The heavens roared in indignation. Tornadoes came crashing down on the Heaven Ascension Platform, threatening to tear it apart. Cha Ming shielded the pill with his body, conserving his energy for when it was needed. His soul’s numbness eased with every passing moment.
Seeing that they were accomplishing nothing, the winds dispersed. They left as quickly as they’d come. A sharp sound echoed around them, and everyone realized that Huxian and his three friends had simultaneously broken through to late core formation.
Stay back, everyone. I’m going in alone! Huxian shouted. He jumped into the circle just as Cha Ming activated it.
A man, a ghost, and a fox stood solemnly as fire came raining down from the heavens. Cha Ming summoned his Grandmist flames to fight off the torrent of heavenly fire that managed to sneak through the straining formation. What he didn’t catch was devoured by Huxian as it fell. Even Sun Wukong, exhausted as he was, lashed out at the oncoming flames, which eventually crashed into Cha Ming’s qi-depleted body.
The Sea God Emperor saw the princess move to charge in, hoping to repay her life debt, but there was nothing that either of them could do to help Cha Ming. He stopped her and tried to shield her eyes from the carnage that would follow, but she refused to look away.
To his surprise, Cha Ming was still standing. His body, which had been scorched until he was completely defaced by the heavenly flames, healed within moments. The process repeated itself again and again, each time more violent than the last. The formation convulsed more and more, and on the eighth blast of fire, the half-step-transcendent formation shattered.
Then, on the ninth and final strike, Huxian grew to phenomenal proportions. He became a massive creature of suppression that spanned a third of the formation circle. His body was a full three hundred feet long, just missing another thirty-three feet to the maximum allowable for mortal bodies. His three tails flailed, and at that moment, everyone on the platform understood that what they’d seen before was only an illusion. Huxian wasn’t a normal three-tailed fox, but a Godbeast through and through.
His three black-and-white tails flailed as he became the very definition of savagery. In this case, time acceleration wasn’t a benefit, but he’d recently consumed a spatial fragment. A shell of distorted space-time appeared around him, fending off a large part of the heavenly flames before they crashed through. The three stars on his tails, the ones for lightning, wind, and swamp, glowed brightly, significantly eating away at the flame’s power. Huxian’s light and shadow domains ate away and purified the flames before finally, they crashed into his massive body, which he used to shield his brother.
Then the flames did something unexpected. Despite being mindless agents of heaven, they didn’t try their best to reach Cha Ming and the pill. Instead, they continued burrowing into Huxian below his fur. Huxian let out howl after howl of pain as they worked their way through his flesh and toward the most vital part of his body—his demonic core.
Cha Ming cried tears of blood as he realized what they were doing. The heavens were challenging him. He knew, in this moment, that if he so chose, he could save the pill. But the heavens would take away his brother’s life, and as a result, his own.
Cha Ming howled in rage. This was too unfair. Time and time again, the heavens had denied his advancement. Time and time again, he’d wanted to advance, only to be stopped at the final step. He gripped the pill, which he’d worked so hard to create. Then, without any hesitation, he crushed it. The moment he did, the flames left Huxian’s pain-ridden body and hovered around Cha Ming’s fist. They waited, for even the dust in the pill was an affront to the heavens.
“Why?” he yelled out at the skies. “Why do you hate me? I just want to see her again… I just want to see her again.”
The powerful man who’d created miracle after miracle kneeled in anguish. He opened his palm and let the gray dust trickle to the ground. The heavenly flames, the final wave of gray flames that had sought to kill his brother, darted out and consumed the dust, allowing none of it to touch the platform. It disappeared with the last of the pill.
The skies stilled. Huxian shrank in size, and his friends rushed over to his side. They poured their demonic qi into his body, trying their best to stabilize his condition. Meanwhile, the elders rushed over to Cha Ming. But he couldn’t feel their helping hands, nor could he hear their reassuring words. He could feel nothing, could process nothing.
All he could do was weep in despair. Despite all his efforts, he had failed.
Interlude: Shifting Tides
Gong Lan looked around warily as thin violet wisps meandered across Violet Wind Mountain. She stood at the base of the steps to the monastery that had protected the Ling Nan Plane against the forces of evil for countless millennia. Their usual mental attacks didn’t trigger as she ascended to the peak, step by step. They were broken, their enchantments dispersed.
What caused this? she wondered as she climbed the last step. The ancient buildings of the monastery no longer radiated their calming presence. Ghosts fled as she traveled toward the tall purple building at the back. Its 999 stone steps were now divided in three broken segments, each one more precarious than the last. The peak of the purple stone tower was a mess of rubble and ruin. Traces of destruction and lightning lingered in the air.
Evil, the bodhi seed on
