Molting the Mortal Coil

He matured the little beetle till it was the size of his palm and then moved the orange flame over to it. Using it as an experiment, he didn’t apply a Human Seal since that would just make it more creepy. The orange flame fell upon the beetle and it let out a squeaking noise before going silent. 

There was no smell of burning flesh, or insect in this case, yet the beetle was still being bathed in the orange flame. It was no normal fire after all, the Samsara Flame could do more than burn physical objects and it was exactly this special function that Sage was using upon the Dragoon in order to test a theory of his. The hand sized beetle had gone completely still and quiet, but that did not mean it was dead. As the controller of the flames, Sage could glimpse into what the beetle was experiencing. 

Just like when he had been the victim of the Samsara Flame, the beetle was living out a multitude of other lives. Sage watched the lifetimes of dozens of insects flash past and then he was surprised to see the Dragoon living as a form of lizard. Then it became a Spirit Animal Viper, and a few lives later it was a huge sea turtle. The little beetle wasn’t just living more lives, it was improving its next in the cycle of reincarnation. Sage was fascinated by this change and watched more closely. Remarkably, after a hundred lives, the little beetle was a human! 

When Sage was under the influence of the Samsara Flame, his mind was slowly being consumed to fuel the tempering of his soul. The Dragoon was quite young and only an insect after all, so it didn’t have much mind to fuel this process. Sage was using his own Spirit Power to bridge this gap, feeding energy to the little beetle. He wanted to see whether this Samsara Flame was only useful against enemies. While every life Sage had lived through was tainted with unfinished business, he had still experienced many things. 

When he’d thought of Merging with a powerful Demonic Beast to acquire its experiences, this idea popped into his head and he wanted to try it out before even handling the simple task of breeding a firefly. The lives and experiences were essentially artificial, but for the one living them, they were quite real. A person can only interact with the outside world through their senses. The lives lived under the Samsara Flame were directly experienced by the mind and soul. For the person being burned, even time flowed at a normal rate and the lives they lived were just as real as anyone else's.

Turns out, his experiment was far more successful than he thought it would be.

The Dragoon broke free of the Samsara Flame. While living a human life, it ran into some sort of fortuitous encounter that led to a great mental breakthrough. The Dragoon’s mindset changed completely and it freed itself from the orange fire. That wasn’t the end of it, the sky above the Lang Clan compound darkened and thunder rumbled. The palm sized beetle suddenly turned into the eye of a massive whirlpool. The energy of the heavens and earth for miles around converged, sinking into the little bug’s body. A moment later the Dragoon transformed and a young human teen stood in its place. He had a piercing gaze and a heroic stance. The boy that was once a bug smiled at Sage.

“Thank you, Father! Farewell for now. May we meet again in the future.”

The boy bowed his head and cupped his hands in a salute. Sage was stunned into silence. Before he could reply, the teen who was somehow wearing an elaborate silk gown flew up into the sky. As he approached the dark clouds, lightning crackled and arced across the sky. The thunder rumbled louder like it was threatening the teen. The boy roared at the sky and a huge bolt of lightning fell down upon him like a column of electricity. The teen thrust his fist upwards and the bolt was shattered apart. Thousands of sparks fell away from and scattered among Lionheart Town like burning shrapnel. 

Unfortunately, it was just the beginning. Another bolt of lightning followed the first, and it was even more powerful. Boom! The second bolt was shattered apart and so were the third and fourth. It was only after the seventh and eighth bolt of lighting fell that the teen started to look tired. Lionheart Town was in shambles, but Sage could tell that the last bolt was as powerful as all the previous ones combined. If it fell unhindered, the destruction it would cause might wipe out half the city. He could feel that even the very first lightning bolt that had fallen was strong enough to grievously wound, if not kill, him. This ninth lightning bolt was way out of his league.

The air in Lionheart Town was so charged with energy that Sage felt his hair rising. It was so thick that he felt like he was back inside the Cloud Swallowing Thunder Eel. Only this time, he didn’t feel safe at all. His life was in the hands of that teen standing in the sky. The one who just a few minutes ago had been a little beetle as big as his hand. Life sure is strange sometimes, isn’t it?

He couldn’t do anything to help, and there wasn’t enough time for him to try and save the others who were important to him. Sure, he could hide inside the Universe Ring, but if the worst were to occur, what about the Tiankong Siblings and Wan Ling? At that moment when he was staring down death, he chose to stand strong and accept his fate. 

Everything went silent. 

The boom of thunder was so loud that his eardrums had burst. All around him many mortals were bleeding from their ears, noses and eyes. A few had fallen to the ground clutching their chest. The immense shockwave released from the collision of the teen and the lightning had caused the whole of Lionheart Town to rumble. The meeting in the sky had caused the ground to quake. Many were dead or injured, but the skies suddenly cleared up. 

The teen had succeeded. A single upward punch completely conquered the river of lightning that had fallen from above and banished the dark clouds. The sky was suddenly clear like that monstrous lightning had never been there in the first place. The teen looked down and frowned, but then he shook his head and then flew up into the sky. He moved so fast there was a loud boom in his wake and then he disappeared completely from sight. 

Who knew you could uppercut a storm away?

His ears were not ringing as his fast healing quickly restored his hearing. He realized the seriousness of the situation and rushed to the Thousand Treasures, buying a huge quantity of healing pills. Then he gathered up the injured Dragoons and sent them into the Inner World while bringing out an equal number of replacements. Injured as they had been, he considered their service fulfilled and let them retire from that point on. The new Dragoons were swiftly sent around town to maintain order and distribute the healing pills to all the mortals that were injured. They also had to do some firefighting, the many sparks that had fallen to the ground had already ignited dozens of small fires around town. A couple buildings had also collapsed from that final quake and teams were sent to dig out the survivors. 

What had started as a small experiment had turned into a disaster.