise. "While my Qi moves through your Meridians, you’ll feel a sensation, something entirely new to you. I need you to use that sensation as a reference point, and begin drawing in Qi from the atmosphere the same way, almost like breathing."
She paused, making sure Lyra was tracking every word.
"Here’s the part you need to understand. When I unlock your Dantian for the first time, it will be extremely weak. If you don’t fill it sufficiently within the right window of time, it will collapse, and the moment it collapses, you die. So you need to absorb Qi carefully. But you also can’t rush it. If you fill it too quickly, the pressure will be too much for the Dantian to withstand, and it will break the same way, too little, and too much, both kill you. You’ll need to walk a narrow line the entire way through." A brief pause. "And the last thing you should know, this process is going to hurt. A great deal." ƒreewebɳovel.com
Lyra felt a flicker of fear move through her at that. And close behind it came something else, doubt, old and familiar, rising before she could stop it.
Can I actually do this? Is this something I’m capable of? I’ve never managed to do anything properly in my entire life. Will this be the same? Am I going to spend my whole life as nothing but a failure?
The thought sat heavy in her chest. And then her eyes found Necrotize.
He was watching her, not with concern, not with doubt, but with something that looked almost like anticipation. Like he was genuinely looking forward to what was about to happen. Like he had no question at all about the outcome.
No one had ever looked at her like that before. Not once, in her entire life, someone watching her with that kind of expectation, that kind of certainty that something good was coming.
The feeling was completely new. And she found, without really deciding to, that she didn’t want to disappoint it. She made up her mind, quietly and completely, she would give everything she had.
"Alright, Lady Catherine. I’m ready. Please begin."
"That’s the spirit." Catherine smiled faintly, took a slow breath, and began.
A thread of deep red energy began flowing from her palms into Lyra’s back.
Lyra felt it the moment it entered, starting at her spine and spreading outward through what felt like channels running beneath her skin, branching through her body in directions she had never known existed. The sensation was unlike anything she’d experienced before. Like breathing for the first time, somehow, despite having breathed her entire life.
She felt the energy converge, moving through countless small channels, all of them eventually narrowing toward a single point below her navel. Her entire lower abdomen began to warm.
And then it struck something. Something round. The energy pressed against its surface, slowly working its way through, breaching it bit by bit.
So this is the Dantian.
She marveled at the discovery, something that had existed inside her her whole life, completely unknown to her, written in no book she’d ever read.
The red energy settled at the base of this round structure. It didn’t take up much space, perhaps five to ten percent of the total volume. The moment it stabilized, the pain began.
It started in her lower abdomen, a pain unlike anything she had ever felt. It felt like something was tearing through her from the inside, like her entire abdomen was being ripped open and pulled outward. Her whole body began to shake. Sweat broke out across her skin in beads. Blood began trickling from her nose. Every instinct screamed at her to get up, to run, to escape whatever this was.
She didn’t move.
"Don’t give in to the pain," Catherine said, voice steady. "Endure it. Whatever happens, do not let your focus slip, or something far worse could happen."
Lyra fought to steady herself, forcing her breathing to slow despite the agony tearing through her core.
"Good. Just like that. Now, remember the sensation from when my Qi moved through you. Use that. Start absorbing Qi the same way."
Lyra focused. She recalled the feeling exactly, the channels, the warmth, the path leading down to her Dantian. She drew in a long breath.
And began.
The sensation was different this time. Catherine’s Qi had carried warmth. What she was drawing in now was cold, sharp, clean cold, moving through her channels and converging at her abdomen exactly as before.
But when it reached the Dantian, she noticed something strange. Of all the Qi she was absorbing through her Meridians, only a tiny fraction actually made it inside, like separating a few drops of water from an entire pond.
These drops were a pale green. And the moment they touched the red energy already settled inside, the red began shifting, turning green, spreading, growing. What had been five to ten percent of the Dantian’s volume became fifteen, then twenty.
And as the colour changed, the pain began to ease. Not completely. But steadily, gradually, it loosened its grip.
Lyra kept her entire focus on the process, absorbing, refining, drop by drop, the green expanding through the Dantian. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
Thirty percent.
The moment she crossed that threshold, the pain in her abdomen vanished entirely.
Necrotize and Catherine noticed the change immediately, the shaking stopped, the sweat stopped. Catherine spoke first.
"She’s good. Reaching thirty percent this quickly is genuinely impressive, don’t you think, Master?"
"Yes," Necrotize agreed. "It really is."
But as he said it, his gaze had already left Lyra entirely, drifting upward, toward the sky. Catherine noticed but didn’t ask why.
With the pain gone, Lyra’s focus sharpened further. The refining process accelerated.
Thirty-five percent.
Forty.
Forty-five.
Forty-nine.
And the moment she crossed fifty,
Something changed.
Lyra’s eyes were still closed, but she felt it immediately, a sudden disturbance in the air around her, sharp enough to break through her concentration. The Qi essences drifting through the atmosphere around her began behaving strangely, moving in ways that had nothing to do with anything she was doing.
Elizabeth felt it too. A sudden stillness settled over everything, the air had gone completely still, the wind that had been moving through the garden all afternoon simply stopped. Not a single leaf moved. No butterflies. No birds. Everything around them seemed to have gone into hiding, as though something enormous had just announced its presence.
And then the light began to change. Not the gradual dimming of sunset, something else. Something that didn’t belong to the natural order of the day at all.
Fwwwww.
A gust of wind tore through the garden, but it wasn’t like the breeze from before. This carried something else entirely. A cold that sank into the skin and didn’t stop at the skin, a cold that felt like it belonged to death itself.
Elizabeth’s eyes moved to Necrotize, who had been staring up at the sky for some time now. She hadn’t questioned it before. Now she understood why.
She looked up too.
What she saw made her knees nearly give out.
The entire sky above the academy had turned black, choked with clouds unlike anything from that morning. These didn’t drift. They didn’t sit still. They were turning, a massive, slow rotation spanning the entire sky above the academy, a vortex large enough to swallow the whole campus whole.
Catherine looked up and saw it too. Her face went pale, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open.
Only one name surfaced in her mind.
"...Heavenly Tribulation."
