Douluo: Manifesting the Black Abyss and White Flower at the Start-Chapter 317 - 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.