DD Black White [315-316] (Patreon)

Chapter 315: World Tree

Where the Titan Giant Ape passed, every obstacle was mercilessly crushed.

Ruined walls and shattered rubble were trampled to dust like toys; the hard foundations splintered inch by inch beneath its colossal palms. The violent shockwave it kicked up swept gravel hundreds of meters into the air—its momentum was terrifying beyond measure.

Confronted by this calamity-like beast charging in, Lu Jingming merely raised his hand without haste. A knight's lance of elegant design, its whole body flowing with a soft, pure white glow, appeared in his grip out of thin air.

With a deft twist of his wrist, the lance—named "White Flower"—was driven steadily into the ground before him.

Hum—!
An invisible yet vast surge of life energy spread out from the lance like ripples on water—gentle, yet swift.

At the very instant the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's immense body, like a falling meteor, was about to slam into him—

A sudden upheaval!

Countless tender green shoots and vines, brimming with astonishing vitality, burst madly from the sundered earth without warning.

They grew at a near-insane speed—lengthening, thickening, hardening to incredible toughness.

Those instantly born trunks and branches seemed to gain life and will of their own. Like giant pythons roused from slumber, breathing a moist, fresh loam-scent, they wound and bound with startling agility around the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's pillar-like limbs and cliff-like torso.

In just moments, centered on Lu Jingming, an ancient, dense primeval forest surged up out of nothing across several kilometers.

Towering trees shot skyward; their thick leaves interwove rapidly above, forming an immense green net that blotted out the sun and the sky, sealing the raging Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape completely within.

"Roar—!!!"

From the forest's depths came the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's furious, unwilling bellow.

It flailed arms strong enough to rend steel; corded muscles unleashed world-shattering strength, tearing and crushing the thick branches binding it.

Yet these trees—jointly catalyzed by the Denro Authority of the Greater Lord Rukkhadevata and the White Flower's heaven-defying regenerative power—were preternaturally tough, and possessed a near-bug-like vitality. Branches ripped to shreds one second would sprout even greener, thicker shoots and vines from the break the next, recoiling to rebind at a despair-inducing speed.

Endless, inexhaustible—life without end—they dragged the brute-force Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape into a quagmire of attrition.

Soon, the wildly proliferating forest swallowed the ape's massive form from sight. From outside, only its increasingly irritable roars and the constant crack of breaking boughs could be heard. Clearly, it was trapped for the moment, unable to break free.

Lu Jingming regarded the rule-defying forest domain he had wrought with his own hands, satisfaction on his face.

Combining the Greater Lord Rukkhadevata's Denro Authority with the Black Abyss White Flower's absurd restoration and regeneration was far more than one plus one. Who said healing and life-aligned powers could only save the dying?

Using the Denro Authority to madly accelerate tree growth, then gifting them with near-immortal regeneration at the cellular level via White Flower's restorative force—not only did this make the trees tougher than any known flora, but it also let them self-repair at extreme speed the instant they were damaged.

Better yet, by reversing the Denro Authority, the forest could quietly and continuously siphon a captive's life force and soul power.

Once snared by this law-etched forest, it was like falling into an endless nightmare.

The more you struggled, the faster you burned out; the quicker your life drained away—until you were too weak to resist, reduced to a lamb awaiting slaughter.

Unless… the captive possessed absolute destructive power that far exceeded the forest's regenerative limit—enough to annihilate all in a single blow.

As if to prove the point—

"ROAR!!!!"

A bellow, angrier and more frenzied than any before, detonated from the forest's deepest heart.

An invisible yet crushing gravitational pulse erupted from the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape like a cataclysmic tsunami.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

The entire forest twisted and heaved under the tyrannical force.

Leaves cascaded down; massive trunks bowed, snapped, and even burst outright beneath gravity that had multiplied dozens of times.

In an instant, the lush, sun-blotting forest collapsed across more than half its breadth, reduced to splintered timber.

The Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's muscles bulged like granite; its brown-black fur stood on end like steel needles.

Catching that fleeting moment when mass collapse outpaced regeneration, it unleashed all its strength and tore the remaining bindings to shreds.

The next heartbeat, its hulking body turned into a black cannonball that ripped the sky, surging straight up—smashing free of the forest's confinement.

"As expected, taking him down that easily was a bit much to ask."

Lu Jingming looked up at the towering figure that had burst free, raging as it climbed to several kilometers in the air. His face showed no surprise—only the calm of foreknowledge.

Though Titan Giant Ape had not truly stepped into the realm of an Ultimate Douluo, he was nonetheless a bona fide level-98 Super Douluo. Backed by the top-tier bloodline and talent of the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape, his real combat power was terrifying.

Lu Jingming had no doubt: if Xuan Zi were here, facing Titan Giant Ape's full eruption, he'd likely be ground into the dirt.

His true strength was already brushing the limits of human soul masters.

High above, the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's colossal figure briefly paused, like a spring compressed to its limit.

The next moment, under the double blessing of its own immense mass and its domineering gravity field, it became a kindled meteor—rending the air and plunging toward Lu Jingming below.

Rumble—!
Air scorched and compressed along its hide, igniting into a blazing inferno and trailing a searing red plume across the heavens, even twisting, evaporating, and scouring the high clouds along its path.

Faced with this heaven's-judgment impact, Lu Jingming could have used the Black Abyss's space-disintegrating authority to blink away. But a powerful impulse rose within him—he wanted to see with his own hands how far his strength now reached.

He chose the most direct, most savage, most force-expressive answer—take it head-on.

Zzzrra—!!!

Blue-white lightning exploded around him like a beast loosed from its cage.

Snakes of current surged into the Black Abyss spear in his hand.

That annihilating charge was forced by sheer will into tighter and tighter confinement—until it became viscous, deep, black-red lightning, reeking of endings and death, coiling the cold spear-tip like a living thing.

The intent of Ending, Death, and Destruction merged perfectly into that hyper-compressed thunder.

Lu Jingming's figure blurred—becoming a black-red lance of lightning that tore the sky as he charged up, defying the overwhelming gravity, to meet that world-ending "flesh meteor" head-on.

He seemed to fuse with the thunder-spear, trailing motes of black-red light as he drew a straight, clean line through the air—like a blade of judgment splitting the world in two.

"BOOOOM—!!!!!!!!!"

The hyper-condensed black-red lightning collided with the burning meteor.

Time froze for a heartbeat.

Then a visible ring of shock—mingled thunder and flame—detonated outward from the point of impact.

The terrible shockwave lashed the sky like God's whip—shredding and scouring the clouds, cleaving the blue dome into stark halves.

"Arrroar—!!!"

The Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape howled in agony.

That black-red bolt pierced its adamantine body in an unstoppable flash, tore through for hundreds more meters, then finally faded into the heights.

Lu Jingming's form resolved again, standing steady in the sky above, the spear-tip's dreadful black-red glow slowly receding.

The electromagnetic acceleration's brutal kinetic strike, combined with the Black Abyss's dominion to decompose and extinguish life—together they left a ghastly hole, meters across, in the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's hundred-meter form.

The flesh and fur at the wound's rim had carbonized under the supreme heat of lightning and been reduced to nothing by decomposition—so there was no gushing blood. Even so, the pain biting into soul and marrow wrung a soul-rending wail from the beast, and its huge body, strength gone, tumbled toward the ground like a severed kite.

BOOM—!!!!

The earth shuddered, a crater tens of meters wide blasted out, a mushroom cloud of dust surging skyward.

In the drifting haze, the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape lay curled at the pit's bottom, battered and spent, its aura rapidly waning.

Chapter 316: Chuunibyou Raiden Mei

With the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's monstrous physique and vast size, the wound wasn't fatal—but it was enough to take it out of the fight for a time. Every breath tugged at flesh corroded by the decomposition force, inflicting soul-ripping pain.

"Er Ming!!!"

Elsewhere, locked in fierce battle with Raiden Mei, Niu Tian saw this and his face went iron-blue, eyes blazing with fury and alarm.

He stopped holding back. With a roar that split the clouds—half dragon's song, half bull's bellow—his body swelled and transformed.

In a burst of dazzling cyan light, a divine dragon, stretching several hundred meters, with jutting bull horns and scales of sky-cyan, coiled into being among the clouds.

The vast dragon-form loomed in and out of sight; each scale gleamed with a cold, potent luster in the stormlight. Innumerable strokes of sky-cyan annihilation thunder capered through the surrounding clouds like vassals, radiating a destruction that made heaven and earth tremble.

"Heavenly Cyan Annihilation Divine Thunder!"

An icy, imperious dragon-chant resounded to the Ninth Heaven.

In an instant, the canopy of cyan lightning ceased to be scattered bolts—it became a true deluge.

Countless pillars of cyan-black thunder, as thick as barrels and laden with power to erase all things, poured down like the Milky Way from nine heavens—blanketing and bombarding Lu Jingming and Raiden Mei without distinction.

"In front of me and Mei… you want to play with thunder?"

The corner of Lu Jingming's mouth tugged into a mocking smile, as if watching a clumsy performance.

Without a word, the Stigmata of Thunder on his hand blazed. The supreme writ of the Thunder Archon unfurled quietly in this world.

Those annihilating divine thunders screaming down from the sky met their true sovereign—and an invisible, absolute might seized them by the throat.

Like docile sheep, they turned, betraying their caster's will, flowing like rivers to the sea, all into Lu Jingming's upraised palm—condensing into a violently throbbing sphere of cyan lightning, brimming with destructive charge and humming ominously.

He didn't spare it a second glance—just flicked it away like trash, down into the pit where the Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape had just begun to struggle upright.

"BOOM—!!!"

The sphere detonated the instant it touched the Titan Giant Ape's body.

Ravenous cyan-black arcs devoured the ape's massive form in a heartbeat.

A scream, more shrill and agonized than before, tore out from the heart of the storm, making the air quail.

Salt to the wound.

Meanwhile, Raiden Mei slowly raised her blade.

Though she had lost most of her Herrscher authority, as the former bearer of the Herrscher of Thunder—her understanding and command of lightning's essence far surpassed the soul beasts of this realm.

She simply lifted her left hand, slender fingers splaying. The uncontrolled cyan bolts still writhing in the air seemed to find a guide. Docile and surging, they gathered onto her sword's blade.

The black blade, once flickering with violet arcs, took on a deep, dangerous cyan-blue sheen. Lightning was compressed to the utmost.

"Tempest—submit to me!"

Mei's cool voice carried a sliver of long-dormant, instinctive chuunibyou grandeur as her sword fell.

Szzrak—!
A blade of thunder hundreds of meters long—pure Heavenly Cyan Annihilation Thunder condensed to the limit—ripped space, cut the clouds, and fell like a heavenly verdict upon the vast, coiling Azure Dragon.

Squelch!

Iron-hard scales parted like paper; cyan dragon's blood fountained like a waterfall.

A gash deep to the bone yawned across the dragon's body. Each drop of scalding blood that struck the ground burned smoking pits in the charred earth.

A strike to body and pride.
Lu Jingming and Raiden Mei returned his way unto him—using Niu Tian's own ultimate thunder to grievously wound his brother and himself.

"ROAR—!!!"

The Azure Dragon loosed an earth-shaking howl of pain; in its great eyes flared a flash of fear and disbelief.

The divine thunder he prided himself on—enough to annihilate all—had been toyed with at will, turned back to maim him.

He dared not use any more lightning—abandoning ranged energy attacks entirely. He unleashed instead the primal might of a soul beast's body. His mountain-like tail whipped, shrieking as it tore the air, a steel lash of a thousand tons, churning the clouds as it slammed toward the diminutive Mei.

He would tear this hateful human to pieces.

But before Raiden Mei, who could become lightning and ride it, Niu Tian's mountain bulk only made him seem ponderous and slow.

After all, lightning's core virtue—beyond its annihilating force—is speed unrivaled among elements.

Kra-BOOM—!

Thunder cracked again.

Mei's body flashed into a limber streak of pale-blue lightning. She didn't meet force with force—she danced through the tail's sweeping path with an elegance and precision that bordered on prescience.

Each tiny shift slipped past cataclysmic impacts by a hair's breadth.

The tail struck only air, gouging bottomless trenches in the earth and kicking up storms of grit and stone.

Through the billowing dust, Mei already stood a hundred meters away, blade slanted to the ground, as composed as if strolling her own courtyard rather than fighting for her life.

Watching from afar, Lu Jingming couldn't help a flicker of surprise and a wry smile at Mei's poised, almost showy evasions.

Who'd have thought that, beneath the mature reliability that replaced her girlish youth, Raiden Mei still hid a trace of that stylish, chuunibyou flair?

Back then, the Thunder Queen could deliver the cringiest lines without blinking.

Then again, that occasional contrast with her usual cool poise—that's exactly Mei's unique charm, isn't it?

Adorable, no?

And at that very instant, as his mind relaxed—

Vmm!!!

An unimaginable, suddenly-descending gravity, like a thousand invisible mountains, slammed down upon him.

So domineering, so abrupt—it crushed him toward the ground.

Caught off guard, Lu Jingming was yanked out of the air, plummeting like a meteor.

BOOOOM—!!!!!

A deeper, heavier impact than any before burst out as he slammed into the earth, throwing up a dust cloud dozens of meters high.

Centered on his impact, air for hundreds of meters groaned under the sudden weight; the ground, struck by an unseen hammer, moaned and sank—forming a vast depression as a spiderweb of cracks shot outward at shocking speed.

As the dust thinned, a silhouette emerged—Lu Jingming half-kneeling at the pit's bottom, bracing himself with the Black Abyss White Flower against the crushing gravity.

He slowly lifted his head, grit sliding from his hair, and locked cold eyes on a battered, hulking shape not far away.

The Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's body was scorched black; fur that had stood like steel needles was curled and caked by Niu Tian's divine thunder, stinking of char. Clearly, Lu Jingming's earlier strike had been no small pain.

Yet in those lantern-sized eyes burned no fear—only wilder, more violent wrath, fixed murderously on Lu Jingming.

There was no doubt—the sudden gravity that had wrenched him from the sky was the enraged counterattack of this wounded beast.

"Tch. A gravity domain… how troublesome."

Lu Jingming clicked his tongue, impatient. In the next moment, his aura shifted.

A ring of invisible yet palpable gray light—signifying death and endings—spread from his half-kneeling form like a stone dropped into still water, quiet yet swift.

Where the gray swept, the world turned eerie.

Clumps of hardy green weeds yellowed and withered at visible speed, their color leaching away until they crumbled to ashen dust.

Tough stones seemed to weather through millennia in breaths, their surfaces going chalky and rough before collapsing into grit.

Even the fine motes hanging in the air seemed to lose their vitality, turning dull and lightless… as if some force had drawn all life and color from the world, leaving only the most primitive, monotonous, despairing gray of death.

This was Lu Jingming's dominion—the power of the Black Abyss White Flower: the Withering Field.

The Titan Giant Ape Giant Ape's raging gravity domain met that gray aura and found its bane.

The omnipresent, mountain-heavy pressure melted and unraveled like frost in blazing sun—decomposed, dissolved, erased.

The crushing force pinned on Lu Jingming vanished without a trace.