BOOOOOOOOM—KRAKOOOOOM!
On World 35 (Venom-Heart Jungle), the final and largest planet of the five swamp worlds, the top of Mount Hundred-Venoms—a colossal black volcano three miles high—exploded into the sky!
Black volcanic rocks the size of castles rained down into the surrounding steaming swamp jungle as a creature straight out of an ancient nightmare coiled up out of the boiling lava crater.
It was the ultimate ancestral guardian beast of the Venom-Spider Sect: the Rank 8 Early Ten-Thousand-Foot Centipede King!
Its body was nearly two miles long and wider than a ten-lane highway, covered in overlapping plates of dark purple-gold Star-Chitin Armor that gleamed like polished meteor iron. Along both sides of its two-mile-long body clicked ten thousand scythe-shaped golden legs, each one sixty feet long and sharp enough to slice a mountain peak in half.
Standing on top of the Centipede King’s flat, horned head was the Sect Master of the Venom-Spider Sect himself—Poison-Heart Old Freak, a hunched Rank 7 Peak Nascent Soul cultivator wearing a crown of dried centipede shells and holding a blood-red drumstick.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
Every time Poison-Heart Old Freak beat the giant skin drum strapped to the Centipede King’s horn, the Rank 8 beast let out a deafening, metallic roar that shattered the clouds across half the continent!
