The air in the Grand Defile shattered with the roar of two thousand throats channeling spiritual fire all at once.
Elder Yan Lie sprinted at the tip of the charging vanguard, his heavy boots pounding the turf with ground-shaking force. His five-foot crimson broadsword blazed like a blazing bright brand. That left an arc of swirling orange sparks in the air behind him. Behind him, two thousand students of the Crimson Flame Pavilion deployed in a sweeping crescent formation, their scarlet battle robes snapping as their dantians flared with packed fire-qi.
“Form the Crimson Dragon Battle Array!” Yan Lie roared, raising his blazing broadsword toward the sky. “Unleash the Nine-Fold Wildfire! Burn this insolent boy until his soul is boiled away!”
Two thousand fire fighters raised their weapons at the same time.
From their blades, palm seals, and forged iron rings erupted hundreds of intertwining ribbons of spiritual flame. The single streams coalesced mid-air, swelling into twelve huge fire dragons, each thirty paces long, with burning molten claws and eyes of blinding white star-fire. The surrounding heat in the meadow soared instantly past two thousand degrees of roaring spiritual dragon-fire.
The lush green clover boiled away into gray dust before the fire even touched it. Ancient river boulders along the brook cracked and exploded under heat shock, and the bubbling mountain stream hissed furiously. He turned into thick, blinding clouds of white steam. The scorching heat wave rolled across the canyon like a fiery eruption. That turned the air into shimmering, choking waves of orange mirage.
Along the flanking ridges, Xiao Hei was already executing his outer edge patrols. The massive shadow-wolf moved like a streak of liquid ink beneath the pine canopy, his midnight fur drinking in the daylight. While Lin Xiao handled the frontal assault, Xiao Hei guarded the valley flanks. Stray tongues of wildfire splashed off boulders toward the timber slopes. Then, Xiao Hei darted forward in silent, shadow-leaping strides. With deft swipes of his umbral paws, he smothered errant cinders in pockets of pure void darkness before they could ignite dry needles or reach the air-flow chimney pipes of the underground shelters. Golden eyes sweeping the ridgeline, the great black wolf settled onto a high crag. That kept the safe hall outer edge secure.
Down at the cedar table, Lin Xiao didn’t reach for a shield.
He looked down at his azure linen scholar robes. “Ling’er spent three days stitching these sleeves,” Lin Xiao muttered to himself. “If they get covered in soot, she’ll sigh at me all evening.”
With a soft, shimmering pulse of sky light, Lin Xiao collapsed his human avatar. The azure robes folded neatly in mid-air and were drawn into his internal void space.
In their place, sitting upon the wicker cushion, was a plump, semi-clear sapphire-blue sphere forty inches in width. His two curved white eyes blinked cheerfully at the wall of dropping inferno.
“Host,” the Omniscient Dao Spirit chimed in his mind, her cool voice fully unruffled by the roaring cataclysm. “Hostile formation has deployed two thousand four hundred degree spiritual wildfire. Heat absorption matrices tuned and online.”
“Perfect,” Lin Xiao replied. “I was feeling a bit chilly from the morning breeze anyway.”
The little blue slime gave a gentle wobble.
Then, with an elastic thwip, Lin Xiao bounced off the wicker cushion. He didn’t retreat toward Tie Shan’s defensive lines. He didn’t leap into the safety of the brook. Instead, the round sapphire blob hopped straight forward. It bounced across the scorched grass directly into the gaping, blazing bright maw of the lead fire dragon!
“He leaped into the fire!” a student screamed from the front rank. “The demon has committed suicide!”
Elder Yan Lie’s lips curled into a victorious, savage sneer. “Foolish beast! Nothing in this mortal realm can survive the packed wildfire of two thousand Crimson Flame students! Turn to ash!”
BOOOOOOOM!
All twelve fire dragons came together at the exact map points of the blue slime, exploding in a huge pillar of swirling orange and scarlet fire that rose three hundred feet into the sky. The blast wave flattened scorched shrubs fifty yards away. The granite cliff walls glowed a dull, menacing cherry-red under the intense heat.
High above, in his nine-dragon jade chariot, Grand Elder Xuan Ji stroked his beard, a smug, satisfied smirk spreading across his wrinkled face. “Arrogant vermin. He spoke of tea and wholesale margins, only to be reduced to cinders in the first breath of righteous battle.”
In the ranks of the crusaders, a cheer began to rise. Students brandished their swords, war drums prepared to strike a victory rhythm—
And then, the roaring pillar of flame began to shrink.
It didn’t fade into the sky. It didn’t blow away in the wind.
Instead, the swirling fire was being pulled inward. It spiraled wildly toward a single point on the ground as if an invisible, bottomless drain had opened in the heart of the inferno.
Two thousand Crimson Flame students ground to a halt, their cheers dying in their throats. The blazing wall of fire thinned, curled, and vanished into a gentle swirl of warm orange mist.
Standing—or rather, sitting—in the exact center of the glowing, white-hot glass crater was the blue blob.
Lin Xiao was not charred. He wasn’t blackened. Not a single cell of his semi-clear sapphire jelly was damaged.
In fact, he was glowing with a wonderfully cozy, radiant golden-red luster, like an expensive sapphire heated gently over embers. His fluid mass had flattened into a comfortable, squishy pancake. It soaked up the surrounding heat with rhythmic, contented ripples. Small curls of fragrant, sweet steam rose from his rounded top. It smelled faintly of toasted marshmallows and caramelized peach sugar.
Lin Xiao extended a small, semi-clear blue slime arm from his flank, picking up a stray slice of dried melon that had survived in his void storage. He held the melon over the glowing coals of the crater for three seconds. That let the blasting heat crisp the edges, before popping it into his core with a soft gulp.
“Ahhh,” Lin Xiao’s clear, relaxed deep echoed through fluid surface shakes, carrying across the silent, smoldering defile. “A bit smoky, but nice and toasty. Honestly, Elder Yan, that was fantastic. My lower core was feeling a little tight from sleeping in that hammock. That dry heat worked out the knots fully. Do you think your students could do that again? Maybe focus a little more on the left side?”
Elder Yan Lie stood twenty paces away, his jaw hanging so slack that his red beard brushed his breastplate.
The five-foot crimson broadsword in his hands began to tremble. His brain, conditioned by eighty years of traditional fire training, flatly refused to process the reality before his eyes. Two thousand students channeling full-power spiritual dragon fire had produced enough heat energy to smelt twenty tons of iron ore into liquid melted rock waste.
And the blue puddle was asking for another round because it felt like a sauna.
“You... You...” Yan Lie stammered, his face turning an apoplectic shade of white. “What... What manner of ancient demon are you?!”
Behind Yan Lie, two thousand Crimson Flame fighters stumbled backward, their boots tangling in their scorched hems. Students looked at their own hands, their flame-etched swords suddenly feeling cold and useless. The total, easy immunity displayed by the azure blob shattered the foundational pillar of their sect’s pride.
“Form formation!” Yan Lie shrieked, panic cracking his voice into a high-pitched squeak. “Reload the core-fire giant crossbows! Draw your swords! Don’t let it advance!”
High on the southern terrace, hidden behind heavy castle walls of cured oak and dark rock, Chief Tie Shan and his bear-kin crews monitored the vanguard’s chaos with practiced calm.
The air-powered catapult array—twenty-four engines powered by underground steam tapped from the valley’s hot springs—stood ready in two disciplined batteries. In the firing troughs sat giant bronze pods housing braided jade-spider silk sunk in Lin Xiao’s custom sticky rice syrup glue.
Lin Xiao had personally supervised the compounding of the adhesive in the kitchens. While traditional sects made siege weapons with barbed iron or acid-burning toxins, Lin Xiao found such methods crude and uncultured. Instead, he had boiled thirty sacks of glutinous pearl rice for sixteen hours until the starch chains cross-linked into a semi-clear, golden syrup. Blended with mountain peach resin and his own elastic ancient fluid, the syrup formed a marvel of culinary building.
“The beauty of sticky rice syrup glue lies in its culinary physics,” Lin Xiao had explained to Tie Shan during testing, his curved eyes crinkling. “Ordinary potion-made glue snaps under spiritual qi. But glutinous starch behaves like a non-Newtonian caramel. The more wildly a fighter kicks or surges their spirit veins, the firmer the amylopectin molecules interlock, turning the web into an iron-hard, rubbery cushion. It doesn’t harm skin or robes. If the prisoners get hungry, it’s lightly flavored with wild mint and toasted sesame.”
Tie Shan had chuckled until his tusks gleamed. He set the air-powered bursting charges to scatter the sticky nets fifty feet overhead, ready to drape over the charging vanguard like a fragrant picnic blanket.
Lin Xiao wobbled his warm jelly, stretching two pseudopods into the air in a lazy morning yawn.
“Advance?” Lin Xiao chuckled. “I don’t need to advance, Elder Yan. I’m just digesting my snack. But if you’re done warming up the lawn... I believe Old Man Tie has a few party favors he wanted to share.”
High on the southern terrace overlooking the smoldering crater, the heavy wooden safety latches of twenty-four air-powered catapults clanged open all at once. He swung the massive timber throwing arms into firing battery with a ringing hiss of tightly packed steam.