Chapter 783: Ninth Round 2

All colors seemed to have lost their meaning.

White, endless white.

In the space where the final 11 testers were, 11 nuclear bombs detonated simultaneously at high altitude.

The extreme light and heat, like an apocalypse, poured their energy onto the relatively small plaza.

Dig deeper, dig deeper!!

His eyes felt like they were about to burst.

An Awakened One from the South Africa War Zone frantically dug downward into the rock.

His limbs flailed into afterimages.

This was the most desperate effort of his life.

Upon hearing the command, a fear named death almost tore his sanity apart.

He had thought that by relying on his earth‑type talent to burrow into the ground he could cleverly avoid the damage of the previous rounds, and this round should be the same.

But he never imagined.

The imagined earth‑penetrating missile did not appear, nor did seismic magma give any warning.

What appeared was humanity's strongest war weapon in history…

Nuclear bombs!

The rapidly rising heat behind him seemed about to melt him.

If not for the brief reaction time between the nuclear bomb's detonation and the dissipation of its damage,

he would have already been completely dissolved into elementary particles by the explosion's light radiation.

His spiritual energy ran wildly, at this moment he wished to turn his whole body into rock and sink straight to the earth's core in one breath.

Heat… too hot!

There was no time to dig deep enough to escape; the scorching heat from all directions instantly vaporized the surface rock.

Dead silence.

Sound seemed to vanish at this moment.

Emptiness, white.

He could feel the world beginning to twist.

The ultra‑high‑frequency sound wave swept over his body first, his internal organs feeling as if they were being torn apart in a blender.

"Pfft!"

A sweetness rose in his chest.

The shockwave from the high‑pressure explosion almost shattered his entire skeleton.

The fresh blood he had just spat also evaporated along with it.

As if sinking into magma, the earth began to melt.

A beam of light bright enough to melt eyeballs expanded from high altitude.

This was the ultimate reaction called fission.

Useless…

Too late… far too late ah ah ah!!

Despair, indignation.

Even if his reaction speed were faster, his digging speed faster,

the energy radiation released in the next instant would still penetrate his body unimpeded.

High‑energy particle flow, thermal radiation, supersonic shockwave.

Layer after layer of damage swept over his body, instantly reducing him to ashes.

Unwilling, utterly unwilling.

Before death, his cooked brain could only flash one last thought.

Why!?

How come!?

How could such an attack appear, how dare it appear in a Second Level trial…!!

The earth continued to melt.

In midair, that scorching sun brimming with destruction slowly rose.

A dim, black humanoid silhouette was imprinted on the rock wall of a 475‑meter‑deep pit.

That was the last trace left by this Awakened One.

"Warning! Core operation at 88%!"

"97%!"

"100%! 100%!!"

"Core overloaded operation!"

"Load 129%…141%!!"

The numbers indicating overload rose rapidly.

He hunched his body, head bowed.

Sharp, heart‑stopping alarm sounds madly transmitted from the bio‑computer.

Burying his head under his arms, Lihao stood almost motionless in place.

At his chest, the golden core representing the artificial sun had turned into a violent orange‑red from overload.

His skin grew hot; a large amount of heat that could not dissipate formed white mist.

If thermal detection equipment were present now, it would obviously be detected.

His body surface temperature had already reached several hundred degrees.

Like cooked meat in a pressure cooker, being boiled over and over again.

"Fully supply the spiritual energy defense shield... close the overload limit..."

There was no emotional fluctuation.

Only the right brain, retaining a small amount representing human emotions, continuously transmitted shocking emotions.

The ninth wave's attack intensity exceeded all testers' imaginations.

If they knew they were facing a nuclear bomb, probably no one would choose to continue.

"Squeak—ya"

The energy shield deformed, shaking violently like foam in a gale.

As if it would shatter in the next second.

"Abandon other bodily tissues..."

This fast... already at the limit?

Just seconds.

A massive energy strike drove him into desperation.

At the brink of life and death, Lihao resolutely shrank his full-body energy barrier to reduce consumption.

"I... can definitely hold on..."

"I absolutely cannot... die here!"

His gaze firm, after shrinking the shield's range, the extreme heat instantly dissolved all bodily tissue except his head and chest.

At that moment of melting, the densely packed electronic circuits covering his bones also sparked and turned to ash.

Only his head remained, with a slanted half of his chest cavity wrapped in a blue shield.

The shockwave came, and he went with the flow.

Like a pebble in a towering tsunami.

Only the spiritual energy continuously surging from the core guarded the last spark of life.

"Ga... you... mother..."

In a hundred-meter-deep pit, a corpse almost dissolved into powder lay on the ground, rapidly regenerating.

A feeble sound, but a stubborn curse buzzed like a fly from the newly grown vocal cords.

His speech was breathy.

Wrapped in soft, holy white light, Zhang Tie stared straight at the mushroom cloud in midair.

"Damn your grandmother..."

"Damn it, was I just blown to ashes?"

His speech became barely clearer. Xiong Hanzi's expression was complex, venting his emotions with endless sighs.

Too terrifying...

Although Lin An had described the nuclear explosion scene to him, hearing it was not as good as seeing it, and seeing it was not as good as experiencing it firsthand.

He took pride in it, but the defense after transformation was as fragile as a flower under a train wheel when faced with the nuclear explosion.

He couldn't even last a second, and the subsequent damage directly knocked out his death-exempt talent.

Moreover, the characteristic of the Indestructible Asura's near-death rebirth seemed to be triggered as well.

He just didn't know how the system calculated it, and he couldn't figure out why he had respawned on the spot.

Taking advantage of his invincibility, Zhang Tie simply narrowed his eyes and stared fixedly at that huge firework.

"Damn it, I guess besides me and Lin Dui, everyone else is probably dead..."

"This damn dog system really gives no chance to survive..."

He felt a little lingering fear.

Zhang Tie, who usually feared neither heaven nor earth, couldn't help but feel a bit uneasy now.

This was far more terrifying than the instant kill by the Crying Angel before.

At least that time, he didn't even feel the taste of death, but died under some mysterious rule.

"How is this so abnormal..."

Quite the fellow.

Zhang Tie clicked his tongue and shook his head.

This time they faced only a trash-tier yield, a small tactical nuclear bomb of just 250,000 tons.

The explosion distance was far, and it was detonated in midair.

Just like that, he had no power to resist.

It's hard to imagine how Lin Dui survived at the center of the nuclear explosion back then.

His whole body felt prickly and numb.

Zhang Tie lay slumped among the ground full of quartz, feeling somewhat dazed.

Having withstood the first wave of damage, the subsequent radiation and heat damage, though also terrifying, were still not enough to pose a lethal threat to him.

In his complex mood, he seemed to feel that his body had undergone a special change at the moment of the explosion.

I feel like... at the instant of triggering death, I saw something...

My talent... isn't it death-exempt? Did I actually die or not just now?

Zhang Tie frowned, his gaze somewhat bewildered.

Cursing is just cursing.

Unlike before entering a near-death state, this time it seems more like a recovery from death...

After all, he really turned to ash.

That moment.

He seemed, from deep within his Memory, to have seen some strange fragments.

"That is... the memory of the Undying Asura... Suturer?"