Chapter 124
Heavenly Eruption
Mei's eyes shot wide open as she burned almost half of her Qi in less than a breath carrying out Lya and Song from their temporary lodging and out into the open. No less than a second later, a black bolt of thunder ripped across the ashen sky and obliterated the wooden dwelling in a manner that seemed beyond abnormal.
Her eyes darted around in panic, settling only when she saw the figure stop by their side, frowning as deeply as her.
It wasn't an attack, per se—there were no other cultivators anywhere around, and even if there were, none should have been capable of conjuring up an attack of that scale. Besides, the ashen skies seemed full of them—black bolts of lightning, varying in sizes and thickness, streaking across and slamming into random points of the world, destroying whatever they touched.
Eerily, however... they made no sound. It was as though they swallowed it instead, turning melody into silence.
The bolts were relatively infrequent and seemingly vastly spread—Mei looked in all four directions yet could not see the end of the ashen firmament. It went on endlessly, dulling the world's colors in a rather stark and somber way. The green of the trees had turned nearly brown, as though a painter had taken a beautiful piece and doused it in coloring oils, desaturating it until it became death out of life.
"What is--" just as Mei wanted to ask what likely all four were thinking, she felt something. A stir deep inside her dantian prompted her to close her eyes and look deep inward. There, abounded in streaks of white was a churning Core that held the essence of self—and though the core itself was always in equal measures white as it was slightly gray (all depending on what kind of Core one forged during the breakthrough), there were a few stains, spots of black. Were she not focused on looking for anomalies, she would have missed them for certain—that was how tiny they were.
Fear struck her, and she tentatively used tendrils of Qi to probe the anomalies. Nothing happened, however; well, the anomalies seemed to 'absorb' the Qi from tendrils but would spit it back out a moment later, except in the form of black vapor.
For one reason or another, though, Mei didn't feel any danger—not instinctively—towards the anomaly. It was unbecoming, and it was beyond her understanding, but... she felt it was non-threatening. Rather, she decided to do an experiment--
She drew out her sword and managed to extract a tiny little mote from within the anomaly, mixing it with ordinary Qi and executing one of the Arts she was most familiar with—the Art shuttled her forward rapidly, allowing her to outpace her opponents and get a surprise hit in. Ordinarily, though strong, it was easily countered by anyone who was prepared for it, knew of it, or simply had good battle instincts, like Shen Tao.
However, something was... different. She knew it the moment she even began executing the art.
Without her even realizing it, she found herself at her intended destination. Did a second pass? No. She felt that it was so fragmented it could not even be measured in time—it was as though she blinked from one place to another, rather than moved in between them.
Furthermore, she watched her sword slowly turn to dust and disappear, seemingly unable to hold steady in the wake of the expelled energy—the expelled energy that had leveled about a thousand yards of space between her and the mountain's beginning. There was only wasteland there, occupied solely by the fading flickers of dust and nothing else.
She found herself gasping, drained mentally and physically, still unable to process what she'd done.
The attack she executed... it was on the level of those people who have mastered their Avatar forms. No, even before that—the Art she used wasn't supposed to do this. It had no means of doing this. It was a halfway movement and halfway attacking Art, an uneven combination meant to be used as a surprise. Not... this.
Her knees gave out, and just as she was about to collapse, a pair of arms grabbed her under her armpits and held her up. Glancing over, she saw Shen Tao staring at her incredulously, a mixture of awe and fear in his eyes.
"... you alright?" he asked.
"Yeah," she could only muster a one-word reply, her eyes veering back over to the destruction she'd caused.
It was prompted by a mere feeling, an itch deep within, and she simply wanted to see whether her intuition was in any way correct. There wasn't even an inch of her that thought the outcome would be this devastating. If she attacked someone... no, how far up the chain of strength would she have to go to find someone who could take the attack head-on? Perhaps her Master? Or maybe someone slightly weaker?
She knew well enough that none among her peers would come even close to being able to defend it. Even Shen Tao, for all his marvel and talent, wouldn't be able to react in time. After all, she'd fought him and sparred with him often enough to have a general grasp on his strength. And though it was likely that he was hiding some trump cards, unless that trump card was a shield that activated automatically when he was in danger, he, too, would find himself helpless beneath the weight of that anomaly.
Once again, she looked inward.
There were still a few black spots around on the surface of her Core, but they were fewer and dimmer. She suddenly felt pain over having wasted so much of it on nothing, yet couldn't stay in pain for long as she didn't know what that nothing was.
Suddenly, the world shook, and Mei witnessed her two Juniors unleash attacks of their own—they were broadly weaker than hers, sure, but still vastly beyond what any Foundation Establishment cultivator ought to be able to conjure. Lya's attack was a roaring bolt of thunder—and though it was a normal-looking one, a mixture of white, purple, and cyan, Mei noted, however faintly, black traces deep within reminiscent of the thunder ripping out from the ashen sky.
Song's attack was similar to hers, an ordinary thrust that dug out about three hundred feet of dirt into a small crater. All three seemed to have felt something close to a resonance with the streaking thunder from the gray skies, and if it was just the three of them and not Shen Tao as well, that could mean only one thing... it had something to do with the Forest.
Both Lya and Song collapsed swiftly after, passing out completely unlike her. Looking into them, Mei saw that both had drained every ounce of their Qi; on the other hand, she managed to do it with more control, though she was quite drained herself as well.
"What is happening?" Shen Tao asked the question she wanted to ask as they both held onto one of the kids, looking up at the ever-darkening skies. The frequency of bolts increased, and though there seemed to be no pattern on the surface, Mei started noticing that the bolts didn't seem to land anywhere within a mile of them. "And why did it stop happening here?" She could practically hear the strange, defeated smile in Shen Tao's voice without even looking to the side to confirm it.
"The question is... is it safe to stay here?"
"It's a pointless question," he said. "Even if it's not, we can't leave."
"We can hide."
"We were hiding."
"Okay. So, what's your plan?" She asked with a bit of frustration in her voice.
"Stick to you three, apparently," he replied with an equal measure of bitterness in his. She looked over and met his gaze and felt a pang of discomfort in her heart as she faced him—though he hid it the best he could, she saw it, burning pyres of envy, greed, and even anger.
"... powers don't just come out of nowhere, Shen Tao," she tried to reason. "And if they do, they come with a burden or a curse."
"I'm not asking you to comfort me, least of all with stupid lies like that."
"They're neither lies nor stupid, and I wasn't comforting you," she said with a frown. "I'm merely stating facts. In all the stories you've ever heard or read or even witnessed of people obtaining amazing powers practically overnight, when have they ever ended well for the person in question? Unearned strength is tethered to a thousand devils, and just because ours haven't shown up yet doesn't mean they aren't eyeing us from the shadows."
Before Shen Tao could reply—a bitter remark or a well-thought-out argument—yet another thing happened. Well, it was the same thing, just in a different way.
A black bolt spanning at least half a mile in diameter tore through the fabric of space and time, sundering all in its wake... and this time around, it was not silent.
Pain was bordering the worst sort Mei had ever felt in her life—she instinctively let go of Lya and clamped her palms against her ears, but it was futile. Her eardrums had burst and were bleeding profusely, and the sheer resonance of the sound had started a major chain reaction of earthquakes. She watched in abject horror as the tall, jagged peaks of Bloodmoon Mountain cracked and split, crushed under their own weight. It was an avalanche of dust, debris, and boulders, and it was unlike anything she'd ever seen before in her life.
"RUN!" She didn't hear herself scream, and she doubted Shen Tao could hear her. However, she still felt she needed to say it.
Grabbing Lya once again and using Qi to close her ears (just barely helping a bit with pain that had begun to jolt through her system like fire), she shuttered backwards and away from the coming storm of death. She caught a glimpse of Shen Tao to her left, running alongside her, Song in tow.
Darkness swelled all around, and soon similar bolts began to erupt every which way around them, turning the calm, still world into one of unmitigated cataclysm. Mei witnessed an entire field of green be torn up into a mile-deep crater of smoking ash and death, while similar scenarios played out all around them.
She didn't know where to run, and her instincts guided her. Within minutes, she became deeply aware that she was running in the direction of the 'fake' Forest—just as she did twice before when in deathly danger, she resorted to the one place she thought infallible.
Whether that was true or not, and whether the forest could survive the onslaught that was destroying the world around them... she didn't know. However, bearing witness to the rivers being heaved up from their roots, all their waters evaporated before they could fall back down to the ground, and watching all light be consumed by the ever-expanding cabal of ashen clouds left her little hope in anything else.
This wasn't the sort of thing that one survived through strength—it was so overpowering and overwhelming that Mei felt even her Master could only run and hide, and perhaps even Sect Master himself would choose to do so. So, she ran, ran in the direction of the only place she felt could be a safe haven in the times of apocalyptic reckoning.