Ten miles west of the Grand Defile, along the wind-scoured ridges of Cloud-Piercing Pass, thirty thousand traditional fighters had halted their scared retreat.
The panic that had driven them from the valley was primal and overwhelming. Students from Heavenly Sword Manor, Crimson Flame Pavilion, Azure Cloud Sect, Mystic Talisman Hall, and Pure Lotus Abbey had abandoned formation banners, baggage carts, and broken floating skiffs, sprinting through the mountain gaps like frightened sheep escaping a wolf pack. But they reached the higher elevations where the canyon opened into the eastern plains. Then, the stampede gradually slowed to a shivering halt.
Human curiosity, especially the paranoid curiosity of immortal fighters, was a powerful force.
“Look back!” a core student from Azure Cloud Sect gasped. It pointed a trembling finger toward the western horizon. “The sky... The entire mountain range has gone black!”
Every eye turned back toward the Grand Defile.
From this distance, the scale of the disaster was breathtaking. The sky above the forest was no longer sky. It was an inverted ocean of churning black void-qi spanning ten thousand li from north to south, thick and heavy like liquid ink. At its center, a huge cyclonic funnel dipped toward the earth, lit up by violent, underground pulses of deep royal purple fire. Arcs of lightning thicker than city gates flickered across the cloud wall. Their crackling discharge shook through the bedrock so intensely that pebbles bounced against the soles of the fighters’ boots.
“Sect Elders!” shouted a panicked deacon, clutching his chest. “Is the ancient demon god emerging? Did the deep pit open?”
Behind a massive granite outcrop overgrown with wild briars, Elder Mo Qian of Mystic Talisman Hall was wildly rummaging through his spatial pouch. His high-born daoist robes were torn at the hem. His tall jade hairpin sat crooked upon his sweat-soaked brow.
“Quiet, all of you!” Mo Qian snapped, his voice trembling despite his best efforts to appear dignified. “Clear the outer edge! Deploy the Spirit-Eye Scrying Array!”
Four senior magic charm masters hurried forward, slapping yellow red stone papers against the flat face of a four-foot bronze scrying mirror. With a ringing hum of spiritual qi, the polished metal surface rippled like disturbed water before resolving into a crystal-clear projection of the Grand Defile.
Instantly, dozens of sect leaders, elders, and chief students crowded around the bronze mirror, jostling for a view.
Elder Liu Chen of Azure Cloud Sect leaned in so close his beard nearly brushed the bronze frame. “Where is it? Where is the nine-headed chaos behemoth? The records of the ancient sect wars describe ancient beasts as mountains of black scales with eyes of burning magma!”
“Look at the epicenter!” Elder Yan Lie of Crimson Flame Pavilion barked. His face was dark with suppressed fury and lingering terror. “The sky-trial vortex has locked onto the valley floor! Whatever is breaking through must be standing directly beneath the sky spotlight!”
Mo Qian channeled a burst of spiritual energy into the mirror’s focus runes. “Enhancing zoom! Piercing the ozone foul fog!”
The image on the bronze surface sharpened rapidly.
The blackened crater where the battle had taken place zoomed into focus. The scorched grass, the crushed clover, the abandoned banners—everything became razor-sharp. The sky spotlight of pure violet light was beaming directly onto a patch of flat green turf beside a small, bubbling mountain brook.
And sitting right in the center of that beam was...
Silence fell over the ridge.
It was a total, choking silence. The howling wind seemed to fade. The distant rumbling of thunder seemed to dim. Even the wild breathing of thirty thousand warriors died away, replaced by the collective sound of dozens of immortal elders blinking in deep, soul-wrenching confusion.
“Elder Mo,” Liu Chen whispered after five painful seconds. “Your mirror is misaligned.”
“It... It can’t be misaligned,” Mo Qian stammered, wiping sweat from his forehead with a trembling sleeve. “The scrying array tracks the dense spiritual deep ring of the sky-trial’s target! The focal node is locked at total zero map points!”
“Then what in the name of the Heavenly Emperor are we looking at?!” Yan Lie roared, his eyes bulging. “That’s not a nine-headed behemoth! That’s not a blood-drinking fiendgod! That’s... That’s...”
“A dumpling,” a young student in the back whispered timidly. “A blue dumpling.”
“Silence!” Yan Lie shrieked, his face turning a dangerous shade of crimson.
Projected upon the bronze mirror. It sat peacefully beneath the world-ending spotlight of the Ninth-Tier Purple Heavenly Lightning Sky-trial, was a single, semi-clear blue blob.
It was roughly forty inches wide. It had no arms, no legs, no horns, no fangs, and no demonic markings. It possessed two curved white eyes that looked entirely too relaxed for someone standing on the threshold of cosmic total ruin. Thirty thousand fighters watched in stunned disbelief. Then, the little blue orb squished downward against the grass, popped back up into a cheerful sphere. Then he extended two stubby blue pseudopods to stretch its sides like an old shopkeeper waking up from a pleasant nap.
A system log registered the sudden influx of collective scrutiny:
“Wait... Wait!” Mo Qian’s voice climbed an entire octave, cracking like dry bamboo. “You mean to tell me... The entity undergoing the Ninth-Tier Purple Total ruin Sky-trial... Is THAT?!”
“The demon slime!” another elder cried out. “The azure monster that fed our vanguard dumplings! It shed its human skin! That’s its true ancient form!”
“Preposterous!” sputtered a deacon from Heavenly Sword Manor. “A water slime is a zero-tier pest! It eats pond moss and dissolves fallen leaves! How could a puddle of jelly trigger a ten-thousand-li heavenly execution decree? Fighters spend five hundred years in secluded bone-grinding quiet focus, swallowing dragon marrow and burning old family spirit stones just to trigger a three-bolt golden sky-trial! This thing doesn’t even have a skeleton!”
From the thorny briar bush ten paces away, a low, ragged sound began to echo.
It was Grand Elder Xuan Ji.
The coalition commander had crawled out of the thorn bushes, his golden robes caked with damp bog mud, his old family sword belt dragging on the ground. His face was pale, smeared with dirt and dried foam around the corners of his mouth. He looked like a madman who had escaped an asylum, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the scrying mirror with manic intensity.
Then, Xuan Ji began to laugh.
It was a harsh, rattling laugh that rose into frantic shrieks of delight.
“Hah! Hahaha! AHAHAHAHA!” Xuan Ji pointed a muddy, claw-like finger at the bronze projection, laughing until he choked on his own thick spit. “Look at it! Look at the arrogant little beast! It didn’t flee! It didn’t dig into the earth or hide behind its mountain arrays!”
“Grand Elder?” Mo Qian asked, stepping back cautiously.
“Don’t you see, you fools?!” Xuan Ji wheezed, his chest heaving with vindictive joy. “The heavens aren’t blind! The Heavenly Dao doesn’t tolerate anomalies! That creature thought it could deceive the world with demonic trickery and corrupted wine! But its very existence is a blasphemy against cosmic law! The heavens have showed up the Ninth-Tier Purple Total ruin Sky-trial specifically to erase it from the wheel of rebirth!”
Xuan Ji stepped forward. He wiped mud from his chin, his arrogant stance rushing back into his withered frame like dirty water filling a ditch.
“It’s finished! A single bolt of purple total ruin lightning carries the packed Yang-Thunder fire of the sky high sky! It turns mountain peaks into boiling glass! When that lightning strikes, that little puddle of demonic water won’t even have time to scream! Every drop of its fluid will be boiled away into nothingness! Its soul will be ground into cosmic ash!”
The elders exchanged glances. Slowly, a wave of tentative relief washed across their pale faces.
“The Grand Elder is right,” Liu Chen murmured, stroking his trembling beard. “No physical vessel below the Soul Formation realm can withstand pure purple lightning. Even an ancient dragon would have its scales melted off. That creature is barely forty inches wide. It will evaporate instantly.”
“Heaven is executing the demon on our behalf!” a student shouted, pumping his fist. “Righteousness prevails!”
Back in the meadow, ten miles away, Lin Xiao felt a faint, prickling sensation along his upper water’s skin.
He turned his gaze toward the distant eastern crags. Through his panoramic fluid senses, he could clearly detect dozens of tiny spiritual scrying beacons reflecting sunlight off polished bronze mirrors hidden in the rocks.
Oh, Lin Xiao thought with a pleasant bob of his jelly. They’re watching from the ridge. That’s nice. It’s always fun when people come to watch a show.
Deciding to be a polite host, Lin Xiao extended a single, plump azure slime arm high into the air. He flattened the tip into a small, squishy hand and waved it cheerfully back and forth toward the distant mountains, offering a warm, friendly greeting to the thirty thousand scared spectators.
In the bronze mirror atop Cloud-Piercing Pass, the magnified image of the little blue blob waving its tiny jelly hand filled the entire surface.
The students fell instantly silent.
Elder Mo Qian stared at the waving slime arm. His jaw dropped so low his mouth formed a perfect circle. Beside him, Xuan Ji’s laughter died instantly in his throat, his face freezing in an expression of numbed, impossible to understand fury.
“Did... Did that monster just wave at us?” a young swordsman whispered in utter horror.
“It’s taunting us,” Xuan Ji hissed, his fingernails digging into his palms until blood dripped into the mud. “It’s mocking the entire traditional training world! Let the thunder fall! Strike it down, Heaven! Vaporize that insolent blue bug!”
As if answering the old man’s desperate plea, the heavens above the Grand Defile let loose a roar that shattered the sky.