Regret...was not the major emotion that welled up in Han Xuhan's heart at the thought of his imminent demise.
Had he not tried to save Shangguang Ce, perhaps he would've managed to survive the flood. However, the feeling he detested the most was guilt– and he was absolutely certain that he hadn't managed to cultivate the mindset of someone who could abandon a kid to his death and not brood over the decision for the rest of his life despite having a fairly decent excuse for his actions.
He felt partly responsible for the fact that Shangguang Ce's enlightenment had come through his random bullshit, although he was sure that his responsibility in that was actually negligible.
His decision to save Shangguang Ce regardless of the risk was arbitrary, impulsive, and definitely incorrect considering his prime purpose was to survive. But he felt the sweetest sort of relief upon realizing that this respectable, disgustingly righteous decision was possibly the last decision he would make in his life.
It was the type of joy a struggling degenerate felt upon busting a fat one to a good vanilla manga with no questionable tags– a pure, unadulterated appreciation toward life, and to himself for realizing that his heart had not been fully corrupted by what he didn't quite find right.
Time had not slowed down, but Han Xuhan's world had sped up. The whirling blades were a mere ten feet away. Shangguang Ce's molten skin was on his clothes. The stink of burnt chicken was in his nostrils.
It was a piece of general knowledge among cultivators that Heavenly tribulations struck in a specific method unless something went gravely wrong during the process.
The first wave would consist of a single bolt.
The second would strike twice, the third, thrice...
He had seen Shangguang Ce being struck twice in a row during his return alongside the flood. So the first strike had to have happened while he was on his way out.
Following that logic, there should be two more bolts raining down on the two of them any second now without giving them much of a recovery time.
The initial panic in his heart was gradually replaced by a sense of lazy serenity. There was hardly a reason to worry so much, he realized. Reincarnation was real, transmigration was real, heaven and hell were real. Life would not stop for him, or anyone else for that matter. He would start over in another world, perhaps. Death wasn't so scary now, was it?
Would there be a temporary state between his death and his next life? Would his non-physical form travel through the underworld? Would there be king Yama, granny Meng and the yellow river? Or would it differ? Was he about to see if any of the religions of his old world actually had it right?
Angels and demons, divine judgment, karma....Han Xuhan's thoughts were overwhelmed with imaginations of epic proportions.
THUMP!
His reverie was broken apart in a brutal fashion as a fierce kick nearly dislocated his shoulders. It took but a fraction of a second in his enhanced state of mind to connect the dots using the earliest of images that his eyes captured upon focusing on the real world.
Zhanxian had leaped from the third wall using an aerial boost from Tun Shi Tian. It must have been apparent that he was about to get chopped up to pieces along with his 'meatshield' within the next few seconds despite the viscosity of the seawater and the forceful waves working as a deterrent against its magnetic force field.
This, however, was a suicidal move. Zhanxian's body fell directly under the radar of the shredder and was sucked up toward it at a breakneck speed even before it could fall down in the water. Though the shredder machine itself was already half-submerged in the water, its force field hadn't weakened at all.
The kick had awakened Han Xuhan, both physically and spiritually. To his horror, he realized that he had actually accepted a death so miserable without a ferocious last-ditch effort.
What the hell was that? How did that happen? Did Shangguang Ce's tribulation infiltrate his own thoughts? But the two of them weren't even the same type of cultivators! He was supposed to be safe from this guy's tribulation!
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Han Xuhan venomously cursed the daoist author who had passed down that information. Was that man trying to get kids killed?
Where was the CCP when you needed their censoring skills?
Han Xuhan executed two actions simultaneously at the next second. Inside his body, he rushed his remaining qi into a short cycle, canceling Zhanxian's summon right before a metal blade could break the red skeleton in half. Had he been half a second slower, Zhanxian's body would have been reduced to a pile of dry noodles.
While his mental force had been occupied with controlling his qi, Han Xuhan's body had bent in an awkward, painful angle that had possibly dislocated his other shoulder. This position allowed him to use Shangguang Ce's body as a surfing board on the newest wave of seawater, making use of the meat-shield's stocky build which equaled to a large area of impact, thus pushing them further away from the scope of the shredder machine.
Right at that moment, the second bolt of the third round of tribulation fell on Shangguang Ce, spraying Xuhan and the seawater beneath them with a strange, greyish substance leaking from his body furiously.
Then came Tun Shi Tian's excited yell.
"Master, get ready!"
Han Xuhan felt a second suction force growing at an alarming speed behind the two of them. It outstripped the second wall's shredder by a great margin almost instantly.
Tun Shi Tian had activated another shredder to neutralize the force-field of the first one!
A faint hum rose in the wind as the second pair of metal blades blurred out from sight, only their friction against the wind left behind.
The two forces clashed together and fell into a stalemate! The first shredder was closer to them, but the second shredder was much more powerful. Between these two were the constant surges of seawater that pushed and pulled on their submerged bodies.
Han Xuhan instinctively wanted to cancel the owl's summon as well. But then he realized that Tun Shi Tian was sitting on top of the device, a safe zone. A bold idea crossed through his mind as Han Xuhan caught a glimpse of the owl from neck-deep water.
In the direction the chain of events was developing, he wouldn't make it much further. To begin with, he hadn't even had a clear idea of what to do once he trapped himself between the force fields of the two shredder machines. So far, he had been acting on instantaneous ideas to barely save his neck. This was already the limit to how much he could plan on the spot.
Han Xuhan gathered all of his remaining strength in one arm and brutally clawed out a chunk of meat from a recently damaged area of Shangguang Ce's neck.
Humans had a meridian running through this portion of their neck, and Shangguang Ce did not turn out to be an alien, thankfully. Even though he couldn't see it amidst the tumultuous waves, Han Xuhan sensed a sharp flow of qi inside the bloody, mangled flesh. Normal physical attacks wouldn't damage a meridian, a half-ethereal, microscopic vessel which had tremendous self-healing capability. So he wasn't worried to see trickles of qi leaking out from Shangguag Ce's neck.
He had been subjected to the infamous art of foreign qi control in his body several times in the past, a courtesy of sect master Xuan Zi and Kong Ye. His constant, fucked up development in terms of cultivation had practically forced them to do it, and he didn't blame them. Other than by certified healers, no cultivator would let their meridians be invaded by foreign mental forces. It was borderline taboo to do so unless they were trying to murder each other.
Using that experience, Han Xuhan mobilized his mental force and gathered a trickle of qi from their surroundings in vapor form, which he guided into Shangguang Ce's meridians through the leak.
"Shit, AH SHIT!"
Gasping, Han Xuhan discovered how powerful Shangguang Ce's mental force was. Physically, he was constantly getting steamrolled by the sea waves, and now, his mental force nearly got snuffed out like a tiny candle-flame as soon as it met the onslaught of Shangguang Ce's own mental force. It almost felt comparable to his experience with Kong Ye and Xuan Zi!
This guy was an absolute monstrosity! Could he be...
The third bolt fell from above. Had he not distanced himself just a few seconds ago using that joint-damaging posture, he would have probably not survived that one, judging by the terrible state it left Shangguang Ce in. Now, he was but a charred body emitting smoke, his features barely recognizable.
Gritting his teeth, Han Xuhan wrested out his qi out of the meridian and dragged along with it the tiniest possible amount of qi that had just been under Shangguang Ce's mental force. Then he shot it toward the first shredder that was now deep underwater, its blades creating a whirl of seawater so powerful it almost withstood the oncoming waves by thrashing them aside.
Thankfully, qi was a quasi-ethereal substance that could be influenced by very few corporeal things. The blades, or the whirling water could not stop it from approaching.
With some difficulty, Han Xuhan landed the thread of qi on top of the central device, and then guided it toward the powerful, humming qi converter, an obvious target due to his prior investigation.
Half a second later, the blades halted, and the force field of the first shredder disappeared without a trace.
Han Xuhan's qi was seen as an alien threat by the shredders, but Shangguang Ce was a disciple of this sect. His qi would be recognized!
But his relief at managing to avoid death was short-lived.
At a lightning-fast speed, Han Xuhan and Shangguang Ce were dragged along the accumulating water, toward the third wall where a larger version of the machine was humming with vigor.
Han Xuhan growled like a wounded beast and used the last bit of his mental force to move the thread of qi inside the deactivated shredder.
He wanted Tun Shi Tian to do what he had just done and stop the second shredder in time. He was too far away from it to do it himself, his control over qi being barely above average. His mental influence wouldn't work accurately so far away.
He managed to make the thread of qi wriggle out of the converter of the first shredder a second later. However, the second shredder had already hit its peak performance, attracting their bodies toward its blades so powerfully that it began to defy gravity.
Han Xuhan did not need to be a calculating genius to understand that his thread of qi would never make it inside the core in time. Both of them had already been dragged out of the seawater by the force-field of the second shredder, their speed only increasing every decisecond as they were pulled upwards along the third wall. The blades were rotating just a few meters away! Only a second remained before they got chopped into pieces!
He was so close to the device now! If only he had gotten just another extra second to use his qi to stop the device...
Han Xuhan closed his eyes and prepared himself for pain.
Tun Shi Tian screeched in alarm.
Ah...so that bird did like him, after all. Its voice contained so much pain-
"UNHAND ME, BITCH!"