Yu Xiaogang held a bowl of cooled herbal medicine, looking at Tang San with heartache written all over his face.
"Was it your father's enemies? Or people from Spirit Hall?"
Tang San did not take the bowl. Instead, he looked up at the gray sky outside the tent and asked a question in return.
"Teacher, what's the situation outside?"
At that, the atmosphere inside the tent instantly became unbearably oppressive.
Flender sighed, pulled over a chair, and sat down.
"A complete disaster."
"Heaven Dou Imperial City is gone, and apparently the Star Luo Empire suffered the same massive earthquake."
"Temperatures across the entire continent are soaring like mad. The water in the rivers has almost boiled dry."
As he spoke, Flender looked at Yu Xiaogang, a trace of admiration in his voice.
"Fortunately, Xiaogang worked out the cause of this disaster yesterday and had us move the refugees to higher ground ahead of time. That was the only reason we weren't drowned by the boiling water that rose this morning."
Tang San froze at those words.
Worked it out?
He whipped his head around and stared at Yu Xiaogang.
"Teacher, you know what's causing this disaster?"
Yu Xiaogang pushed up the glasses on his nose, an expression of complete confidence settling over his face. This was the assurance he possessed as the soul master world's foremost theoretical grandmaster.
He walked to the middle of the tent and spread out a battered map of the Douluo Continent.
"It's actually quite simple, San."
Yu Xiaogang pointed at the Star Dou Great Forest on the map, his tone utterly certain.
"Based on the information coming from Spirit Hall and the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect, a soul beast that has taken human form is hiding in the Star Dou Great Forest. Its cultivation may exceed a million years-the silver-haired woman from the rumors."
"The massive earthquakes over the past few days and the rising temperatures are all her doing."
Tang San frowned, his face full of confusion.
"How could she raise the temperature of the entire continent by herself?"
"Because of the leylines!"
A gleam of wisdom flashed through Yu Xiaogang's eyes as he launched into a lengthy discourse.
"I consulted countless ancient texts and combined geology with soul beast theory to reach a perfect conclusion."
"That silver-haired woman's true form must be an extremely rare, super-powerful fire-attribute or earth-attribute soul beast."
"She's hiding beneath the Star Dou Great Forest. To fight the human alliance, she's frantically drawing energy from magma deep within the mantle!"
"She's extracted so much magma that the underground magma layer has been hollowed out. The crust lost its support, causing the massive collapse around Heaven Dou Imperial City."
"And the heat from the magma she drew upward spread throughout the continent along underground waterways. That's why the rivers are boiling now!"
Yu Xiaogang clapped his hands and delivered his final conclusion.
"All of this is nothing more than a million-year soul beast struggling in its death throes, using the terrain to create a large-scale natural disaster."
Inside the tent, Flender and Zhao Wuji both nodded, thoroughly convinced by Grandmaster's theory.
To them, this explanation had sound reasoning and evidence. It was perfectly logical.
Yet after hearing all this, Tang San simply leaned against the wooden bed in a daze.
A long while passed.
"Hahaha..."
Tang San suddenly laughed.
His laughter grew louder and louder until tears spilled from his eyes. Laughing pulled at the wound where his arm had been severed, making him suck in cold breaths of pain, but he still could not stop.
"San, what are you laughing at?" Yu Xiaogang frowned, feeling somewhat displeased.
Could there be some flaw in my perfect theory?
Tang San stopped his bitter laughter. He looked at the man before him, whom the world respectfully called Grandmaster, his eyes full of pity.
"Oh, Teacher..."
Tang San shook his head, his voice steeped in despair.
"The theory you're so proud of isn't even a joke in the face of true power."
"Drawing out magma? A hollowed-out crust?"
"We were all wrong. Absurdly wrong!"
Tang San abruptly sat upright, fixing bloodshot eyes on Yu Xiaogang as he all but roared out everything in his heart.
"There's no formation drawing up magma!"
"The rising temperature isn't some soul beast casting a technique!"
"It's body heat! Pure physical body heat!"
The tent instantly fell silent.
Flender and Zhao Wuji exchanged looks, both wondering whether Tang San's imprisonment in the water dungeon had made him hallucinate.
"San, what nonsense are you talking about?" Yu Xiaogang's expression hardened.
"What kind of body heat could cook an entire continent? Are you saying there's a furnace bigger than a mountain underground?"
"Bigger than a mountain?"
Tang San gritted his teeth, remembering that dark-gold whisker that had remained utterly motionless in the magma.
"Beneath Slaughter City, I saw a whisker with my own eyes."
"A single whisker thicker than your entire refugee camp put together!"
"That whisker had pores. It breathed."
"It merely drew upward a little, and burned straight through more than ten thousand meters of rock above Slaughter City!"
Tang San trembled all over, his voice shrill.
"That wasn't some geological disaster. It was a living creature growing!"
"It's swelling until this planet bursts!"
Flender and Zhao Wuji sucked in cold breaths at his words.
A whisker thicker than the camp?
It completely overturned everything they knew.
Yet after hearing this, Yu Xiaogang was stunned for only a few seconds.
Then his tightly knitted brows relaxed again.
Not only was he unafraid, but a thirst for knowledge blazed in his eyes.
"So that's it! So that's how it is!"
Yu Xiaogang paced excitedly around the large tent and clapped his hands.
"San, this information is crucial! It completes the final piece of my theory!"
Tang San was dumbfounded, completely unable to follow Yu Xiaogang's train of thought.
Yu Xiaogang pushed up his glasses and looked at Tang San with burning eyes.
"San, you were deceived. That wasn't a whisker at all!"
"Think about it. If a single whisker were as thick as the camp, how large would its body have to be?"
"Wouldn't it be bigger than the Douluo Continent?"
"That completely violates the law of conservation of energy governing soul beast growth!"
Yu Xiaogang held up one finger, his tone as decisive as severing iron with a blade.
"It's an ancient plant-type soul beast!"
"There are scattered references to it in Spirit Hall's fragmentary records. It's called the Earthcore Demonic Vine!"
"This plant-type soul beast grows year-round at the edge of the planetary core. Its vines are dark gold, and to dissipate heat in magma, their surfaces evolve vents resembling animal pores."
"With their regular expansion and contraction, they look just like they're breathing!"
The more Yu Xiaogang spoke, the more excited he became, as though he had already seen through every truth in the world.
"That silver-haired woman isn't an animal-type soul beast at all. She's a million-year Earthcore Demonic Vine that took human form!"
"She's spreading her enormous underground root system toward the surface. That's why you saw that thick vine drawing upward!"
"As for the rising temperature, that's because her roots are conducting the intense heat from the planet's core upward!"
Listening to Yu Xiaogang's watertight analysis, which even cited the "law of conservation of energy,"
Flender and Zhao Wuji suddenly understood.
"As expected of Grandmaster! You even managed to deduce the existence of an ancient plant like that!"
Only Tang San remained leaning against the head of the bed, staring at the utterly confident Yu Xiaogang, unable to say a word.
He finally understood what it meant to be a frog at the bottom of a well.
When a frog saw a great dragon fly across the sky, it would not think it was a dragon. It would merely think it was a rather strangely shaped leaf.
Because in a frog's world, the very concept of dragons did not exist.
Just as the adults inside the tent breathed a sigh of relief at having unraveled the "truth behind the disaster,"
Suddenly,
"Plip."
A faint sound came from a battered wooden water bucket in a corner of the tent.
Then, before everyone's horrified eyes,
The little water remaining in the bucket actually broke free of gravity, forming droplets that slowly floated toward the top of the tent.
"Wh-what's going on?"
Zhao Wuji froze and instinctively reached out to grab a droplet.
Before he could touch it,
"Rumble!"
A continuous rumbling also came from outside the camp.
It was not an earthquake shaking from side to side, but an upward thrust.
Flender reacted fastest, throwing aside the tent flap and rushing out.
The next second, he froze in place, his eyes wide as though he had witnessed the end of the world.
Then the others inside the tent hurried out after him.
They followed Flender's gaze.
Ahead of the refugee camp stood a cliff hundreds of zhang tall, stretching across the plain.
At that moment, it actually broke clean away from the horizon.
The entire cliff, along with the stretches of forest and waterfalls upon it,
Broke free of gravity's shackles before everyone's eyes and slowly floated toward the gray sky.
Soil pattered down.
And it was not just the cliff hanging in midair.
Fist-sized stones, broken trees, and even some ruined structures on the surface were all drifting uncontrollably into the sky.
The map in Yu Xiaogang's hand fell to the ground.
Gravity between heaven and earth was disappearing.
That cliff, hundreds of zhang tall, slowly floated upward right before everyone's eyes.
There was no earth-shattering crash, only the cracking of countless thick roots being forcibly snapped. It sounded like someone slowly tearing apart handfuls of bowstrings beside their ears.
Large chunks of rock peeled off the bottom of the cliff, but rather than smashing into the ground, they slowed halfway down, falling more and more slowly until they actually hung suspended in midair.
Yu Xiaogang's mouth fell open.
The square-framed glasses on his nose slid down to its tip, but he could not spare a hand to push them up.
"Th-this doesn't make sense."
Yu Xiaogang mechanically took two steps backward.
"Even a million-year plant-type soul beast couldn't alter the gravitational field of an entire planet."
"This completely violates the basic principles of how soul power operates..."
He kept shaking his head and muttering, desperately trying to find a reasonable explanation within the theories he had spent his entire life studying.
Tang San leaned against a nearby wooden post, looking at Yu Xiaogang like this, feeling nothing but helplessness.
"Teacher, there are no theories left."
Before Tang San could finish, terrified screams suddenly erupted from the refugee camp behind him.
A five- or six-year-old child who had been sitting on a tattered blanket suddenly lifted off the ground, his entire body floating uncontrollably into the sky.
The child wailed in fright, his hands grabbing wildly at the air.
His mother screamed and leaped up, trying to grab her son's ankle.
But the moment her feet left the ground, she too hung suspended in midair, unable to come back down.
Mother and son spun helplessly several meters above the ground.
Panic instantly spread through the camp.
Everyone realized they had become lighter.
Some people ran just a little too fast, and a single step sent them drifting more than ten meters away, frightening them into hastily clutching nearby tree trunks or heavy wagon wheels.
"Nobody panic!"
Zhao Wuji roared and immediately summoned his Great Strength Vajra Bear martial soul.
"Third soul skill, Gravity Enhancement!"
A yellow halo rapidly spread from beneath Zhao Wuji's feet, covering an area more than a hundred meters around him.
He wanted to use his gravity-control soul skill to forcibly drag the floating people and objects back to the ground.
At first, it actually worked.
The mother and son in midair suddenly dropped, landing heavily in the mud, while the floating rubble around them also fell to the ground.
Zhao Wuji wiped the sweat from his forehead, cursing.
"What the fuck kind of weather is this? Even gravity's gone."
But before he could catch his breath...
Crack.
A crisp cracking sound came from beneath Zhao Wuji's feet.
He looked down.
The patch of ground beneath him, roughly the size of a basketball court, already had a ring of deep cracks around its edges, severing it completely from the surrounding land.
Then, before everyone's horrified eyes...
That entire slab of earth, carrying Zhao Wuji and even his "Gravity Enhancement" domain, rose straight out of the ground and slowly drifted into the sky.
Zhao Wuji's eyes widened.
He pushed the Soul Power within him to its limit, muscles bulging and veins standing out all over his body, trying to force the patch of earth back down with the weight of a thousand tons.
But against this planetary-scale repulsive force acting on the crust, his Soul Power in the seventies amounted to less than a praying mantis trying to stop a chariot.
The patch of earth kept floating upward with utter disregard, not even pausing.
"Zhao, stop wasting your strength!"
Flender shouted, summoned his Cat Owl Martial Soul, and flapped his wings, flying into the air.
He grabbed Zhao Wuji by the back of his collar, forcibly hauled him off the drifting slab of earth, and tossed him onto the still relatively stable ground nearby.
Flender hovered in midair without landing right away.
His face was deathly pale.
From that height, he had seen something even more despair-inducing than the camp losing its gravity.
He turned to look at the distant horizon.
As far as his eyes could reach, the terrain of the entire Douluo Continent was disintegrating completely.
The distant cities, forests, and mountain ranges.
All of them were splitting into enormous slabs of crust.
And every single one of those slabs was slowly bulging upward, breaking away from the planet's original surface.
It looked like an egg being hatched from within.
The hard outer shell of earth had already been shattered, and its fragments were being pushed apart bit by bit.
"Boss Fu, what are you spacing out for? What exactly is going on up there?"
Below, Zhao Wuji clung to the trunk of a large tree and shouted at the top of his lungs.
Flender slowly descended to the ground, his wings trembling so badly he could not even retract them.
He looked at Zhao Wuji, then at Yu Xiaogang, his voice so dry it sounded slightly distorted.
"The continent... is gone."
Before you continue