Ten feet above the blooming clover meadow, the sapphire-and-gold sphere slowed its descent, hovering weightlessly in the afternoon sunbeams like a soap bubble resting on an invisible current.
For thirty seconds, thirty thousand kneeling fighters held their collective breath. Not a blade of grass moved. The silence across the Grand Defile was so deep that one could hear the rustle of pine needles on the distant ridges and the soft drip of golden dew from flower petals.
Then, gravity took over.
GLOOP~
It was the softest, roundest, and most unapologetically squishy sound imaginable.
The blue slime touched the lush clover, flattened out into an elastic disc two feet thick. Then he bounced back up with a cheerful wobble. It shook its fluid mass like a happy puppy emerging from a garden pond. It scattered a handful of sparkling, fragrant golden droplets over the surrounding clover.
Then, with an easy ripple of azure soft glow, the slime’s atom-deep structure shifted.
The semi-clear jelly folded inward, drawing surrounding moisture and spirit-qi into a seamless, flowing dark shape. In less than two breaths, the cosmic entity that had devoured nine waves of sky thunder transformed back into an ordinary eighteen-year-old human scholar.
