Along the way back home, Su Qingcheng had fallen unconscious. Clearly she had gone through a lot and the adrenaline she originally had, ran out. Su Ran quietly took her back home, and it wasn’t long before Su Ran returned safe and sound. Su Yanran had been waiting outside the clan residence the entire time, and looked crestfallen to see Su Qingcheng’s body in Su Ran’s arms. However, Su Ran quickly reassured Su Yanran that she was alright and that she just passed out from exhaustion. After some rest, she would be better. Su Ran decided not to let the matter go too big. Su Qingcheng was placed in her bed where her breathing became regulated and it seemed like she was going to be just fine. Su Yanran was seated on the bedside and kept both her hands on one of Su Qingcheng’s hands.

“You must be alright… Do this for me,” Su Yanran sighed, regretting her inaction back then deep in her heart. “Your older sister was too weak. She broke down before she could do anything to stop her. Forgive me, please forgive me.” After a few moments, Su Yanran left the room and allowed Su Qingcheng to rest

She slept for the whole day since then and only woke up the following morning. She seemed refreshed and invigorated, but deep down inside she was a bit worried. She only had five months left to complete her training, and Yao Meiyue had not said anything this entire time. Su Qingcheng had gone to the courtyard to look for her mother, but she could not find her the entire time. Su Yanran had also mysteriously disappeared. Sighing, Su Qingcheng decided to forget about the matter for the meantime and return to her room and rest a bit more. She could only wait for Yao Meiyue’s good news to develop a way to properly cultivate her lightning energy.

At that moment…

Su Yanran and Su Ran were both in a secluded part of the Tiger’s Den that was restricted only to Su Ran. The former looked to be in a sour mood.

“I was worried sick about her.”

“And so was I,” Su Ran sighed. “But you have to put aside your feelings for her! Don’t think I don’t know how you feel about Qingcheng’er, but it isn’t right.”

“I don’t care, mother.”

“You’re just going to hold her back at this rate. She will be a master of the elements in the future. She’ll be someone even I can’t compare to. But she can’t be tied down here. Eventually she will have to leave. What will you do then? Will you stalk her like some crazy person?”

Su Yanran’s face became ugly. She folded her arms beneath her sizeable chest and pouted. “You don’t understand. Without her in my life…”

“Quiet. Don’t tell me you have a mental demon too? Did you know, Qingcheng’er was subjected to lightning torture for a whole month? The only reason why she survived it is because the accident from five years ago already predisposed her body to lightning essence. She should have been fried to death by now! We are fucking blessed that she is still alive. Don’t… don’t be so selfish!” Su Ran scolded Su Yanran loudly.

It was then that Su Yanran swallowed her words and nodded weakly.

“I don’t even think she’ll even reciprocate that kind of love,” Su Ran hummed. “You need to focus on growing up and putting more effort into your Tianqi cultivation. Qingcheng’er… has gone through too much at her age. She is well motivated. You, on the other hand, have doted on her too much. Leave that to me.” Su Ran frowned.

Su Yanran left the room without saying anything.

In the meantime, Su Qingcheng was impatiently lying down on her bed kicking her legs up and down, when she heard a familiar, always-welcome voice enter her mind. I got it. It took me a long time, but I finally wrote up and designed a divination method for you. I’ll call it Thunder Blossom Cultivation! Yao Meiyue seemed pretty proud about it, and Su Qingcheng didn’t see any reason to argue against it. It was only just a bit over a day, but she already managed to make a method to channel the lightning energy. You already have fully absorbed the lightning core, so now intrinsically, your body is capable of generating electricity. My Nightflower Tianqi is pretty malleable, but you need a proper method to be able to properly fuse lightning with the tianqi to boost its power.

“I get it, but how do I do this exactly?”

Yao Meiyue imprinted some mental knowledge into Su Qingcheng, whose eyes began to widen like saucers. “So it’s like that?”

Right, it’s really that simple. The idea is to suppress your Tianqi paths and only allow lightning to run through them. Once you begin to circulate pure lightning energy, you can inject the Tianqi into it. Instead of forcibly fusing lightning into Tianqi, we will do the complete opposite. By injecting Tianqi into the pure lightning energy, we will achieve a better result, because lightning is a purer force of nature than the Nightflower Tianqi which is synthesized by man.

“A new concept?”

I forgot, this is something new to you. The five Tianqi essences are powerful when fused together by a human being, but because they are manmade, their capability to fuse with further sources of nature is drastically decreased. Trying to forcibly expedite this process goes against the heavens, and thus in doing so, you will be subject to a heavenly tribulation. This is fine for you since you’re already practically immune to thunder, but most others will be struck to ash.

“So it’s like that.” Su Qingcheng nodded; this was the equivalent of playing God. The heavens didn’t appreciate that, so you’d be punished. “However, if we do it the other way around, it would be the same as paying tribute to the heavenly nature of thunder!”

Exactly. Now, you need to go do some closed door cultivation. I predict that by the time you finish, you will be able to charge through to the final rank of the Tianqi User stratum! Su Qingcheng was startled when Yao Meiyue declared this, but suddenly it made sense. Ever since her body had undergone serious tempering, her Tianqi paths had grown stronger and became more akin to actual magical circuitry in previous stories. Su Qingcheng excitedly ran to her private training room to begin her closed door training after informing the attendants there that she would spend a whole month without leaving.

Though they were startled, they already could sense that in the mere span of eight months since the challenge declaration, Su Qingcheng had risen two ranks and was about to advance a third. This was already monstrous. Furthermore, they could sense a firm will and determination in her eyes, not to mention the strange sparks of purple lightning they could spot in her pupils. This scared them immensely and they knew deep in their hearts that Su Qingcheng was no longer the trash they once knew. She must have gone through hell when she was captured.

Su Qingcheng, on the other hand, didn’t care about any of this and focused wholeheartedly on her cultivation. Su Qingcheng sat cross-legged in the center of the room and shut her eyes, placing her hands in front of her, making her appear like she was a monk in deep meditation. She carefully suppressed the Nightflower Tianqi in her body and began to churn her inner energy, drawing from the power of the lightning core she had absorbed a while back. After a while, lightning began to course through her veins and Tianqi paths, which could no longer be just ‘paths’ but a circuit of wires concurrent to her nerves.

Su Qingcheng’s body grew hot, as she was forcibly overloading herself with electricity – this was the idea behind ‘Thunder Blossom Cultivation,’ one would forcibly overload themselves with pure lightning as if they were genetically modifying a plant, and it would blossom at the climax into a beautiful and bizarre flower! Su Qingcheng gritted her teeth, bearing through the pain as she continued to channel the electricity. Time quickly passed by while this happened…

After a week, Su Qingcheng showed no signs of advancement. However, her body was no longer smoking from the intense electrical charges in her body. Currently, she was slowly injecting the Nightflower Tianqi into the pure electric energy in her body. She was doing this very slowly and sending fine strands of it gradually into the electrical currents, causing incredible pain. However, how could this pain be compared to the electric torture from the Heaven Thunder Prison? She continued to soldier through the pain, grunting and inwardly cursing to herself that this was incredibly harsh training. However, all Yao Meiyue did was to quietly encourage her and tell her that the pain would be worth it.

Another week later, Su Qingcheng finally showed signs of calming down. Over these past two weeks, Su Qingcheng had painstakingly refined the electrical energy in her body before fusing the Nightflower Tianqi into it, finally beginning to see the fruits of her labour, she could feel the energy in her body being something that was uniquely her’s. However, Su Qingcheng was very careful to listen to Yao Meiyue’s instruction and spend extra time to stabilize it by letting the energy run wild in her body for a while. She kept her eyes closed and her position grounded as she let sparks of electricity get shot out from her body. Each bolt of electricity caused char marks and singe spots to explode out where it impacted the room.

After a day of discharge, the training room looked very messy. However, Su Qingcheng opened her eyes and smiled. Her eyes had changed color from brown to a very pale purple, signifying that she had lightning energy inside her body. She looked at her hands which had become very red from her weeks of internal cultivation. Standing up, she stretched out and loosened her limbs as she didn’t even realize she was in that same seated position for so long. She casually walked out of the training room and left it, seeking to bathe and wash up.

When the attendants peeked into their room, they were shocked to see that despite Su Qingcheng looking a bit dirty, the room was in a very sorry state, looking like it had been destroyed by heavenly thunder tribulation. Yet, Su Qingcheng didn’t look like she was hurt too much. This was too strange.

At that moment…

Xiao Tie had fully recovered up to now and had heard all the news about Su Qingcheng’s kidnapping. However, he learned that she had returned and had become incredibly powerful. He inwardly hoped she would be killed off, but then recalled that her mother was an insane existence that could have been a God if she chose not to abandon that path. He sighed as he sat on a bench in the courtyard of his own residence. However, he felt that something was amiss.

“Show yourself, intruder!” Xiao Tie yelled out hoarsely. Ever since Su Qingcheng beat him up, he had taken his training more seriously. He had broken through to the third rank of the Geomancer stratum after he had recovered from his injuries after painstaking training and purchasing elixirs.

A totally robed figure was hiding behind a pillar and was shocked to hear that Xiao Tie knew it was there. It spoke with a voice that made it difficult to identify whether the interloper was male or female. “Xiao Tie, you want to know if you can get even with Su Qingcheng, am I right?”

“Eh? What, just tell me, who are you?” Xiao Tie was shocked, but felt this could be another bait or scheme set out for him. He tried to probe the stranger’s capabilities, but was shocked to find he could not.

“It doesn’t matter who I am. All I can say is that in your current state, you can’t even hope to beat her right now. She is about to break into the fifth rank of the Tianqi User. Once she becomes a Geomancer, she can annihilate you as easily as swatting a fly. But if you study under me, I can help you become strong.”

“I want to become strong, but you need to tell me what or who you are first.”

“Two words – Demon Flame.”

“D, demon flame…” Xiao Tie recognized something before laughing. “Yes, yes. Very well, I would like to get even with that bitch, so I will happily take you as my master.”

“Very good. I feel like we will get along quite nicely, disciple Xiao Tie.”

“Thank you, Master, for giving me this fortuitous opportunity. I won’t let you down.”

As Su Qingcheng was going to the bathing rooms, she suddenly froze in place and shuddered. “I felt something terribly wrong… Was it just my imagination?” After she regained her composure, she shrugged and continued on her way.