Before Dean could finish speaking, the Hell Portal ahead suddenly shook violently, instantly drawing everyone's attention.
"Lohr, can you hear me?" Dean shouted again.
"This has to be connected to him. Be careful." Sam pulled Dean back a little to keep them from being sucked in.
The ground around them was shaking far too violently.
Under everyone's watchful eyes, the Hell Portal neither expanded nor closed. Instead, it underwent some bizarre solidification.
Along the edges of the rift, the dark-red sulfurous glow began to congeal and dim like cooling lava, forming a rough, volcanic-rock-like substance.
The suction within the rift, which had constantly churned and tried to drag everything around it into hell, visibly weakened and subsided.
In barely a dozen seconds, the once-dangerous spatial rift had turned into a fixed "cave" in the ground, its edges covered in a hardened lava crust. Its interior remained deep and dark, but it no longer emitted any pull, looking like a profound entrance.
Before Dean and Sam could react, a grayish-white light suddenly flared in the open space before the portal.
Wu Heng staggered into view within the light.
The glove on his right hand was covered in black patterns, its glow dimmed. He looked somewhat exhausted, but his gaze was clear.
"Lohr!" Sam cried in delight.
"You're alright?!" Dean rushed over and looked him over from head to toe, his eyes lingering especially on the glove covered in black patterns. "That hand—"
"If you're putting on a show, you have to make it convincing."
Wu Heng answered briefly. At the same time, he waved his left hand, and several strands of the power of balance transformed into chains, binding several low-level demons nearby that had yet to grasp the situation, along with two low-level angels hiding behind the rocks.
"Clean up