Falling

Violence.

Indescribable violence.

The instant the towering Plane Storm swallowed the five of them, Xiao Yan felt as though he had been thrown into a frantically spinning millstone. Overwhelming tearing forces surged at him from every direction, pulling without any pattern-now to the left, now to the right, then suddenly rushing up from beneath his feet, as though they meant to tear his body into countless pieces while he was still alive.

His protective Dou Qi was like paper in the storm, ripped open with cracks almost as soon as it came into contact with it.

"Brother Xiao Yan!"

"Xiao Yan!"

Two familiar voices reached him in fits and starts through the roar of the storm.

Xiao Yan clenched his teeth and gripped the two jade hands tightly, recklessly pouring the Dou Qi within him into his arms. Veins bulged along them like coiling dragons, and his knuckles turned deathly pale from the strain.

He could feel Xun'er and Cai Lin gripping him back with all their strength. Their four slender jade hands were like iron clamps, their nails digging deep into his flesh.

But it was no use.

The power of the Plane Storm was far too terrifying. It was no mere impact of energy, but a tremendous force that came from the plane itself. Before such power, even a Dou Di seemed as insignificant as an ant.

A torrent of planar force, glowing gray-white, suddenly roared in from the side and slammed into the space between the three of them.

Bang!

Xiao Yan felt the weight in his hands vanish.

In that instant, it was as though something had seized his heart in a crushing grip.

He jerked his head up and saw Xun'er's pale green figure and Cai Lin's seven-colored light caught in two opposing torrents amid the chaotic storm, speeding away in different directions.

"Xun'er! Cai Lin!"

Xiao Yan's eyes nearly split as he roared and recklessly moved to chase them. But the moment he stirred, another torrent struck him head-on, sending him flying backward and forcing a mouthful of blood from his lips.

By the time he steadied himself again, there was nothing around him but the boundless storm. Not a single figure remained in sight.

Not Xun'er, Cai Lin, Gu Yuan, or Zhu Kun.

They were all gone.

Xiao Yan's body trembled violently in the storm, not from his injuries, but from an emotion he had not felt in many years.

Fear.

Not fear of his own death, but fear of loss.

He hastily took four Soul Jades from his Storage Ring. Before entering the passage, they had exchanged these jade tokens, each bearing its owner's Soul Imprint. His fingers trembled slightly as he sent his soul power into them.

A faint light flickered on all four jade tokens.

They were alive.

All of them were still alive.

The heartstring Xiao Yan had drawn taut to its limit finally eased a little. He clutched the four Soul Jades tightly in his palm, took a deep breath, and forced himself to calm down.

"As long as you're alive, I can find you, no matter where you've been swept away."

He murmured to himself, and his once somewhat frantic eyes grew sharp and resolute again.

After being swept along in the storm for an unknown length of time, Xiao Yan suddenly felt the frenzied tearing force around him begin to weaken.

Then he felt as though he had struck something.

It was soft yet resilient, like a boundless membrane. The instant he hit it, the membrane caved sharply inward, and an immense rebound force nearly sent him flying straight back.

Xiao Yan grunted, the Dou Qi within him surging wildly as he forced his way forward against the rebound.

Rip!

A sound rang out, as though something had torn. The next instant, the boundless darkness and gray mist before Xiao Yan abruptly vanished, replaced by a dazzling expanse of light.

Xiao Yan instinctively narrowed his eyes.

As his vision gradually adjusted to the light, his body went completely rigid.

The sky.

He saw the sky.

It was a sky unlike any he had ever seen, so high and distant that it seemed endless. A faint trace of purple tinged its deep blue, and a huge blazing sun hung on the horizon, several times larger than the sun of the Dou Qi Continent.

And beneath that sky stretched a boundless land.

Mountain ranges wound and rose like dragons, every peak towering into the clouds. The mightiest among them were countless times taller than even Tian Huang Mountain on the Dou Qi Continent. Rivers raced across the land like ribbons, so wide that any great river on the Dou Qi Continent would have seemed a mere stream beside them.

But what shook Xiao Yan most was the presence that filled the heavens and earth.

Dense.

Dense to an incredible degree.

That presence was not the natural energy of the Dou Qi Continent, but something purer and more substantial. It filled every corner of the world, so dense that it seemed one could condense it into liquid simply by reaching out and grasping it.

"So this is... that world?"

Xiao Yan murmured to himself, towering waves surging in his heart.

He suddenly recalled the faintly expectant look on his teacher's face as the old man had gazed at the horizon when they left. That old man had once said that this world would be ten thousand times more wondrous than the Dou Qi Continent. Xiao Yan had taken it for an ordinary remark at the time, but now that he had seen it with his own eyes, he understood that his teacher's words had probably been too conservative.

In a world like this, those so-called supreme experts of the Dou Qi Continent might truly have been like frogs at the bottom of a well.

But before he could recover from his shock, his expression suddenly changed.

The moment he appeared, the strange energy filling the heavens and earth rushed madly into his body from every direction, like sharks that had caught the scent of blood!

That energy forced its way into his meridians through his pores, his breath, and even the wounds torn open on his body by the storm.

The moment it entered, the sea-vast Dou Qi within Xiao Yan erupted in an instinctive frenzy!

The two completely different energies crashed madly against each other in his meridians.

The pain was like countless red-hot steel blades scraping back and forth through his meridians. Xiao Yan had endured the torment of devouring Heavenly Flames countless times on the Dou Qi Continent and considered his tolerance for pain far beyond that of ordinary people, yet at this moment, beads of cold sweat the size of beans instantly covered his forehead.

He tried to circulate the Flame Mantra to suppress the invading energy, but there was simply too much of it, and its quality seemed to surpass even that of his Dou Qi. For every strand he suppressed, ten or a hundred more poured in, unceasing and inexhaustible.

More alarming still, amid the collisions, the Dou Qi within him was being eroded and assimilated bit by bit by that energy, like a drop of ink falling into the sea and slowly being diluted.

Pfft!

Xiao Yan spewed a mouthful of blood and plummeted straight down from high in the sky like a kite with its string cut.

He tried to steady himself and use the power of space to tear open the void and slow his fall. But when his hand clawed fiercely at the space before him, his pupils abruptly contracted.

That space did not budge.

On the Dou Qi Continent, a casual wave of his hand was enough to tear open a spatial rift several thousand zhang long. But here, even when he clawed at it with all his might, he could not raise so much as a ripple in space!

"How can the space here... be this stable?!"

Alarm filled Xiao Yan's heart. He gritted his teeth, and the Purple Cloud Wings and bone wings spread out from his back at once, beating with all their strength. Yet the two pairs of wings, which could carry him a thousand li in an instant on the Dou Qi Continent, now felt incomparably heavy, slowing his fall only slightly.

The Dou Qi within him continued to rage wildly, locked in combat with the invading energy.

Xiao Yan could clearly feel his strength draining away at an astonishing rate.

Even Xiao Yi, who had been trembling on his shoulder, now let out a faint whimper. Her tiny body turned into a wisp of pink flame and slipped into him, then fell into a silence akin to deep sleep. No matter how Xiao Yan called to her, she gave no response.

The wind howled in his ears.

The ground rapidly expanded in his vision.

As his consciousness grew hazy, Xiao Yan dimly saw a city of unimaginable size in the distance below. It had been built along a river, and a faint curtain of light flowed over its walls. At its center, a towering stone statue of a goddess stood silently between heaven and earth, looking down upon all living beings.

Then he heard a tremendous, muffled crash.

Boom!

The figure falling from the sky smashed a huge, deep crater into a hill outside the city, sending dust billowing into the air.

At the bottom of the crater, Xiao Yan lay covered in blood, still clutching the four Soul Jades tightly in his hand. Then his consciousness sank completely into darkness.

Dusk deepened.

A slender figure with a basket of medicinal herbs on her back carefully climbed down the edge of the crater. She gazed at the motionless figure at the bottom and hesitated for a long time before gathering her courage, picking up a branch, and gently poking him.

"Hey... are, are you still alive?"