Lu Yun had a good idea why he had suddenly aged again.
His lifespan must have been affected. That extraordinary bolt of lightning hadn’t just devastated his spiritual world—eradicating the Martial Dao Will of those mountain peaks and jade buddhas—it had also carried away a portion of his life.
In common parlance, it was a so-called heavenly punishment. To act against the heavens was to invite their wrath.
When one defied fate, broke through their limits, and crossed a threshold that was never meant to be crossed, it was only natural for the heavens to put them in their place. Fair enough.
SIGH. Lu Yun couldn’t help but sigh softly, muttering to himself, ’No wonder there are no records of anyone breaking through to this Realm. Is it because the heavens forbid it?’
He thought of Huang Jiao and his ilk—old monsters who had scraped by since the Zulong Dynasty. Each was a peerless genius, a prodigy who would have stood at the Martial Arts Peak in any era.
Yet not one of them had managed to truly break through to the Realm of Manifest Saint True Monarch. They could only rely on their Martial Dao Will, anchoring it to objects and creatures, seizing new bodies to prolong lives that should have long since been extinguished.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to break through; they had simply failed. The consequence of failure was what he was experiencing now: being struck by heavenly lightning until you were charred on the outside and tender on the inside, and having your lifespan shaved away by heavenly punishment.
The outcome could be even worse—their souls might have been utterly obliterated, leaving them no chance to even possess another body.
Now, those people were nothing more than lingering remnants of will, barely hanging on. And it seemed they needed the power of the collective will of the masses, along with the Dragon Vein, just for a chance to break through to the Realm of Manifest Saint True Monarch.
The will of the masses is a torrent formed from the converged Telekinesis of countless people, and the Dragon Vein is the power of the heavens and the earth. Neither could be dispensed with.
Lu Yun finally understood. Without those two things, any ordinary person attempting to break through to the Realm of Manifest Saint True Monarch was doomed to fail.
A pillar of lightning nearly five meters thick—only someone with his Golden Indestructible Body could have withstood it.
Had it been anyone else, even a master at the Peak of Divine Intent Grandmaster, a strike from such lightning would have had only one outcome: they would have melted away, leaving not even ash behind.
The power of the Dragon Vein must be for avoiding heavenly punishment, or at least for weakening it.
With the karmic protection of a Dragon Vein, perhaps the heavens would turn a blind eye and not send down such a terrifying Thunder Tribulation.
His own Thunder Tribulation had definitely been on a higher difficulty setting. He had no Dragon Vein, no will of the masses, nothing to protect him. He had taken on the wrath of the heavens bare-chested, head-on.
The difficulty was likely more than just a single notch above the normal.
Lu Yun shook his head, casting aside the distracting thoughts. ’Whatever, it’s fine. It’s only a hundred or two hundred years of life, that’s all.’
A century or two isn’t long, but it isn’t short either. For a normal person, that’s two lifetimes. For a Manifest Saint True Monarch, it’s just a minor hiccup.
’As long as I break through to the next Realm, everything will naturally return to normal.’
’My lifespan will return, and the Martial Dao Will that was obliterated by the Thunder Tribulation will coalesce once more. Everything will be alright.’
Lu Yun hovered in mid-air, feeling the brand-new power coursing through him. An indescribable sense of peace washed over his heart.
His Divine Thought now had a far greater range than before, covering everything within a two-thousand-meter radius.
Then, Lu Yun glanced down at his body and sighed in resignation. He was, at this moment, completely and utterly naked.
Even though there was no one else around in this remote mountain forest, floating stark naked in mid-air wasn’t exactly a dignified state of affairs.
Lu Yun looked around, hoping to find something to cover himself. But within a few hundred meters, the only things he could possibly use for clothing were tree bark and leaves.
Before Lu Yun could come up with a solution, voices drifted up from the foot of the mountain. His Divine Thought extended naturally, and their conversation entered his mind with perfect clarity.
It was four people: three men and a woman. Their voices were all youthful, sounding to be in their late teens or early twenties.
The four of them were wandering about the base of the mountain, seemingly searching for something.
A young man said wearily, "This is weird. We’ve been searching for half the day and haven’t seen anything strange at all."
Just then, a woman with a coarse voice chimed in, "Brother Ze Yang, could you have been wrong? Maybe that strange weather this morning was just a rare atmospheric event."
The young woman’s looks were ordinary. Her features weren’t exactly pretty, but they weren’t ugly either—the kind of face you wouldn’t be able to pick out of a crowd.
She also had a sturdy build, with broad shoulders and thick arms—a physique clearly honed by years of farm work and hard labor.
A sturdy, bronze-skinned man of about twenty stopped walking. The sound of him scratching his head in embarrassment could be heard, yet his voice held a strange conviction. "Xiaonan, I don’t think so. I’ve been alive for twenty years, and I’ve never seen weather like that."
"You guys just don’t get it. I saw a lightning bolt so thick... you have to believe me, it was at least this big!"
As he spoke, the sturdy man called Ze Yang gestured with his hands, trying to demonstrate the thickness of the lightning bolt.
His hands were spread as wide as they could go, as if he were trying to wrap them around the trunk of a century-old tree.
Seeing this, the two younger men gaped, letting out exaggerated gasps of awe before mercilessly starting to tease him.
"WHOA—don’t you think that’s a little exaggerated, Brother Ze Yang?! A lightning bolt that big would’ve split the mountain in two!"

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