The lead war barge didn't just crash; it dissolved mid-air before screaming into the earth.
The acid-eaten hull buckled, spilling Inner Sect disciples into the open air like ants shaken from a picnic basket. They fell into the ravine, their pristine robes fluttering, their terrified wails cutting through the thunder of the collapsing ship.
CRASH.
The wreckage slammed into the mud of the perimeter moat, sending a tsunami of toxic sludge washing over the Centipede defensive line.
"Hold!" Iron Hand Zhang roared, standing thigh-deep in the green muck. His metal skin sizzled but held. He raised his Basilisk-bone club. "Fresh meat! Don't let them regroup!"
The Pack didn't wait for permission. They swarmed.
Five hundred desperate souls, fueled by the red mist venting from the mine shaft, charged the wreckage. They didn't fight with the elegance of the sword sects. They fought with the brutality of the desperate. They used sharpened rebar, acid grenades, and shields made of reptile scales.
A survivor from the ship—a young man in gold-trimmed armor—stumbled out of the burning debris. He coughed up black smoke, raising a jade sword.
"Filth! Do not touch me! I am of the—"
A brick hit him in the face.
Then a spear.
Then the mob.
Yang Yi watched from the square. The red rain sizzled on his gray scales, feeding the reactor in his gut. The Void-Iron Body technique hummed under his skin, making him feel incredibly heavy, as if his bones were made of neutron star matter.
"They're adjusting," Mo warned from the shadow of the command hut. The blind elder tilted his head to the sky. "The other ships are spreading out. They won't group up for the cannon again."
Above, the three remaining war barges peeled away from the formation. They circled high, out of range of the crude artillery.
"Deploy the Skymarshals!" the Purple-Robed Elder's voice boomed from the sky, amplified by qi.
Hatches opened on the undersides of the barges.
Hundreds of cultivators dropped.
They didn't fall uncontrollably. They stood on flying swords, descending in a disciplined, spiraling formation. A vortex of blue steel and killing intent aimed directly at the square.
"Target priority: The insurgent leader!" the Elder commanded. "And the cannon!"
Yang Yi gripped the Thunder Drake sword. The red lightning arc'd up his arm, biting into his neck.
"Lin," he rumbled. "Sky cover."
Lin stood by the cannon, her hands pressed against the cooling barrel. Her eyes were white, fully immersed in her ice cultivation.
"Glacial Fog."
She exhaled. A massive cloud of supercooled mist erupted from her position, rolling upward to meet the descending swarm. It wasn't a solid barrier, but it obscured vision and dropped the temperature instantly.
The descending cultivators hit the fog. Their swords frosted over. Their formation loosened as visibility dropped to zero.
"Now," Yang Yi whispered.
He bent his knees. The ground beneath him fractured, spiderwebs of cracks shooting out for twenty feet.
He jumped.
He didn't need a flying sword. The raw power of his legs, fortified by the Basilisk density and the Chimera's explosive strength, launched him like a mortar shell.
He shot up through the red rain, piercing the white fog.
He collided with the lead group of cultivators fifty feet in the air.
"Hello."
He swung the Thunder Drake sword.
It wasn't a duel. It was a collision. The massive blade, wreathed in chaotic red lightning, smashed into three cultivators at once. Their protective qi barriers shattered like glass. They were batted out of the sky, their bodies tumbling into the fog below.
Yang Yi reached the apex of his jump. Gravity began to pull him down.
But he wasn't done.
He focused on the Void-Iron Body.
Density Shift: Singularity.
He pushed his qi outward, creating a localized gravity well around his body.
"Get down here!"
The cultivators hovering near him felt it immediately. Their flying swords dipped. Their robes pulled taut. The air itself seemed to bend toward the gray-scaled monster in their midst.
Yang Yi fell, dragging a dozen screaming disciples down with him.
BOOM.
He landed in the center of the square. The impact shook the foundations of the huts.
The disciples he had pulled down crashed around him. Those who weren't dead on impact scrambled to their feet, dazed and surrounded.
"Kill him!" a disciple shouted, lunging with a spear.
Yang Yi caught the spear tip with his bare hand. The gray scales didn't even scratch.
He yanked the disciple forward into a headbutt.
Crack.
He dropped the body and spun, the Thunder Drake sword creating a perimeter of death.
"Too light," Yang Yi growled. "You're all too light."
The battle devolved into chaos. The Inner Sect disciples, used to duels and structured sparring, found themselves in a mosh pit. The Pack didn't fight fair. They threw lime powder in eyes. They hamstrung opponents. They used the terrain—the mud, the collapsing shacks—to separate the elite warriors.
And whenever a Pack member fell, the red mist seeped into their wounds. Cuts closed. Bones knit. They stood back up, eyes burning with a feral, chemically induced rage.
"They're zombies!" a cultivator screamed, backing away from a Viper thug who had just taken a sword through the shoulder and kept swinging his pipe. "Why won't they die?"
"Because you're fighting the mountain!" Yang Yi answered.
He cleared a circle around him. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic. The Void-Iron Body consumed stamina at a terrifying rate, but the red rain replenished it just as fast. He was a conduit for the Dragon Heart's energy.
But the real threat hadn't landed yet.
High above, on the flagship, the Purple-Robed Elder watched the slaughter. His face was a mask of cold fury.
"Worthless," Elder Kuang spat. "They struggle against trash."
He stepped onto the railing of the ship.
"I will sever the head myself."
Elder Kuang jumped.
He didn't use a sword. He fell, arms spread, robes billowing. As he descended, the wind gathered around him. It wasn't a gentle breeze; it was a typhoon compressed into the shape of a man.
Storm King's Descent.
Yang Yi felt the pressure immediately. The red mist swirled away from the center of the square, pushed back by an invisible column of force.
"Move!" Yang Yi roared to the Pack members near him. "Clear the square!"
He planted his feet. He drove the Thunder Drake sword into the mud to anchor himself. He shifted his density to maximum.
Elder Kuang landed.
There was no sound of impact. Just a sudden, violent expansion of wind blades.
The ground exploded outward. The nearby huts disintegrated, turned to splinters in a microsecond.
Yang Yi stood in the center of the crater. His armor was shredded. His gray scales were scored with hundreds of white scratches. But he hadn't moved an inch.
Elder Kuang straightened up from his crouch. He was a tall man with a beard braided with silver bells. He held a fan made of steel feathers.
He looked at Yang Yi. At the claws. The scales. The vertical gold pupils.
"I expected a rebel," Kuang said, his voice carrying effortlessly over the din of battle. "I found a beast."
"Evolution is messy," Yang Yi rasped. He pulled his sword from the ground.
"You stole the Heart's flow. You disrupted the Ascendance Array. Do you know the cost, boy? The inner islands are losing altitude. Thousands of years of history, threatening to crash because a rat wanted to eat at the table."
"History is just the story of who survived," Yang Yi said. "And your history is built on harvesting us."
Kuang narrowed his eyes. "You've been to the chamber."
"I saw the pods. I saw the faces."
"Necessary sacrifices. Order requires fuel."
Kuang snapped his fan open.
"And you are just waste."
He swung the fan.
Gale Cutter.
Three blades of compressed air, invisible and razor-sharp, slashed toward Yang Yi.
Yang Yi couldn't dodge. The wind pressure pinned him in place.
He raised his left arm. He focused the gravity field on his forearm, compressing the air into a shield.
Clang. Clang. Squelch.
Two blades deflected. The third bit deep into his shoulder, carving through the Basilisk scales and hitting the calcified bone beneath.
Blood sprayed. It wasn't red. It was dark, almost black, and it smoked when it hit the ground.
Yang Yi grunted, sliding back a foot. The pain was distant, filtered through the Blood-Root Lotus.
"Is that all?" Yang Yi mocked, though his arm felt numb.
Kuang frowned. "Tough hide."
He raised the fan again. "Let's see how you handle vacuum."
Kuang began to spin. The air in the square was sucked toward him. A tornado formed, lifting debris, bodies, and mud.
Eye of the Storm.
Yang Yi felt his feet leaving the ground. The gravity field of his own body fought against the lift of the wind. It was a tug-of-war between physics and magic.
"Zhang!" Yang Yi yelled, fighting to stay grounded. "The cocktail!"
Iron Hand Zhang, hunkered down behind the wreckage of the acid cannon, heard the call. He grabbed a crate marked with a red skull.
"Fire in the hole!"
Zhang threw the crate into the tornado.
Kuang saw it coming. He sneered. "Debris?"
He flicked his fan to shred the crate mid-air.
Bad move.
The crate shattered. Inside were twenty jars of Mist of the Sleeping Dragon, concentrated and mixed with Liu Feng's volatile combustion powder.
The wind shredded the jars. The powder ignited.
FOOM.
The tornado turned into a pillar of fire. But more importantly, the heat vaporized the sleeping agent instantly, dispersing it through the wind funnel.
Elder Kuang was standing in the center of a hyper-oxygenated firestorm laced with magical tranquilizers.
He coughed. The wind faltered. His eyes glazed over for a second.
"Poison..." Kuang staggered, his fan drooping. "You fight without honor!"
"I told you," Yang Yi roared.
He saw the opening. The wind pressure dropped.
Yang Yi charged.
He didn't swing the sword. He dropped it.
He tackled the Elder.
He wrapped his arms around Kuang's waist.
"We're going for a ride."
Yang Yi activated the Void-Iron Body. But he didn't anchor himself. He inverted the field.
Anti-Gravity Pulse.
It was a theoretical move from the manual. Unstable.
They shot into the air. Not flying, but falling upward.
Kuang panicked. He tried to summon his wind, but Yang Yi had him in a bear hug, pinning his arms.
They rocketed up through the smoke, past the hovering cultivators, past the red mist.
They reached the apex of the jump, three hundred feet in the air.
Yang Yi released the anti-gravity. He switched instantly to Singularity. Maximum density.
"Now we fall."
He spun them around so he was on top. He drove his knees into Kuang's chest.
They plummeted.
"Get off me!" Kuang screamed, summoning a wind cushion.
"No."
Yang Yi bit Kuang's shoulder. His shark-like teeth tore through the purple silk and spiritual armor. The Wolf essence savored the taste of high-grade cultivator blood.
They hit the ground.
CRACK-BOOM.
The impact was like a meteor strike.
A crater formed in the muddy square, ten feet deep.
Dust and steam billowed out.
The battlefield went silent. The disciples in the sky stopped fighting. The Pack lowered their weapons.
Everyone watched the hole.
A hand reached up to the edge.
Gray scales. Black claws.
Yang Yi pulled himself out. He was limping. His chest was heaving. His armor was gone, leaving him bare-chested, revealing the map of scars and scales.
He turned back to the hole.
"Stay down."
Elder Kuang didn't move. He lay at the bottom of the crater, every bone in his body shattered by the impact of a falling mountain. He was alive—barely—his chest rising in shallow, ragged gasps.
Yang Yi looked up at the sky, at the remaining ships.
He picked up his Thunder Drake sword from the mud.
He pointed it at the fleet.
"Next?"
The disciples on the flying swords wavered. Their Elder, a master of the wind, had just been pile-driven into the earth by a flightless beast.
"Retreat!" a voice cried from the second ship. "Pull back to the perimeter!"
The fleet turned. The cultivators fled, streaming back to the ships like frightened birds.
A cheer went up from the Dregs. It started low, a rumble in the throats of the miners and the thugs, and grew into a roar that rivaled the cannon blast.
Yang Yi didn't cheer. He dropped to one knee, using the sword as a crutch.
The red mist was thinning. The burst of energy from the mine was stabilizing.
Lin ran to him. She checked his eyes. The gold was dull, the vertical slits blown wide.
"You're burning out," she whispered, touching his burning skin. "The Void-Iron technique is eating your life force."
"I bought us a day," Yang Yi wheezed, spitting a clot of dark blood. "Maybe two."
He looked at the crater where the Elder lay broken.
"Drag him out. Bind him with the Basilisk chains. He's not a prisoner."
"What is he?" Lin asked.
Yang Yi smiled, and it was a terrifying thing to see.
"He's a hostage. And he's going to tell us how to get into the Dragon's brain."
Yang Yi stood up, shaking off Lin's support.
"Liu Feng! Get the alchemy fires going. We need more pills. The next wave won't be ships. It will be the ground assault."
He looked at the mountain peak. The lights of the Inner Sect were flickering again.
The beast had bitten the hand that fed it. Now, it had to swallow the arm.