Chapter 4
Spring Step skill check: critical success! You are one with the forest. Your enemies are far too distracted to worry about the likes of you.
The words washed over Alex as he stood in perfect stillness while the world roared and shook all around him, Gold-tier auras and Silver-tier devastation generating a perfect storm of absolute chaos as fire-breathing stone dogs and vicious shadow cats fought against each other with everything they had.
Perhaps the only reason why he wasn’t fleeing for his life at that very moment.
When battling one’s obvious mortal foe, why bother with a puny mortal so weak he was still a half-step from Silver?
All the more so when his ability to blend in to the soothing rustle of the forest made him no more significant than the terrified monkey shivering in his arms. How it had even gotten there, Alex wasn’t sure, his hand gently stroking its back before putting it on a nearby rustling branch as he thought very strongly of being one with the forest.
A forest that surrounded the twisted configuration fused to bloodstone that was now sending pulses through the football-field-sized clearing growing ever larger from the fearsome collateral damage inflicted by impossibly sharp claws and obliterating fire.
Yet not one lick of flame or feline claw dared nick the heart of that clearing, six evenly placed obsidian jewels from which rust, or perhaps blood, pooled from the stone it had been embedded in.
Yet no matter the metaphor of his thoughts, the tormented scream of the entire delve, all its permutations being forced to exist and fuse into one never-intended whole was nothing less than the darkest of truths. And one that would very shortly have catastrophic consequences.
Nothing compared to the fate of a certain gate, of course.
But the difference was only by degree.
Alex’s heart quailed, struck with the same dismayed disbelief of someone being handed a life sentence for a misdemeanor intended as a lighthearted prank by a judge who clearly despised them.
Because as much as he had wanted to believe in a heroic arc with a happy ending, the pulsating discordance now radiating from that hellish artifact as it strobed with ever-growing power, inciting the spirit beasts to a frenzy wouldn’t just spit out Gold-tier abominations.
It would destroy the caldera in its absolute entirety.
Malice to an unthinkable degree.
Whoever had set up this configuration wasn’t trying to dominate or subjugate Qianshi.
They wanted to destroy the city entirely.
An example, perhaps.
The most violent and vicious imaginable.
For just a heartbeat, Alex was filled with a killing range for a certain smirking Gold.
Wondering if this was how he would get back at the city for daring to defy him.
Oath kept, he would do nothing to attack the city outright.
Because the seed of its oblivion had already been planted.
A seed he might have had every intention of removing, though Alex wondered if even he would have survived Gold-tier killing shadow or Dragonic flame.
FUCK!
“Alex! Alex, I can sense it! Everything! It’s a death trap! This whole place is a… a quark bomb!? No, Alex, we have to leave now! NOW!”
Alex’s gut twisted at the panic in Linnea’s mind.
Because she was right.
“Gather all of them and tell them to leave NOW! This place will go in less than twenty-four hours,” he thought back at her as hard as he could.
“How? How do you even… oh. That’s right. Your impossible artificer skill just went up another rank. Congratulations.”
Alex flashed a bleak smile. “Go to Qing Wu’s house. She can fly your family and hers right off the wall and out.”
He knew damn well how unfair it was. Because there was no way in hell half a million would successfully flee into the desert in less than twenty-four hours, but at least his closest friends would have a chance…
“Make that twelve hours,” he thought as another spike of spiritual energy wildly sprayed from the cursed configuration and a third Gold-tier creature manifested.
A second stone dog, which made it quite clear why the beasts were fighting so furiously, so desperately for control.
Wise enough to sense the configuration’s power, utterly unaware that it would lead to all their destruction.
Any chance of his survival went from miniscule to infinitesimal as the newly summoned stone dog turned its massive ground-shaking presence around to face not the cats striking the smaller dogs with wild abandon when they weren’t being burned alive in desperate howls... but toward Alex.
As if the twisted configuration sensed the threat Alex posed.
But that was okay, he thought as he continued to stare at the pulsating bloodstone. Because his hesitation might have just cost him his life…
But at least he had gotten more bang for his buck.
Find Weakness skill check made! You sense the flaw in the infernally aligned artifact 100 paces away!
“Alex, please! You have to flee! You have to!”
“Too late, beautiful,” he whispered under his breath as the massive abomination of stone and liquid magma sprang through the clearing to slam into the forest where Alex had been hiding far faster than physics should allow.
But it didn’t matter. Because Alex was already one with the forest once more.
Bullrush. Bullrush.
A single heartbeat and Alex was before the artifact radiating such bitterly cold malice, promising power and violence within every creature to reforge itself in hatred’s image.
Of course it was utterly impervious to any lesser cultivator’s attacks.
Truly, part of the most vicious of gambits to ensure absolute submission at the hands of a Gold, or oblivion so utter it would prove a horrific lesson to anyone who dared protest the hidden mastermind’s designs from that moment forward.
Even in that instant, Alex couldn’t help but think of Dongfang Hong and Shalu. Which only made his hatred all the more blinding as he channeled all his fury into an abomination of an artifact that mocked him on every level imaginable.
An absolute study in contrast and extremes, power generated by malice and abhorrence, inside and out.
For even if the cursed configuration inspired hatred and loathing in all things summoned, that, too, was a reflection of itself.
Hatred beyond imagining within every cursed rune carved into a once-noble rock’s pores. Rotten obsidian teeth that throbbed with twisted power, such that its artificially constructed soul was itself a thing of torment without end.
Torment that ached for only one thing more than the destruction of all that would dare to exist in the same world as it.
And that was simply to be free of the awful burden of its own existence.
A desperate wish granted with a single cleave and the cleansing power of lightning, as a solid ton of stone and six pristine obsidian cores were, for a single heartbeat, permitted to slip free of the infernal bindings linking them all together.
You have SUCCESSFULLY chained Spell Cleave with Enhanced Storm Strike!
Storm Strike successfully triggers Lightning Blast!
You have successfully destroyed Gold-tier Configuration of Oblivion!
All it had required was for every binding rune to be covered in cleansing lightning for a single moment in time. Weakening the chains of binding just long enough for things to slip free.
Long enough for everything to slip free.
The entire forest roared and shook with a pressure wave that tore through acres of dense foliage, sending shredded cats and shattered dogs flying through the air as a certain ghost of the forest flittered past branches and trunks so fast that it was always the tree right behind him that exploded as the ground was torn and shredded by the inconceivable pressure wave.
A panicked Alex Bullrushed from trunk to crown to wildly swinging branch to patch of shadow blossoms to peach tree to countless other incarnations of the lush green that seemed without end as time stretched and blurred as much as space in his desperate panic.
He knew damn well that had he not evolved Spring Leap to serve as a Bullrush so efficient that it cost him almost no Qi Reserves at all, he’d already be dead.
And the way space itself seemed to stretch in all directions as Linnea’s desperate panicked cry washed over Alex from what seemed an impossible distance away, he already understood what had happened. What must have happened.
“The configuration ruptured and the instances are separating! GET OUT NOW! While you still have access to a gate!” Alex mentally screamed.
He could only pray that she had heard him, because her panicked mental cries had faded to nothing at all.
And Alex had just been struck from behind.
You have been AMBUSHED by Primal Shadow Puma!
You’re already moving at the speed of Bullrush!
You have saved versus crippling blow!
You have suffered one Medium Wound!
You have successfully blinked to another tree!
You have successfully chained 37 additional Spring Leaps!
Alex’s eyes bulged as furious blinding pain ripped along his back, and all he had done was pause for a single heartbeat to shout his mental warning to Linnea.
Yet an eyeblink in time was far longer than he could spare.
Even as he thought the words, he was flittering as fast as thought through the trees once more, now sensing dire peril just behind him.
His lips curled in a rictus of a grin. Somehow, he knew the blow he had suffered to his spine should have killed him. But his bones were indestructible, and the Gold-tier claw had skittered off the vertebrae even as he was blinking away.
The only reason he was alive.
Because no fucking doubt, the creature that had chosen to chase him with every intent to kill absolutely had to be a Gold.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!