Chapter 355: Trial of Meteors - III

Chapter 355: Chapter 355: Trial of Meteors - III

Chapter 355: Trial of Meteors - III

The red sky roared like an awakened demon.

Over a hundred colossal flaming meteors plummeted from the churning clouds, each one of them carrying the full-force strike of a Level 1 Domain Master Realm expert.

Standing upright amidst the crushing gravitational pressure, Rhain alone faced the wrath of the sky.

"Origin Domain of Darkness!"

The pitch-black domain erupted from his forehead, soaring upward to form a colossal dome of darkness that shielded the entire group.

BOOM—!!!

The first meteor crashed against the dome of dark shield, causing ripples to spread.

But it was only the beginning.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Like a torrential downpour of the world’s destruction, over a hundred massive, flaming boulders rained down upon the dome in the span of a single minute.

Each collision generated a shockwave that sought to flatten everything in their path.

Rhain stood entirely alone at the epicenter of all this, the sheer physical strain on his body was immense.

With every meteor that detonated against his domain, the pitch-black void within his dantian spun fiercely, extracting massive amounts of essence from his three supermassive, crystallized cores to instantly repair the fracturing darkness overhead.

The clock ticked mercilessly.

Fifty-one minutes. Fifty-two minutes. Fifty-three minutes.

With every passing sixty seconds, the meteors’ force grew exponentially denser.

The sheer volume of consecutive impacts caused the very earth beneath them to sink further into a massive crater.

And the trial was only escalating.

By the fifty-fifth minute, it had reached a terrifying new threshold.

Third Level of the Domain Master Realm.

"Ugh!" Rhain gritted his teeth, his right palm pressed firmly upward against the inner wall of the dark barrier.

He was continuously pouring a torrential ocean of essence into the shield just to keep it from collapsing.

But even with an essence capacity that was almost a hundred times more than an ordinary cultivator, the drain was unimaginably steep.

To single-handedly block a ceaseless barrage of Level 3 Domain Master strikes was taxing his reserves to their limit.

Rhain’s dark grey eyes flashed with a fiery light.

"Origin Domain of Fire!"

WHOOSH—!!!

A scorching sphere of blood-red fire erupted, instantly layering itself beneath the pitch-black dome.

The apocalyptic heat of his second domain fused perfectly with the darkness, instantly fortifying the heavily battered shield.

Behind him, Lyra slowly pushed herself up from the scorched earth.

Seeing Rhain standing alone, his back bearing the weight of the falling sky, a fierce fire ignited within her chest.

She refused to kneel while he fought for her life.

"Domain of the Crimson Empress!" Lyra shrieked, enduring the suppression while her legs trembled.

An orange-crimson Heavenly Fire exploded from her slender body, expanding upward to merge with Rhain’s dual domains.

She channeled every last drop of her fourth-level Core Formation essence into the barrier, lending her strength to the defense.

Seeing the young girl rise, Karsten and the terrified mercenaries felt their faces burn with shame.

"Don’t just lie there waiting for death!" Karsten roared, "Pour your essence into the shield!"

The five mercenaries screamed, channeling all of their remaining power, sending thick beams of energy up into the massive dome.

As they did, they looked up at the two youths holding the sky, their eyes wide with profound shock.

"Two Domains?! That man has two Domains in the Core Formation Realm? And that girl... even she has domain in the Core Formation realm! What kind of monsters are they?!"

Their worldview was completely shattered.

"Don’t just stare like idiots!" Lyra roared over her shoulder, her arms trembling as she channeled her flame. "Pour your essence into the barrier, or we all die!"

Jolted back to reality by the threat of imminent death, Karsten and the remaining mercenaries scrambled into a tight circle.

Pushing past their exhaustion and terror, they unleashed every last dregs of their late-stage Core Formation essence, funneling it directly into the combined dome.

With Rhain’s domain of fire, the added support of Lyra’s True Heavenly Flame and the mercenaries’ desperate essence, the trembling barrier stabilized.

Fifty-six minutes. Fifty-seven minutes.

They held their ground.

The combined, multi-layered dome of darkness and dual heavenly fires successfully repelled thousands of meteors.

But the sky was ruthless.

As the clock struck the fifty-eighth minute—leaving exactly two minutes until the trial concluded—the blood-red clouds above boiled with an unprecedented fury.

RUMBLE—!!!

The meteors that descended now were entirely different.

They were completely engulfed in a blinding, white-hot light.

"Fourth Level of the Domain Master Realm," Rhain analysed coldly.

The very first white-hot meteor crashed into their dome.

CRACK!

A deafening sound of fracturing glass echoed across the wasteland.

A massive, spiderweb fissure tore through the intertwined domains of darkness and fire.

"Pfft!"

Lyra coughed up a mouthful of blood, her Crimson Empress Domain flickering dangerously as the backlash assaulted her internal organs.

Karsten and the mercenaries shrieked, collapsing back to their knees as their essence was severed.

They could not hold it.

The power scaling of the trial was growing exponentially faster in the final minutes.

Rhain looked up at the falling meteros with chilling resolve.

He knew that if he kept defending from the inside, the next volley would shatter the dome completely and obliterate everyone behind him.

Without a single moment of hesitation, Rhain dropped his hands from the inner wall of the shield. ℴ

He took a step forward and phased out of the Origin Domain of Darkness, leaving the protective barrier entirely to Lyra and the mercenaries.

He stepped directly into the open wasteland.

"RHAIN! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Lyra screamed hysterically, her crimson eyes widening in terror as she watched him leave the safety of the dome. "COME BACK!"

Karsten and his men stared in petrified horror. He was walking out to face a sky raining mid-stage Domain Master attacks with his bare body!

Rhain did not turn back.

With a flash of spatial light, the massive, pitch-black heavy broadsword materialized in his grasp.

"Empyrean Purgatory Bloom. Second Form."

BOOM—!!!

A majestic blood-red fire erupted, instantly engulfing the heavy broadsword.

Rhain swung the blade upward in a sweeping arc.

Hundreds of massive, roaring Flame Pythons constructed entirely of Red Tribulations Heavenly Flame shot into the blood-red sky.

They surged upward like a rising tide of destruction, clashing against the descending white-hot meteors.

BANG! CLANG! BOOM!

The sky turned into a canvas of fire clashing against fire.

The Flame Pythons ruthlessly gnawed at the meteors, incinerating their outer layers and severely weakening their force.

But even the might of the Heavenly Flame was not enough to completely halt the relentless barrage of Level 4 Domain Master attacks.

The weakened meteors broke through the pythons, continuing their descent.

Rhain saw this and raised his left hand, extending his index and middle fingers.

Buzz—! Buzz—! Buzz—!

"Heaven’s Judgement Finger!"

He didn’t just fire once or twice.

Pushing his spiritual sea to the brink, Rhain successively unleashed the Emperor-Grade martial art.

Concentrated beams of pitch-black light shrieked through the air, piercing and detonating the weakened meteors before they could strike the ground.

He was single-handedly holding back the apocalypse.

But his essence was draining at an unimaginable speed.

Even with three supermassive cores, continuously spamming an Emperor-Grade art while maintaining dual domains was an impossible burden.

A handful of weakened meteors managed to slip past his barrage.

They crashed directly into the weakened shield behind him.

SHATTER—!!!

The dome of darkness and fire couldn’t hold back any longer and finally collapsed.

The shockwave blasted through the perimeter.

Lyra, Karsten, and the mercenaries were sent hurtling through the air like broken leaves, crashing heavily into the scorched earth.

"Gah!" Lyra spat another massive puddle of blood, her internal organs damaged, and her star-forged rapier slipping from her grasp.

Her beautiful face was covered with bloody cuts and ash.

The mercenaries were in an even worse state, lying half-dead in the dirt, completely unable to move.

Fifty-nine minutes.

Only sixty seconds remained.

But as Lyra weakly lifted her head, her heart completely stopped beating.

The red sky above their head was covered with gigantic flaming structures.

Over a hundred colossal meteors, blazing with an ominous purple flame hung in the sky.

The pressure rolling off them was so overwhelmingly dense that the very fabric of space in the wasteland began to warp and tear.

Sixth Level of the Domain Master Realm! Peak of the middle stage!

Any single one of those meteors possessed the destructive force to instantly annihilate a mid-stage Domain Master if it hit cleanly.

And there were over a hundred of them descending simultaneously.

Despair entirely consumed Lyra’s mind. It was impossible. No one could survive this.

As the colossal masses of purple fire began to plummet, her vision blurred, and an ominous, ancient red light began to slowly cover her crimson pupils, as if a dormant taboo was forcefully trying to awaken within her.

But just before the red light could fully consume her vision, a dark-robed figure shot high into the sky.

It was Rhain.