Molting the Mortal Coil

The initial eruption shattered the armor of the Blacksilver Knight like it was a thin candy shell. Such extreme heat and pressure boiled away its Black Enhydros flesh rapidly, giving Sage only enough time to flee into the Universe Ring. From the inside, he couldn’t sense what was going on outside, that overwhelming power instantly destroyed his Spiritual Sense as soon as he tried to extend it out. A moment later he felt a connection inside him shatter. His Soul Fragments had been destroyed. The Blacksilver Knight was no more.

Tao Ba appeared next to him, “Your ring has been damaged. It is being moved from the troublesome place and you are now being issued your first official warning.”

The pot-bellied boy coughed to clear his throat and spoke with a crisp, clear, and deep voice. His words delivered with uncharacteristic clarity, “Provisional User. Damage has been inflicted upon an access ring. Allowing further damage is not advised. Please follow these and all future regulations to prevent access to further services.”

Tao Ba’s choice of words was very telling and Sage was instantly inundated with multiple questions, but he couldn’t worry about that at the moment. He immediately sent his Spiritual Sense out to confirm the situation and as Tao Ba had said, they were in a different place than before. The Universe Ring was laying in a bed of grass, no longer trapped in a cavern at the center of the Living Disaster. Sensing no immediate danger nearby, Sage sent out the Soul Clone to take a look at his surroundings.

The plains around him were quite bare, free of any impending danger. Relaxing a little, he looked down at the Universe Ring and saw that it had a few hair-thin cracks running over the surface of the gold band. It really was damaged.

With the most immediate concerns addressed, he tried to get an idea of his position and that’s when he noticed the most obvious thing in the distance. The clouds were turning grey, streaked with black. The source being the only landmark in view, a lone mountain dozens of miles away. The top of it was glowing red and similarly colored dots shot into the air from it. He had a pretty good idea what that was, and also assumed that the rest of his enemies were likely to still be nearby. How far would they have backed off from the giant tortoise when it was erupting? Were they spread out in every direction? They could be right next to him at the moment for all he knew. He was still far from any claim of safety.

Sage brought the Soul Clone back inside, hiding it from discovery while he started the process of linking to a fresh Warp Worm. His dozen Soul Fragments had been a significant investment of Soul Power, but their loss didn’t damage him so he moved on from the setback quickly. It was a shame he hadn’t been able to recover the Heart of Eruption from the Living Disaster, but he’d made a good attempt. Better yet, the turtle doing his best volcano impression definitely wasn’t easy. He had to hope that sort of action crippled the monster and use this chance to flee.

When the Warp Worm was ready it was released, taking the Universe Ring into an internal space and starting to burrow into the ground. A three foot thick, big black earthworm appearing on a flat featureless plain was certainly unusual, but with the active volcano erupting in the distance he could only hope no one noticed. Unless he’d gotten lucky and Whitestaff got herself and all her disciples killed, he was pretty sure she still had a way to track him. Once he’d built up a bit more strength he’d need to focus on taking her out. The Warp Worm burrowed quickly, amazingly fast by the standards of Earth, traveling at a good twenty miles per hour in the packed earth beneath the plains.

Fast as that was, it would be easy for a horse to catch up with them let alone a Cultivator with their supernatural strength and speed. The problem was that they were on a wide open plain and with their enhanced vision, they could see dozens if not hundreds of miles without any problem. He had to go with the slower option to keep from being discovered. He’d thought about just trying to rely on pure speed, but the problem was that damn giant tortoise. If only he could get the Living Disaster off his tail then he’d be much safer, so he didn’t care about Whitestaff staying on his trail, but he did care about avoiding the tortoise. He just had to hope that his enemies wouldn’t clue in the Living Disaster and point it towards him.

Every few hours, Sage had the Warp Worm burrow closer to the surface so he could extend his Spiritual Sense and get a peek at the outside world. Through the night and the next day, he fled from the scene. Only when the sun was falling again did the Warp Worm slow down and the Soul Clone flew up to the surface to take a look. Spiritual Sense was powerful, but range was limited. It expanded outward in every direction and pressed against everything in the vicinity, like extending the sense of touch to not just one’s own body but to the outside world. It was extremely sensitive and expansive, but it also consumed a greater and greater amount of energy the larger it got.

Sage imagined it followed the inverse square law for energy expenditure, but he hadn’t yet expended the time to run such detailed tests. The Soul Clone on the other hand was a spirit being. It had no physical body, so that meant no sense of touch, but it was also lacking a sense of smell, and taste. Weirdly though, the Soul Clone still had a sense of sight and sound. He wasn’t quite sure how it worked, but he guessed the Soul Clone was energy based. Perceiving light waves and air vibration was different than testing molecules for smells or tastes, something he would need to look into in the future.

The Soul Clone started carefully, only putting the top half of its head out of the ground. This was the part that was odd to Sage, since the perspective of the Soul Clone was at its eyes, just like if it had a physical body. Was that because of the way his soul was formed? Is it because that would be the least disorienting? Or was it some sort of subconscious choice he was making and could change in the future?

Slowly its ghostly eyes circled them, having lifted just over the height of the grass to get an unobstructed view. He saw the unending plains around them, but then stopped. There!

In the distance, there was something other than the flat and featureless plains. He saw gnarled and twisted trees. A thickening of the air that started to distort his vision, and with a moment’s study confirmed that it was the edge of a swamp. The piece he could see was at least a few miles wide, which was promising as a place for him to hide.

Continuing to scan the horizon, the Soul Clone paused when it got a good look behind them. Sage started cursing inside the Universe Ring when he saw that familiar mountain traipsing along in his wake. He’d hoped to have put many miles distance between them, but unfortunately that moving mountain was still just as far away as it had been yesterday and it was still trundling along.

When he finally had enough of spitting expletives, Sage took a closer look through the Soul Clone’s eyes and realized the differences. The Living Disaster was not alone. He caught sight of his other enemies, but they weren’t just spread out to the sides as they’d been in the past. Instead, his eyes were drawn to a few small figures standing on top of the tortoise’s head. Worse yet, he noticed the peaks of a few tents on the edge of the Living Disaster’s ‘shell’. It was like they’d set up camp at the base of a mountain, with meat cooking on spits over campfires between rings of tents. That can’t be good.