155. Beyond the Sky (X) (Patreon)

The lack of monsters was starting to grow suspicious. Dorian was nearly relieved when he came across his first.

It wasn’t much, as monsters went—a serpentine form Dorian had no name for. It was like a living chain of obsidian fused together with globs of metal. It seemed to lack eyes (why would it need them in a place like this?).

Then Dorian peered a little closer with his spiritual sense, and snorted—as much as it was possible to snort with magma up your nose. There was something meaty within, something slimy, a smaller snake critter who’d stuck on this haphazard shell, like a crab in snake form. Earth Realm. Wiggling at a leisurely pace up toward him.

He summoned his Javelin. It popped into being beside him, shucking aside the lava flows, and carved downward to meet the beast. It took but a brief effort of will to pierce it clean through.

Dorian kept swimming. So there are things living here! But this one was rather weak… is it simply that I’m still treading the shallows? That the beasts with real power are much farther down?

These shallows were already giving his body a battering. He felt like a prized sword stuck in a furnace, slowly hammered into a form void of impurities. Streams of crimson qi seeped into every inch of his skin, and deeper still, treating his organs to a brutal yet vigorous cleanse. He wasn’t hardening like a stone, nor was he melting—he was simply becoming more in every respect. His skin was becoming more pliable, more durable, more clean; his muscles stronger, his bones tougher, his joints more flexible. It was the sort of extreme deep-body tempering most Sky Realm cultivators—no, even most gods—could only dream of! And it was only possible for him due to his Bloodline.

Over the next half hour or so he made slow progress, but progress nonetheless. Even the magma had grown denser; it felt like he was clawing his way through a vat of melted iron. The qi density had doubled, as had the pressure. It felt like his whole body was being squeezed in one angry fist. The heat had more than doubled, but his heat resistance was scaling so fast he hardly felt the difference.

For all the good it did his body, though, that wasn’t why he’d come. His Spiritual Sea still remained firmly in its shape! No condensing to be found here. He needed more pressure. More heat. He forged on.

After another hour of swimming his body was starting to feel like a low-grade Godly treasure. His bones would be worthy of a demigod’s Spirit Weapon, he was sure. The weird part was—despite all his swimming—the nexus hardly seemed to be getting any closer!

He was certain he’d come quite some way. A quick look back with his spiritual sense revealed a vast stretch of churning magma he’d painstakingly clawed through. The surface was so far he could hardly sense it anymore. He was stuck in this strange limbo zone—no clue how much there was left to swim. Oh, and he was very much naked by now, too. His clothing had been charmed to be weather resistant but here, at this depth, the heat beat out even the most intense fires at the Oasis. Perhaps only its most high-intensity furnaces could match what Dorian felt now.

More swimming. More tempering. The rate was slowing. It seemed like the heat and pressure would not go up forever; it was stabilizing at this depth. Dorian would guess it was hot enough here to melt nearly every substance known to this plane—so hot that solidness was a foreign concept, save for his own body. A body whose cleansing, too, was slowing; there were only so many impurities one could burn out, so many layers of tempering a physique needed before it brushed up against some natural limit…

He kept swimming. Another hour passed by like that, and the only thing he found up ahead was another weird snake-thing. He pierced it through, kept swimming, a prickling of doubt in his mind. This couldn’t go on forever… could it?

Another half hour, and he was starting to think perhaps it could. The nexus felt like a mirage, or like the horizon itself: beckoning to him, but always nearly the same distance away! Was it some kind of illusion? A trap? The rational part of him hemmed and hawed, torn on whether or not to turn back.

On gut instinct alone he kept swimming.

He was soon rewarded for it.

Up ahead, the flow changed directions. Oh?

He swam for it eagerly. It seemed to split off into several massive side tunnels! He chose one at random and followed the lava flow in. An underground network of magma? Finally he was getting somewhere!

Then he made the real discovery.

Above him there was a pocket of air. An opening—a cave?! Throat dry, he swam toward it. Only a few strides closer and he could already sense a monstrous blast of qi streaming down from it; whatever this place was might as well have been a beacon to his spiritual senses! To probe at it was nearly blinding. He kicked toward it with a fresh eagerness, then heaved himself up and over the top, breaking the surface and landing naked, panting, on hard coal-like ground.

Then he looked up, and gaped.

It was a giant winding tunnel stretching into the distance farther than his eyes could see. Its walls instantly caught his eye. They were made entirely of pearly-white crystals, rows upon rows of them crusted together, jutting at odd angles, translucent, pristine, big as a man and sparkling with qi. They crowded the space, studding up and down the tunnel as far as the eye could see, bathing the place in soft light. They were what had blinded his spiritual senses.

Which was rather unfortunate for him. Because they stopped him from seeing what else was in this space.

There was the river of magma he’d popped out of, huge and thick, coursing way into the distance. Then, curiously, there was another massive river right beside it filled with spirit water—exactly like the water at the Azcan sinkhole!—and it, too, coursed quickly by. They wound and twisted about the space, at times overlapping but never really merging, curiously; they flowed over one another like oil and water. An effect of the qi, perhaps? Or this strange, dreamy locale?

Dorian didn’t have time to think on it. He looked up from the rivers, and found to his very unpleasant surprise that he was not alone.

He was right! Creatures did live here after all. They were simply, understandably, all clustered in this hidden cave network—where the qi was so thick it felt like wearing a second skin. Before him was a clan of red-furred apes, splashing about in the rivers. In their chests, right between their breasts, there was inlaid a gem very much like those studding the walls—but smaller. A few were bathing in lava, others in water. Apes picked hairs off each others’ heads. They looked to be having a grand old time of it. Aww.

Then they noticed him. Their heads whipped over. The whole lot of them—must’ve been two dozen—froze. They stared him down with beady black eyes. Then they opened their mouths, hissing, and there Dorian found rows upon rows of shark-teeth.

Shit. He probed them and got the most unpleasant news he’d had all day. You’re fucking kidding.

Six children in the Earth Realm. The rest were all at least early Sky Realm. And the real big, mean-looking one at the back—that one was a half-step into Godhood. It roared. They struck.

So there were a few awful things here. First, the space. It was big, but it was confined. There was nowhere for him to flee or play the sniper—and he was trapped against the lava flows. Plus there were no shadows! No way to deploy his most effective weapons.

Second, perhaps more salient, there were dozens of Sky-Realm monsters coming for his head! One peak Sky Realm beast he could deal with. One quasi-God he could handle fairly easily. But the lot of them, at once?

Unbeknownst to him, his sister was at this time putting herself in a very similar situation. She came out of it as close to dead as a person could be without being dead.   Time slowed. He thought about it. He should be fine, right? Up until now he’d been somewhat of a glass cannon. But after this recent tempering he should be nearly as durable as a Torchdragon itself! Surely nothing short of a beast of an extraordinary lineage could damage him. And these apes—whatever they were—were not those; he would’ve heard of them!

And so as he resigned himself to the fight, drawing out his Chains and his Javelin, he knew he’d get battered some. With so many creatures it was inevitable. He at least took solace in the fact that it was very unlikely these things could seriously hurt him.

The air warped around them as they charged him. Their meaty fists seemed to blur as they moved, some Law invoked—Earth, perhaps? Some variant of Strength? Dorian paid it little heed. Then those crystals embedded in their chests started to shine. All around them the walls of the cave did too, as though responding to some kind of call.

And sick pit dropped in Dorian’s stomach. Were they drawing on the qi of the caves?

Uh… Most of Dorian’s advantage came from his eleven times qi pool. If these things could inflate the sizes of their pools too by drawing on their surroundings… bad. Very bad. The question was, by how much? Twofold? Three?

Suddenly he had a hint of doubt. It wasn’t very long ago that one Sky Realm Torchdragon had bitten off his limbs with ease. He was putting a great deal of faith into an untested body tempering he’d only just gotten.

But what choice did he really have?

He dashed at them too, Chains flashing. His Javelin surged.

His first wave of Chains mowed down the leading row of apes. His Javelin skewered one through the head, passed easily through another, and drove through the heart of a third. Then he was in the thick of it, Serpent’s senses geared to the maximum, crushing heads and hearts, slicing through as many bodies as he could. Four down. Five. Six. He was stuck in a thicket of bodies—for every one he cut down another angrier, meatier one seemed to take its place. Grimacing, he dodged and weaved below bursts of flame, below fists pounding through the air. Seven. Eight—

He didn’t even see the fist that hit him first. It came on from the side and blasted him right in the chin with a Fist wreathed in the heaviness of the Laws of the Earth, boosted by the qi-crystals studding the walls.

And only then did Dorian really understand how much trouble he was in.

The Dorian of a few hours ago would’ve died on the spot. Head would’ve exploded like a smashed watermelon. As it was he only saw white for a second; there was a harsh ringing in his ears, a blurring of sight; dimly he felt himself falling and managed to catch himself on one leg.

Hells! That's much stronger than it has any right to be—

That moment’s lapse let another fist drive into his stomach. In nearly the same instant a third cracked him upside the head, and a fourth smashed him in the ribcage.

Dorian managed through sheer force of will to not black out. He was relieved to find nothing broken. His body held strong—

Then a fourth fist hit his head.

He didn’t feel it because he was too busy being unconscious. Neither did he feel the fifth and the sixth and the seventh strikes smash into him on his journey to the ground.

Then, luckily, his head cracked hard against the obsidian—and that woke him back up again. It took him but a fraction of a second to get his bearings. He blinked. For some reason the apes had backed up, ringing him a circle. Blearily he glanced up, only to see the chief ape descending from one giant leap, fangs bared, two fists clenched in one big flaming Law-wreathed hammer aimed right at his chest.

Body tempering or not, there wasn’t a chance he’d survive that.

Fuck!