"What do you mean, gone?" Yu Xiaogang grabbed Flender's arm.
"It's all floating." Flender extended a trembling finger and pointed at the distant sky.
"The entire ground is rising. This layer of earth beneath our feet is being flung away by something."
Flung away.
Those words hammered into everyone's hearts, leaving their hands and feet ice-cold.
Tang San leaned against a wooden post and closed his eyes.
He knew perfectly well what Flender meant.
To that monster, Douluo Star's surface was nothing more than a layer of mud stuck to its body.
Now the monster had grown and found the mud a nuisance, so naturally, the mud had to fall off.
Rumble!
Another muffled boom came from underground.
This time, an enormous fissure over a hundred meters wide tore straight through the middle of the refugee camp.
More than a dozen tents and supply wagons fell into the fissure.
But they did not plunge into the abyss. After falling some distance, they were caught by the antigravity field and simply hung in the middle of the fissure, drifting back and forth.
Yu Xiaogang still refused to give up.
He crawled to the edge of the fissure on his hands and knees.
He insisted on seeing with his own eyes whether the "Earthcore Demonic Vine" he had deduced was truly responsible.
He leaned half his body over the edge and peered into the depths.
There was no searing magma below.
The magma layer had long since been squeezed elsewhere by the earlier expansion.
Through the thick layers of rock and dust, Yu Xiaogang saw something.
It was a vast solid surface with a slight curvature.
Dark gold.
Its surface was smooth, yet covered in naturally formed, ancient patterns.
It lay quietly across the deepest part of the fissure, expanding inexorably outward.
Yu Xiaogang stared, stunned.
He took an iron compass he normally used for surveying terrain from his pocket and tossed it down the fissure.
The iron compass fell, but neither struck that dark-gold surface nor floated upward.
It simply stopped halfway down.
Caught between the constantly rising crust and the constantly expanding dark-gold surface below, it floated in the gap that had already become a vacuum.
Yu Xiaogang's legs gave way, and he collapsed onto his backside.
The light in his eyes faded completely.
"It's not a plant."
Yu Xiaogang muttered to himself, his voice trembling.
"There are no roots. It's solid."
"Is that metal?"
"Or scales?"
Tang San walked over with his two broken arms hanging and followed Yu Xiaogang's gaze downward.
At the sight of that familiar dark gold, Tang San gave a bitter laugh.
"I told you long ago."
"It's a living creature."
"We're nothing but fleas living on its back."
"Now it's stretching its body, so naturally, the mud shell on its back has to break."
This time, Yu Xiaogang did not argue.
"What do we do now, then?" Beside them, Zhao Wuji's voice had also grown unusually hoarse.
This man who feared neither heaven nor earth now had eyes filled with terror.
"Even the ground's flying into the sky! We don't even have anywhere to stand!"
Flender gritted his teeth.
"We can't just wait to die. I'll fly you out!"
"The higher we fly, the better. We'll see if there's a large piece of land that hasn't completely split apart where we can take shelter..."
Flender was only halfway through speaking when the light overhead suddenly dimmed.
It was not nightfall.
Everyone instinctively looked up.
An intact continental plate larger than the entire territory of the Heaven Dou Empire had been pushed completely off Douluo Star's surface.
It hung directly above their heads, a dark, looming mass that blotted out the sky completely.
Blotting out the sky and sun.
This was no exaggerated description, but a terrifying reality unfolding before these people's eyes.
An intact continental plate several times larger than the entire Heaven Dou Empire had appeared in midair without warning.
Like a heavy black iron curtain, it cut off all light completely.
At that moment, even the crying in the refugee camp stopped.
Everyone kept their heads tilted back, staring blankly at the enormous landmass overhead, where they could even make out the courses of mountain ranges and rivers hanging upside down.
Flender beat the wings of his Cat Owl Martial Soul, having been about to take people into the air to escape.
But now he froze in midair, not daring to move a muscle.
"Fly..." Below him, Zhao Wuji clung to a tree trunk, his voice so dry it seemed to crumble.
"Boss Fu, where the hell are we supposed to fly?"
Flender swallowed.
Where could they fly?
This broken piece of crust blocked everything overhead. Flying upward meant crashing straight into that upside-down continent.
Below them was the dark-gold solid mass, its depths impossible to see, constantly pushing outward.
Their group was like ants trapped between two biscuit crumbs.
Whoosh!
Suddenly, a strange current of air surged up from below.
The stones and trees that had merely been floating in midair suddenly seemed to be tugged by some gravitational force, accelerating toward the upside-down continent overhead.
"Get out of the way!"
Flender roared and beat his wings hard, barely avoiding a boulder the size of a house.
The boulder hurtled into the continent overhead with a muffled bang, bursting into powder.
The refugee camp below descended into utter chaos.
The antigravity phenomenon was growing increasingly severe.
Those ordinary refugees had no control over their bodies at all and were dragged into the sky one after another, screaming and crying.
Some flailed their arms wildly in midair before smashing into the rocks on the underside of the continent overhead, their bodies mangled on impact.
The blood did not drip down. Instead, it spread eerily across the surface of the upside-down rocks.
"Watch out!"
Leaning against the wooden post, Tang San saw a stone slab the size of a door hurtling toward Yu Xiaogang and shouted in alarm.
With both arms crippled, he could not use hidden weapons at all, much less Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon.
Just as the slab was about to strike Yu Xiaogang, Liu Erlong leaped up, raging flames pouring from her body, and shattered it with a punch.
"Xiaogang! Snap out of it! Why are you spacing out at a time like this?"
Liu Erlong grabbed Yu Xiaogang by the collar and dragged him beneath an enormous, relatively stable rock for shelter.
But Yu Xiaogang seemed to have lost his soul.
He let Liu Erlong shake him, staring blankly at the sky as he continued muttering.
"No, that's not how the gravitational formula works."
"Conservation of Soul Power-how can it explain antigravity on this scale..."
Seeing Yu Xiaogang like this, Liu Erlong grew so anxious that her eyes reddened.
But as a Power Attack System Soul Master, she was utterly helpless in the face of a planet breaking apart.
Tang San looked at the chaotic camp and at the people and objects in the sky, hurtling upward like rain falling in reverse.
An unprecedented sense of helplessness engulfed him completely.
The gravitational formula? Conservation of Soul Power?
Tang San laughed bitterly to himself.
Even now, this teacher of his refused to acknowledge his own insignificance.
Those so-called theories were founded on the premise that the planet of Douluo Continent remained intact.
When the planet itself was being peeled away like a layer of mud, what meaning remained in the laws clinging to that mud?
At the same time.
It was not just this refugee camp.
The same apocalyptic scenes were playing out in every corner of Douluo Continent.
Somewhere high in the sky.
Ning Fengzhi, Sword Douluo Chen Xin, and Bone Douluo Gu Rong stood on a floating rock only about the size of a plaza.
This rock had once been a corner of the mountain behind the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect. Now that irresistible force had pushed it tens of thousands of meters above the ground.
"Sect Master, hold on to me!"
Gu Rong assumed a half-dragon, half-human form, digging both hands into the edge of the rock and shielding Ning Fengzhi behind him.
Chen Xin stood at the very front. Even at a time like this, he remained standing.
Sword energy wreathed his entire body as he continually cut apart the rubble hurtling up from below.
But his sword swings were growing slower and slower.
"Fengzhi, breathing... is getting difficult."
Chen Xin gasped for air, his chest heaving violently.
He found that the surrounding air was rapidly thinning. Each breath drew less and less oxygen into his lungs, and even the temperature was plummeting.
Pale-faced, Ning Fengzhi fought back the dizziness caused by the lack of oxygen to his brain and glanced upward.
That single glance made his entire body freeze.
There was no blue sky, no white clouds.
Above their heads, the atmosphere had been torn apart completely.
And Douluo Star's atmosphere had already been forcibly burst apart by that ever-expanding dark-gold body!
"What... is that place?" Gu Rong followed Ning Fengzhi's gaze, his voice trembling.
These native-born Soul Masters had never seen true outer space.
In their understanding, the sky was the limit.
Who could have imagined that beyond the sky lay a boundless black abyss?
"The starry void."
Ning Fengzhi swallowed dryly.
"We're being pushed out of this world."
The moment he finished speaking, another low vibration came from the dark-gold ocean below.
Chen Xin lowered his head and looked down, and his sword hand suddenly trembled.
The dark-gold surface that had been expanding steadily outward suddenly rose and fell in a rhythmic movement.
Like a sleeping creature gently flexing a joint.
Then, beneath the horrified gazes of Ning Fengzhi and the others, an enormous ridge tens of thousands of li long suddenly bulged from that boundless surface of dark-gold scales!
The instant this ridge rose, the continental fragments and slabs of rock still suspended in midair were flung away by an utterly terrifying physical repulsive force, like leaves caught in a force-twelve hurricane!
Bang!
Before Chen Xin even had a chance to swing his sword, the air current hurled him backward, slamming him into the rock behind him.
At an inconceivable speed, the entire floating rock punched straight through the last thin remnant of the atmosphere and was flung into outer space.
Spirit City.
This place could no longer be called a city.
The main peak on which the Pope's Palace stood, along with the foundations of half of Spirit City, had completely separated from the soil below and hung alone in midair.
Inside the great hall, everything was in disarray.
Expensive ornaments lay smashed all over the floor, and the elders who normally stood high above everyone else now lay sprawled on the ground without a shred of dignity.
They desperately clutched anything fixed in place to keep themselves from floating into the sky.
Bibi Dong still sat on the papal throne.
Her hands gripped the armrests, and her breathing was rapid.
"Your Holiness! We can't hold on much longer!"
Ghost Douluo lay on the floor tiles nearby, the air around him so thin that he was close to suffocating.
"This mountain is drifting into the starry void!"
"If this keeps up, we'll all suffocate in that pitch-black place!"
Bibi Dong glanced at him.
"Suffocate?"
"Being left with an intact corpse would already be the best possible end."
Bibi Dong stood up, forcibly using her Soul Power to pin her feet to the ground.
She walked to a fissure at the edge of the great hall and looked down at the dark-gold back gradually rising as the monster stretched its joints.
She could see more clearly than Ning Fengzhi and the others.
Those scales were covered in ancient patterns so intricate that a single glance made one feel as though their soul would explode.
"Qian Daoliu is still counting on the Divine Realm to save us..."
A bitter smile curled Bibi Dong's lips, and nothing but despair remained in her eyes.
"The Divine Realm? Heh."
"What the hell does the Divine Realm amount to?"
Above the former site of the Star Dou Great Forest.
The Lake of Life had long since ceased to exist.
Hundreds upon thousands of high-ranking soul beasts clung like geckos to a dark-gold scale.
This was their only way to stay alive.
The surrounding temperature was already absurdly high-the body heat radiating from the monster itself.
Those ten-thousand-year soul beasts with slightly lower cultivation were reduced to heaps of ash in the intense heat before they could even scream, without so much as a bone fragment left behind.
The black dragon scales covering Di Tian's body had been roasted red. He dug his claws into the gaps between the scales, smoke pouring from half his body.
"My lord, we can't hold on..."
Di Tian gasped for breath, his voice so hoarse it was almost inaudible.
"There isn't even any air around us anymore. If this goes on, even if we aren't scalded to death, we'll suffocate."
Gu Yuena lay clinging at the very front.
She had not been burned like the other soul beasts, but her face was deathly pale.
She raised her head and surveyed her surroundings.
The thick layers of rock and soil that had originally covered the scales had been completely shattered and flung away by that rise of the back just now.
Now, their group of soul beasts was effectively exposed directly to outer space.
On one side was the vacuum of space, more than two hundred degrees below zero.
On the other were dark-gold scales hot enough to melt divine artifacts.
Caught between worlds of ice and fire, the soul beasts were enduring unprecedented torment.
"Shut up, suppress your auras, and use all your Soul Power to protect your hearts."
Gu Yuena transmitted her voice to Di Tian through her spiritual power, her tone sterner than ever before.
"It's about to transform."
"The most dangerous part has only just begun. If anyone makes the slightest disturbance and startles it, the entire Soul Beast Clan will be buried along with them!"
Hearing Gu Yuena's transmission, Di Tian was so frightened that he immediately shut his mouth.
He desperately squeezed out the last scraps of Soul Power in his body, holding out against the horrifically harsh conditions around him.
Deep in the universe.
The once azure-blue Douluo Star now resembled a blasted heap of rubble.
Countless continental plates and fragments of ocean drifted aimlessly through space.
And at the very center of this wreckage.
Gu Xian's enormous body remained coiled.
Before you continue