Suddenly, a scream came from the direction of the Worship Hall behind the grand hall.
Bibi Dong frowned and abruptly rose, her figure flashing as she darted straight toward the Worship Hall.
When she rushed into the Worship Hall.
She saw that the lofty Angel God Statue had actually split down the middle, leaving an enormous crack.
And Qian Daoliu, the Great Enshrined, lay collapsed beneath the statue, coughing up great mouthfuls of blood, looking as though he had aged ten years in an instant.
"Great Enshrined, what happened to you?" Bibi Dong stepped forward and asked coldly.
Qian Daoliu raised his head. His once-commanding eyes were now filled with ashen despair.
"It's severed..."
"The radiance of the Angel God has been cut off completely..."
Qian Daoliu clutched the hem of Bibi Dong's skirt, his voice trembling.
"Just now, the Divine Realm took the initiative to sever all contact with the Douluo Continent."
"This isn't a temporary obstruction. They destroyed the spatial coordinates outright!"
"The deity our Spirit Hall worships has abandoned us..."
Hearing this, Bibi Dong felt no sorrow. Instead, she threw back her head and let out a cold, delighted laugh.
"Abandoned?"
"You old fool, do you still not understand?"
"They haven't abandoned us. They're running for their lives!"
Bibi Dong looked down at Qian Daoliu, her eyes full of mockery.
"Those lofty bastards in the Divine Realm must have seen the true appearance of the one underground too."
"They were scared out of their wits."
"If even the gods don't dare handle this mess, we have even less reason to worry about it."
With that, Bibi Dong turned and strode out of the Worship Hall.
"Send word throughout the city!"
"From this day forward, abolish the worship of the Angel God!"
"Since even the gods have fled, Spirit Hall will worship only itself!"
The view returned once more to the depths of the Planetary Core.
The incomparably immense dark gold dragon was still sleeping.
Gu Xian had no idea that a slight instinctive reaction from his skin while he slept had crippled the Asura God, the Divine Realm's strongest fighter.
Nor did he know that the entire Divine Realm had been so frightened that it had severed contact and begun hiding in its shell.
At that moment, within his sea of consciousness.
The system's emotionless mechanical voice was slowly echoing.
[Fusion progress notification.] [Current dark gold starry sky behemoth origin fusion: 95%.] [Only 3 days remain in the countdown to the final bodily expansion.] [Warning: this expansion will irreversibly alter the structure of the celestial body at the host's location.] [Upon awakening, please take care to control the range of your movements to avoid damaging the surrounding fragile star systems.]
As the countdown advanced.
Ancient patterns that the naked eye could not look upon directly began appearing across the dark gold scales covering Gu Xian's body.
Every faint heartbeat caused the surrounding space to distort violently.
As the countdown reached three days.
Visible physical changes began appearing across the surface of the entire Douluo Star.
The first was the temperature.
On a barren, treeless mountain outside the ruins of the Heaven Dou Empire's imperial capital.
Ning Fengzhi leaned against a rock, gasping for breath.
His clothes had long since been soaked with sweat, but whenever fresh sweat emerged, the surrounding heat evaporated it in less than two seconds.
The air around him was scalding, and even drawing it into his lungs brought a burning sensation.
At the foot of the mountain, the once-broad moat was now bubbling furiously.
The river water had come to a full boil.
The surface was covered with fish and shrimp floating belly-up, all cooked through and giving off a foul, fishy stench.
"Damn it!"
Yu Yuanzhen wiped the hot sweat from his forehead, his temper growing increasingly explosive.
He stood at the cliff's edge, staring at the boiling river below, and cursed through gritted teeth.
"What the hell does that madwoman in the Star Dou Great Forest want?"
"Is she trying to put the whole continent in a pot and stew it?!"
As far as Yu Yuanzhen knew, only that unfathomable silver-haired woman could cause such a widespread meteorological disaster.
He thought Gu Yuena was using this method to take revenge on humanity.
Ning Fengzhi shook his head, his cracked lips moving.
"No."
"If she wanted to kill us, she could have done it directly on the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest that day. There was no need to go to all this trouble."
Ning Fengzhi crouched and reached out to touch the rock beneath his feet.
It burned his hand.
"Feel it carefully. This heat isn't coming down from the sky."
"It's rising from underground."
Ning Fengzhi gazed at the distant horizon, his voice filled with profound helplessness.
"The temperature beneath the entire continent is skyrocketing. This simply isn't something a soul beast could do."
Just then.
A black shadow flashed across the sky.
Bone Douluo Gu Rong flew back from the distance, stumbling as he landed and nearly falling.
"Old Bones, what's the situation out there?" Sword Douluo Chen Xin, holding his broken sword, hurried forward to support him.
Bone Douluo swallowed dryly, his eyes staring blankly.
"It's all over."
"It's not just here. Things are even worse along the coast."
Panting, Bone Douluo recounted the news he had just gathered.
"The seawater is even hotter than the interior."
"All the water in the sea is boiling. Tens of thousands of sea soul beasts are desperately crawling ashore to stay alive."
"I just passed the eastern coast and saw the Deep Sea Demonic Whale King stranded on the beach with my own eyes."
"He couldn't even move. The half of his body touching the ground had been cooked by the scorching sand."
Hearing this, Ning Fengzhi and Yu Yuanzhen both fell silent.
The overlord of the sea had actually been cooked by a beach?
This was already beyond their comprehension.
If even the Deep Sea Demonic Whale King could not escape, where could their group of Titled Douluos hide?
The entire planet was running a fever. There was no safe corner anywhere.
The Star Dou Great Forest.
The core region.
Not a single drop of water remained in the Lake of Life, whose blue waters had once rippled gently.
Baked by the intense heat, the mud on the lakebed had hardened into slabs, their surfaces covered with spiderweb cracks.
And at the edge of that enormous, bottomless fissure.
Hundreds of thousands of high-ranking soul beasts were packed into dense lines.
Not a single soul beast made a sound.
Di Tian stood above the fissure, directing the first group of soul beasts downward.
"Climb down along the crack!"
"Do you see that dark gold patch?"
Di Tian pointed into the depths of the fissure, his voice carrying across the entire gathering.
"All of you, jump onto it, find a gap, and hook your claws into it!"
"Whatever happens next, even if the sky falls, you must not let go!"
Xiong Jun's massive body slid down the rock wall.
He landed steadily on an exposed dark gold scale.
The instant he touched it, Xiong Jun felt an indescribable heat that scorched his fur until it curled.
At the same time, however, the high-ranking True Dragon blood energy emanating from the scale instantly calmed the agitation within him, bringing a peculiar soothing sensation.
Xiong Jun drove his Dark Gold Dreadclaw deep into the junction between two scales, shamelessly plastered his entire body against them, and stopped moving.
Seeing this, the soul beasts behind him followed suit, jumping onto the scales like dumplings dropping into a pot.
Gu Yuena stood at the very front, watching the scene without saying anything.
She knew there was little time left.
Three days at most.
The crust's thickness had already been compressed to its limit, like a sheet of window paper that could tear at any moment.
When the colossal creature inside fully stretched its body, this outer shell would burst apart in an instant.
Other than clinging tightly to the scales, they had no way to survive.
Meanwhile.
Spirit City, the Pope's Palace.
Arm-thick cracks had already appeared across the floor of this sturdy grand hall.
A faint dark red glow shone from the depths of the cracks.
It was magma forced to the surface by the pressure underground.
Inside the grand hall, the temperature was astonishingly high.
Ghost Douluo knelt on one knee, drenched in sweat.
"Your Holiness, the civilians and low-ranking soul masters in the city are all fleeing outside."
"The ground is too hot. Many have had a layer of skin burned off the soles of their feet. They can't stand on it at all."
"Should we send people to evacuate them?"
Bibi Dong sat on the papal throne, looking at the red-glowing crack beneath her feet without the slightest change in her expression.
"Evacuate?"
Bibi Dong gave a cold laugh.
"Evacuate them where?"
"Do you think they'll be safe outside the city? What patch of land on the entire Douluo Continent isn't giving off heat right now?"
Bibi Dong stood, walked to the entrance of the grand hall, and looked at the gray sky outside.
Vast quantities of volcanic ash had already been forced into the atmosphere, obscuring even the sun.
"Leave them alone."
"Running around is just a waste of effort. Let them stay where they are."
Bibi Dong knew perfectly well that this was no natural disaster.
The monster underground was growing.
This planet was about to be burst apart. Faced with such an absolute disparity in size, all struggle was meaningless.
The view pierced the boiling surface, then the churning layer of magma.
And reached the depths of the Planetary Core.
Gu Xian remained coiled up, completely immersed in deep sleep.
There were no stray thoughts in his sea of consciousness.
The dark gold scales covering his body underwent minute physical expansion every second.
Across his body as a whole, this expansion was utterly imperceptible to the naked eye.
But for the Douluo Star wrapped around him, it was a lethal outward force.
[Bodily expansion countdown updated.] [The pressure borne by the external crust has reached the critical point. Large-scale collapse is expected before the countdown ends.] [Host, please prepare to awaken.]
At the border of the Heaven Dou Empire.
A once-clear river now churned with muddy sand, white bubbles constantly rising to its surface, while even the surrounding air warped in the steaming heat.
"Splash."
Amid the surging spray, a wretched figure was slammed onto the shallows beside the bank by the rushing current.
It was Tang San.
The bones in both his arms had long since shattered, leaving him unable to exert any strength through them. Relying solely on his legs and waist, he could only wriggle toward the dry bank bit by bit, like a fish out of water.
"Cough, cough, cough..."
Tang San turned his head and vomited great mouthfuls of the murky river water that had flooded his stomach.
The river water was scalding.
His clothes had long since been scalded into tattered strips. Large patches of his skin were red, with plenty of blisters rising across them. He looked as though he had been tossed into a pot of boiling water, cooked for a while, then fished back out.
If the Mysterious Heaven Skill inside him had not still been circulating automatically, protecting his heart meridians, the temperature of the underground river alone would have cooked him through.
Tang San lay on his back on the scalding mudbank, staring at the gray sky with hollow eyes.
I escaped.
But he felt not the slightest joy at having survived the ordeal.
That enormous dragon whisker that had spanned the entire underground space, along with that single slow yet heavy breath, had branded themselves deep into his mind like a hot iron. He could not shake them off.
"The temperature... keeps rising."
Feeling the burning heat coming from the rocks beneath him, Tang San muttered to himself.
Though both his arms were ruined, his brain still worked.
He recalled the last scene he had witnessed in the water prison. That dark-gold whisker had only drawn upward a little, yet the temperature throughout the underground space had instantly soared, directly triggering an eruption of magma.
Now even the river flowing out onto the surface was nearly boiling.
What did that mean?
It meant that unimaginably huge monster underground was moving toward the surface!
At that thought, Tang San shuddered uncontrollably, and a profound sense of helplessness surged into his heart.
Just then, hurried footsteps suddenly came from the distant woods.
"Something's moving over there! Go take a look!"
Immediately afterward, several familiar figures pushed through the bushes and rushed onto the riverbank.
Leading them was a middle-aged man wearing square-framed glasses, his face full of anxiety.
It was none other than the Four-Eyed Cat Owl, Flender.
Following him were Zhao Wuji and Grandmaster Yu Xiaogang.
Ever since Heaven Dou Imperial City had collapsed into ruins overnight, the people of Shrek Academy had escorted a group of refugees out to safety.
They had followed the water sources south, asking around along the way for news of Tang Hao and Tang San.
"San?!"
Yu Xiaogang recognized the barely human figure lying on the mudbank at a glance. As though struck by lightning, he scrambled over to him, stumbling and crawling.
"San! How did you end up like this? Your arms..."
Looking at Tang San's two clearly ruined arms, Yu Xiaogang's eyes instantly reddened, and even his voice trembled.
Flender and Zhao Wuji also paled in shock. They hurried forward to help, carefully lifting Tang San off the scalding ground.
"Teacher..."
Tang San looked at Yu Xiaogang. His cracked lips moved, but he did not know where to begin.
Tell them there was a dragon underground so huge it could treat a planet like a ball to play with?
Would anyone believe it?
"Save the questions. The rocks here are hot enough to fry eggs. Hurry and get San back to camp for treatment!" Zhao Wuji wiped the hot sweat from his forehead and hoisted Tang San onto his back.
An hour later.
At a temporary refugee camp Shrek Academy had set up on higher ground halfway up a mountain.
Wails filled the air.
Several thousand refugees who had fled Heaven Dou Imperial City were crammed together here, short of medical care and medicine.
Worst of all, the water drawn from every well was scalding hot. Even a single sip required leaving it to cool for ages.
Inside a large tent at the center of the camp.
After having his wounds simply bandaged, Tang San reclined on a plank bed spread with dry grass.
People crowded the tent.
Yu Xiaogang, Flender, Zhao Wuji, and Liu Erlong were all there.
"San, just who hurt you like this?"
Before you continue