152. Beyond the Sky (VII) (Patreon)

It was less hot than he’d expected! The outskirts of the Volcano, that was. He pattered along pockmarked rock which should’ve felt scalding, but only left a warm tickle on the soles of his feet.

Hmm… As an experiment he fished out a canteen of water from his Interspatial Ring and threw it into the open air, then slowed time to half speed.

Bubbles rose atop the droplets almost instantly. Halfway down they started to steam. The full splash of water went up in smoke before it had a chance to touch the ground.

He blinked. So clearly he did have some heat resistance after all! Probably a gift of his Bloodline. It sure didn’t feel like it when his face was literally melting off in that Torchdragon furnace.

Which, he supposed, said more about the Torchdragons’ innate capacities for fire than it did about his flammability. I wonder just how hot it really was in there. Hotter than the inside of a volcano? Hotter than fire? Hotter than magma?

The volcano—Drakestail Peak, as marked on the map—was growing larger by small degrees. A layer of smoke still blanketed the grounds, making shadow-jumping impossible; there was no shadow anywhere to be found, just a diffuse spread of dim light. Dim enough to cloud his sight, yet not dim enough to permit him shadow anywhere. Which meant he had to make the rest of the journey on foot. Like a chump!

It was slightly silly how fast he got used to fast travel. The two hour run felt like it took days.

By the time he got to the base of the mountain the air had grown splotchy; no longer was it wreathed in everpresent mist, but rather roaming puffs of thick gray smoke. The ground was veined with cracks running into the bowels of the land, and from them came a faint reddish light, a blush of heat. The skies frowned with black clouds that blotted all the way to the horizon. The only light came from the volcano itself: firelight poured from the top of the thing as though it were a massive candle from Hell.

Dorian took the measure of it. Pretty darn big, as mountains went—its surface was all craggy and black, like the skin of a troll running up to the peak. Sharp shelves of stone studded it down its length. Obviously no plants lived here. As far as he could tell no living creatures called this place home either. There were a few sprinklings of white in the black ground: litters of bone here and there. From the clouds above, flakes of ash and ember drizzled slowly down. Against it all there was the groaning and rumbling of huge, heavy things shifting deep within the volcano, topped off by a chorus of sizzles and crackles.

Dorian started to march.

A few hundred paces up a whiff of brimstone tinged the air. Dorian wrinkled his nose. It brought back poor memories. Perhaps his least favorite realms in all the Multiverse were the Circles of Hell—where he’d ended his last run. There were nine in total, each more dreadful than the last! Six in the Middle Realms, Three in the Upper Realms—and each of them was spread thick with this damnable smell.

It came from the single most irritating creature in Hell. Hellspawn. Little fire spirits that seemed to crop up everywhere like weeds, borne spontaneously of Hellish qi-fueled magma. Didn’t take much to spawn one. Any dead God’s body part dunked in enough qi-dense magma had a chance to become a Hellspawn. And in the middle realms dead Gods were legion…

Come to think of it, it was eerie just how similar this was. The smell was nearly identical to that Hellish nastiness. As he scouted out the path ahead—a series of leaps off of sharp juts of rock—he could nearly picture those hellish fuckers bouncing about on the rock shelves above; those heat waves could nearly be waves of Hell-qi. Through a cloud of fog tiny flare-red lights danced; they could nearly be the bodies of Hellspawn bouncing to and fro! He squinted. Sometimes his imagination astounded even himself. As the cloud passed by they grew more and more distinct. It was like they were real.

And then, when the cloud had made it about halfway across, it clicked.

…

He rubbed his eyes. As the cloud paled the dancing fiery forms came into sharper relief. Each of them had at their centers a bone—thigh bone, finger, tooth perhaps—suspended in a flickering torchflame body. Two black qi-eyes, mischievous eyes, stared out. There must’ve been a dozen of them up there, bouncing about.

And they all stared at him.

Hellspawn?! Here?!

It would’ve been less strange on this hike to pass by a school of fish randomly flopping their way uphill. It was so out of place! These things were Middle Realm creatures. Sure, they were a half-step from Godhood—which was why this Lower Realm permitted their existence here—but how in the Multiverse had they found their way here, of all places?

Dorian could still hardly believe his eyes. There could only be two possibilities. First—some incredibly bored Godking had plucked them up and put them here. A prankster, perhaps? It would’ve been an expensive prank. Transfers to the Lower Realms of entire life forms would cost a truly mind-bending amount of qi.

And the second, admittedly much more intriguing idea…

Is there some sort of realm portal nearby?

His eyes flashed. Some interspatial connective tissue binding this realm to some layer of Hell?!

Suddenly he was very intrigued. Why in the Multiverse would a realmic portal lead here, of all places?

…Actually, place was a graveyard, wasn’t it? He scratched his chin. Lots of bones littered everywhere, even back when he was in Rust Tribe. Lots of relics. And there was even a Pseudo-God Torchdagon, the Dweller, hidden somewhere in that underground Sinkhole network! How had it gotten here from its natural habitat, the volcano—which littered the nine circles of Hell?

A hidden realmic connection would explain a lot…

If he found a way to this portal—if he took that entrance rather than Ascend directly to Godhood—it would save him a lot of time and energy and strife. Ascension was almost always a very costly and painful exercise, after all, and it dropped you randomly in one of the higher Realms—often in places you had no business being in…

Still. This was Hell he was thinking about! He winced. Nearly any higher Realm was preferable to Ascend to! The Nine Circles of Hell were some of the most treacherous places in the Multiverse. They somehow managed to hold the hottest, coldest, dryest, and wettest places in all the Multiverse in its circles. Everything was extreme. The gains were great, true; that place was chock-full of resources and qi. The issue—other than the insanely inhospitable terrain—was the demons and warring kingdoms of devils and ifrits and dragons and dark elves and leaping vampires and hungry ghosts, not to mention the Godbeasts roving those molten lands—all manner of deformed, depraved monstrosities. He could hardly throw a rock without hitting a thing that wanted to eat him. He’d literally spent all of last run wading through its higher Circle! It was a miracle he made it out the other end alive, really—he’d punted, oh, two dozen runs dying in various Hellish circles? And not once had he gone there of his own volition; he’d always been dropped there after Ascending to godhood, and cursed his luck instantly after.

Needless to say, the place was best avoided.

He narrowed his eyes. So there might be a portal here. Good to know! It’s of minor interest, I suppose, but I have no use for it. If I see some swirling rip in space, note to self: do not jump in! He was here to break new cultivation ground. He was here for the volcano and the volcano only—everything else was but a distraction.

Unfortunately, it seemed the distractions were coming to him.

The Hellspawn were barely sentient, but they were drawn to life like moths to flame. Or perhaps flames to a moth was more appropriate here—if Dorian were the moth.

They opened black qi-maws, made faces of jeering laughter. No sound came out. They bounded down after him.

Shit.

He wasted a half-second summoning his Javelin, pure reflex, and then kicked himself. These things were essence beings. What was he going to do? Pierce their qi bodies? Slicing through the bone relics that sustained them would not help; that would split them into two smaller Hellspawn—both peak Sky Realm. The little shits were real annoying, and many a God had died finding that out the hard way.

The only way to beat beings made of pure qi was to use attacks of pure qi. He slowed time until their pounces looked to him like the slow wafting of falling autumn leaves. Then he briefly wracked his mind. What was there? The Rust Tribe playbook of fire attacks. Essentially useless. Yama’s Chains—perhaps, but those grappling techniques best used for controlling and squeezing large creatures. Then there was his new toy—one he’d just gotten from his Bloodline, one he’d barely broken out.

[Acid Rains!]

He thrust out a hand.

It was like he’d reached out into some alternate dimension, pulled out a single pitch-black cloud from a thunderstorm, and chucked it out. It ballooned into existence nearly instantly, this chunky misty mass. But this was no normal cloud; this was chock-full of his Bloodline qi at its most toxic.

The cloud belched out shower of sable rain, shrinking as it did; the raindrops hissed as they ripped through smoky air. They fell upward—not a care in the world for gravity—and intercepted the pouncing Hellspawn like a flight of arrows carving into a herd of prey. Where they touched the Hellspawns’ ember qi the black burned clean through the red. It was a most peculiar sight: a herd of red fires destroyed by a rain made of greater black fires, falling upward, biting through them in chunks until they wasn’t a trace left.

Then it was finished, just like that.

Dorian whistled. Those were Sky Realm creatures. They were bordering on Pseudo-Godhood, and likely were imported straight from some Middle Plane! There was no way it should’ve been so easy, especially since he was only in the Earth Realm.

Eleven times power, eh?

He grinned. I wonder how much stronger I’ll be once I condense it.

Humming cheerily, he went back to his march. The peak was nearly in sight…