She was... she was all right?
Jiang Lu slowly opened her eyes, her lashes trembling. The blinding flare of the volcanic eruption still lingered in her vision. The weakness of surviving by a hair's breadth swept through her, and she collapsed onto a cool coral branch.
Her legs were too weak to hold her up. The hand she had instinctively raised to shield herself was still rigid, her fingertips trembling with fear that had yet to subside.
She struggled to lift a hand and gripped the sturdy branch beside her. Once she had steadied herself, she looked around.
The Undersea Volcano had erupted in full. Scalding lava surged and roared, while waves of heat struck the coral branches again and again with earth-shattering force.
Yet the lava could not pass through the gaps in the coral to reach her. Bubbles released by the coral clung to its branches, forming a transparent film that sealed the inside off from the outside.
The heat boiled the surrounding seawater. Water that had been calm churned and steamed a hundred times more violently than before, its savage force crushing rock.
Buoyed by the immense upward thrust of the eruption, the entire coral colony was rising. It carried Jiang Lu, trapped within it, rapidly toward the sea's surface.
Jiang Lu's feelings were a tangled mess. For a moment, she could not tell whether this ordeal had been good fortune or bad.
As far as danger went, she had just been trapped in the heart of an Undersea Volcano, surrounded by molten lava. Every step had threatened to swallow her whole; one slip could have destroyed both body and soul.
Yet by some stroke of luck, the strange coral had kept her securely within its formation, shutting out every deadly threat and leaving her unscathed in