Chapter 26 #3
The essence of the great forest lit up to brilliant effect by impossibly hot fires, much like the sun, that nurtured and protected.
Burning without consuming. The fuel that allowed the endless forests to grow ever grander.
Sufficient to cover an entire world, even as the world was lit by the sun’s eternal flame.
Earth and Spirit. Unified. Shaping mortal clay with the essence of life as a fierce corona of fire became a tight band of superheated sand shimmering with a will of its own.
The clay of living things. The shaking of Earth’s sentient might. The fires just underneath that catalyzed the most catastrophic of eruptions even as it sprayed lava that would one day become the rich fecund bounty of topsoil sufficient to support an entire woodland oasis.
Pairs of elements that synergized. A full four that intertwined.
Just like the four above. A whirling storm of ocean Water filled with Metal-rich salts. Crackling with Lightning as Wind-infused clouds howled overhead.
Two sets of four, much like his original Prismatic Shield. Yet in that moment of stunned epiphany, he realized there was more. So much more.
How Wind fed the flames that blazed all the brighter.
How crackling Lightning catalyzed with Earth, Wind, and Water to form the first living things.
Wood and Spirit forged in that moment, metabolized and catalyzed with the help of metabolic fire and the countless metallic trace elements that allowed life to flourish in the first place.
Water that enriched the forests.
Fires that both destroyed and refined.
In that moment of stunned epiphany, he realized that all the elements were interconnected in cycles of creation and destruction.
Growth and refinement. That all the elements save their direct opposition could reinforce one another, and the tension of opposition could enhance with a tensile strength all its own.
So much more than a single tier of enhancement a single elemental step behind.
Rather, it was indicative of multiple elements woven together, reinforcing and strengthening one another in ways so similar to his super cable.
The interconnected forces and fields of reality itself.
His breath hitched, heart racing as he realized he was on the cusp of a profound breakthrough. Sensing so many truths roaring into him at that moment.
Just as the miraculous marvel before him sputtered to nonexistence.
A priceless treasure, which managed to ward an entire caldera basin and the one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants within, went out like a light. Even if few, save those with Qi Perception or a cultivator right before the ward, could sense its presence at all.
Alex felt a cold chill even as he flinched with dismay, crashing from the heights of epiphany as he struggled, desperately, to hold tight to those flickers of illumination, so close to a breakthrough that was now fading like the morning dew.
“Alex, the bells! Come on, we have to go!”
Alex bit back a curse. Jolted just a heartbeat away from true illumination, but Ya Ling was right. There would be time enough to study this marvel, or so he prayed, if they managed to restore both ward and waterfall and save the city.
And for that, they had to make it to the ritual site in time.
Even as the air behind them rang with discordant clanging bells… and the desperate cries of those who feared it was already too late.
Alex gently put down Lini, the girl’s eyes widening as she caught sight of Alex in the rapidly fading light.
“Alex, you’re covered in blood!” she sobbed with startled dismay, Rachel and Ya Ling both gazing at him with wide, frightened eyes as the crimson lacquer turned into a glossy obsidian hue.
“Alex!”
He didn’t bother responding. Instead he stepped forward, daring to cross the barrier that could so easily kill all of them, so profound had been its power.
Yet there was nothing. Not even a tingle of hostile arts beyond the periphery of his Dark Qi–saturated blood.
Blood that he recalled a second later, knowing it was only a tiny bit as effective as his Dark Qi Projection of a lifetime ago had been. But it was something, and perhaps could lead to something quite profound.
One day.
When he had the time.
For now, there was only one move that they could make that would avert the tide of destruction now threatening to sweep them all away.
So Alex claimed his kitsune friend as Ya Ling did Rachel, the pair of them not even bothering to climb so much as glide down the extremely steep far side of the escarpment, which was, for all intents and purposes, a wall. Yet even here…
“Please go slow enough so that Rachel can keep infusing the stone with living things.”
Ya Ling gave Alex a hard stare he could see perfectly well in the dim light, earlier flirtation replaced with the same growing sense of urgency that he himself felt.
“Alex…”
“It matters.”
Ya Ling flinched before recovering with a cool nod. “Very well, battle leader. It will be as you say.”
“Thank you,” he said, ignoring the whiff of sudden tension.
Because there just wasn’t time for bullshit they could work out when the city wasn’t in peril.
When their lives weren’t in peril.
As Rachel’s whimper, Ya Ling’s curse, and his own Desert Sense and Soul Sight made clear was indeed the case, with the score of Silvers surrounding the ritual site below.
Ya Ling’s eyes widened, her voice the faintest whisper. “Alex!”
“I know.”
Lini trembled with unmistakable dismay. “There must be twenty of them down there. At least! What do we do?”
Alex’s heart was pounding a staccato beat that some might call dread but he chose to call exhilaration, knowing damn well that all it took was one mistake, one unexpected speed cultivator, one wujen using exotic techniques he had no counter for, and it was all over.
But the city could still be saved.
He locked eyes with Lini. “Still eager to be a part of your grandfather’s tale?”
Lini looked back at him with shocked dismay when he passed her a bloodsoaked cloth hiding the most priceless prize in this entire corner of the desert.
“Alex!”
“The fate of the caldera is now in your hands. My blood, saturated in Dark Qi that not even Shadow can pierce, is the only reason why the wujen below haven’t zeroed in on us like beacons of death,” he said, remembering all too well a certain Gold-tier monster that had ambushed them at the ritual site at the cardinal points of Liushi’s own caldera.
His gaze grew intent as he caught Ya Ling’s wide-eyed stare, grateful to see her give a nervous nod of accord before turning back to the now trembling kitsune.
“Are you ready to be a hero, Lini?”
Wide, frightened eyes locked with Alex’s own as they hovered in the air.
“I… y-yes!” she whispered at last.
“Good. The plan is simple. I’m going to crash into those monsters and blitzkrieg the fuck out of them. Ya Ling will provide auxiliary support. While we’re seizing the Vor and trying not to die, you’re going to be the hero that saves the city, Lini. Do you understand?”
Lini’s eyes widened. She swallowed a whimper.
“You alone have Shadow Qi. And this way, whatever happens to me and Ya Ling—and you damn well better believe I’ll be doing all I can to keep us all alive—you’ll be the one to embrace the ritual and place the core.”
“Alex, I don’t even know how—Alex… I was offered a party invite?”
“Accept.”
“Okay.” She nodded, her features pale, and she trembled in Alex’s arms, leaking tears of blood.
For long moments, Alex communed with his newest party member before breaking the link as she crumpled in his arms, before shuddering and snapping her eyes wide open.
“I saw it,” she whispered in wonder. “Everything your companions did, surviving Liushi’s rescue, I lived it as if the experiences were my own. Everything my mother saw and did that you saw—everything you did, every power you accessed, kill you made… I saw it. I felt it. As if it were my own!”
Alex flashed a sad smile. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be.” Her eyes flashed with sudden determination. “Now I know exactly what I have to do to access the ritual site, and I can do it all hidden in Shadow!”
Alex flashed a relieved smile. “Good. Are you ready?”
“I…” Her excited smile turned into a grimace as she gazed at the Silver-tier platoon that would be all too eager to slaughter them. “Yes,” she whispered at last, before giving a resolute nod. “Yes, I’m ready.”
Rachel swallowed. “I am too.”
She hastened to speak as Alex gazed down upon her.
“No. It’s okay! I know your fear. And my affinity with both Sand and Earth allows me to pick a…
um… specialization that might actually keep us alive?
Anyway, put me in the depression right over there…
yes! I’ll stay there, and while you all are fighting and distracting and saving the city, I’ll be doing my best to make everything bloom. ”
Alex’s eyes widened, only in that moment getting a sense of just how much his young Ruidian friend had grown in the very short time he had known her, after being party-linked through the kills of multiple Silvers, and even one Gold.
And even if she had earned only contribution for several of those kills, he had been feeding her potency the entire time.
Caring nothing for his own reserves, his spiritual super cable now shrieking so close to Silver Rank 4 that he could feel it like a pressure wave radiating off him.
To say she had blossomed in the crucible of combat would be an understatement as a wide-eyed Alex sensed the entire area around the basin transforming.
Lichen darkened the sands as blossoming succulents and desert cacti filled the air with their heady perfume.
Alex could sense it, the entire region before the steep caldera face was about to blossom into rich, fecund life.
The look of awe on Ya Ling’s features soon turned into dismay when it was clear that at least some of their opponents sensed the oddity as well.
“Captain! The desert blooms. How? There’s been no rainfall!”