The air in the Volcanic Barrens didn't just feel hot—it felt angry. It scratched at the lungs with every breath, tasting of sulfur and baked stone. The ground underfoot was a mosaic of cracked black rock, some sections glowing faintly orange through the fissures. Steam vents hissed like dying serpents, and in the distance, the Fire-Gourd Mountains belched columns of ash into the perpetual haze.
Elder Guo advanced, his green robes seeming to repel the grime of the barrens. "There is a harmony even in this fire, demon. A cycle of destruction and renewal that follows celestial order. Your chaos has no place here."
Ling Xiao's enhanced senses confirmed part of this. The energy here wasn't the wild, multi-faceted chaos of life or storms. It was simpler, more primal: Heat. Pressure. Fracture. It was chaos reduced to its most violent, essential components. Persuading this energy would be like trying to bargain with an earthquake.
"Li Ming," Ling Xiao whispered without turning his head. "When I move, you run for that ridge." He subtly indicated a spine of darker rock about two hundred yards ahead, one of many that formed a maze through the thermal field.
"Run into the steaming death zone?" Li Ming whispered back, his knuckles white on his knife.
"It's the only pattern that doesn't end with them capturing us. The ground is unstable. They won't follow quickly."
Elder Guo raised a hand. "Take them. The boy alive if possible. The other... is irrelevant."
The six disciples kicked their spirit-horses forward. The beasts, already skittish in the oppressive heat, advanced reluctantly.
Ling Xiao didn't wait. He grabbed Li Ming's arm and ran, not away from the volcanic field, but directly into its heart.
Immediately, Pattern Reading became survival. The ground wasn't solid; it was a thin crust over chambers of superheated gas and magma. His senses mapped the pressure points—places where the next footfall might trigger a steam explosion or a collapse. He moved in a zigzagging path only he could see, pulling Li Ming along.
Behind them, the disciples shouted and gave chase, but their horses balked at the treacherous footing. One mount stepped on a thin crust; with a whoosh, a jet of scalding steam erupted, catching the rider full in the face. His scream was cut short as he fell, and the panicked horse bolted.
"Stay in my footsteps!" Ling Xiao yelled over the growing roar of geothermal vents.
They leaped over a fissure glowing cherry-red, feeling the blistering heat wash over them. Ash began to fall like grey snow, coating their hair and shoulders. The hunting party was delayed but not stopped; Elder Guo was now leading them on foot, moving with the sure, if slower, confidence of his cultivation base.
Ling Xiao's mind was a frantic calculus of pressure and fracture. That vent will erupt in three seconds—swerve left. That section of rock is cooling but brittle—jump. He was reading the volcano's chaotic breath, staying one exhalation ahead of immolation.
They reached the relative cover of the first rock ridge. Ling Xiao pressed against the hot stone, peering back. Four disciples and Elder Guo were still coming, picking their way with care but determination.
"We can't outrun them forever," Li Ming gasped, wiping ash-smeared sweat from his eyes.
"I'm not trying to outrun them," Ling Xiao said, his storm-colored eyes scanning the terrain ahead. "I'm trying to get them to the right place."
"What right place?"
"Where the patterns converge."
They pushed deeper. The air grew so hot it was hard to breathe. Strange, ghostly minerals coated the rocks, shimmering in the heat haze. Ling Xiao's Chaos Sensing was overloaded with the sheer, violent potential of the place. His new energy reserves, filled with storm-chaos, hummed in response, resonating with the deeper, older chaos of the planet's blood.
He found what he was looking for near a bubbling, acrid pool of yellow mud. The patterns here were a knot of instability. A major steam vent ready to blow was under direct stress from a slowly sliding shelf of rock above. A few hundred yards beyond, the side of a smaller volcanic cone showed webbing of fresh cracks—it was primed for a lateral blast.
It was a Rube Goldberg machine of destruction. He just needed to trigger the first domino.
"Get behind that column!" he ordered Li Ming, pointing to a thick basalt pillar. "And don't come out until I say!"
"Xiao, what are you—"
"Just GO!"
Li Ming ran for cover. Ling Xiao turned to face the approaching pursuers. Elder Guo saw him standing in the open and smirked. "Finally accepting your fate, demon?"
Ling Xiao ignored him. He closed his eyes, blocking out the hellish landscape, and focused on the pressure point beneath the sliding rock shelf. He reached out with his will, not to absorb the volcanic chaos, but to... tickle it.
He sent the tiniest thread of his own storm-chaos energy down into the fissure, not as an attack, but as a catalyst. A suggestion of motion.
The ground grumbled. A shower of pebbles skittered down the rock shelf.
Elder Guo paused, his senses flaring. "What are you doing?"
The first domino fell.
With a sound like a mountain cracking its knuckles, the entire rock shelf sheared off and slid. It didn't fall on them. It fell into the superheated vent below.
The impact was catastrophic.
The vent, packed with pent-up steam, exploded. Not upward, but laterally, because the sliding rock had blocked its main chimney. A horizontal blast of superheated steam and rock shrapnel screamed across the barrens at waist height.
The disciples, caught in the open, had no time. Two were swept away, boiled and broken. The others dove for cover.
Elder Guo roared, summoning a shield of green qi that deflected the worst of the blast but shattered under the force, driving him to his knees.
But the cascade had only begun. The shockwave from the steam explosion traveled through the brittle ground straight toward the cracked volcanic cone.
Ling Xiao saw the pattern complete itself. "NOW, LI MING! RUN TO THE HIGH GROUND!" He pointed to a slag hill to the north.
They ran as the world ended behind them.
The side of the small volcano blew out. It wasn't a full eruption, but a pyroclastic surge—a rolling wave of ash, toxic gas, and blistering rock fragments that flowed down the slope like a fiery tide, consuming everything in its path.
It was their cover. Their smokescreen. The ash cloud, dense and choking, billowed out, reducing visibility to arm's length. The roar was deafening.
They reached the slag hill, scrambling up its loose, clinking side. Below, the surge filled the valley they'd just been in, a grey-orange river of death. They couldn't see the hunters. They could only hear muffled shouts swallowed by the volcano's roar.
They were across the immediate kill zone. They had escaped.
Panting at the hill's crest, Li Ming coughed ash from his lungs. "You... you used the mountain itself..."
Before Ling Xiao could respond, a flash of green light cut through the ash cloud below.
A figure emerged, robe tattered, face blackened, one arm hanging at a wrong angle. Elder Guo. His eyes, blazing with hatred, locked onto them. He'd survived, shielded by his cultivation and sheer spite.
"You... WILL... DIE!" he screamed, his voice raw. He raised his functional hand. A formation flag, cracked but still glowing, flew from his sleeve. He wasn't aiming at them. He slammed it into the ground at his feet.
A pulse of ordered energy shot through the slag hill beneath them.
Ling Xiao felt it—a targeted destabilization technique. The hill, composed of loose volcanic debris, began to shudder and shift. A landslide.
"Run along the ridge!" Ling Xiao pushed Li Ming ahead of him.
They sprinted as the hill slumped away behind them. But Elder Guo was already moving, climbing through the collapsing debris with terrifying single-mindedness. He was wounded, but his cultivation made him faster than two exhausted boys.
They reached the end of the ridge. A dead end. A twenty-foot drop into a basin of sharp, cooled lava formations awaited them.
Elder Guo reached the ridge behind them, blocking retreat. "No more mountains to hide behind, demon."
Li Ming looked at the drop, then at the advancing elder. He made a decision. In a move born of desperate street-fighting instinct, he didn't try to fight the cultivator. He lunged past him, his skinning knife flashing, not to injure, but to distract. "GET OUT OF HERE, XIAO!"
"LI MING, NO!"
Elder Guo, caught off-guard by the suicidal move, backhanded Li Ming with a casual flick of qi-enhanced strength.
The sound of ribs cracking was sickeningly loud. Li Ming flew backward as if hit by a boulder, tumbling to the edge of the ridge, blood spraying from his mouth.
Ling Xiao's world narrowed to that sound. That spray of red against the grey ash.
Rage, cold and purer than any volcanic fire, filled the hollow left by fear. His mark burned like a brand. The chaotic energy within him, the storm-chaos he'd breathed, surged in response.
Elder Guo turned back to him, smiling grimly. "Sentiment. A weakness your kind never learns."
Ling Xiao didn't speak. He looked past the elder at Li Ming's still form. Then he looked at the volcano that had begun the eruption, still rumbling. He felt its chaotic heart beating deep below, a torrent of energy that made his storm-chaos seem like a drizzle.
He needed more. He needed the mountain's rage.
He dropped all caution. All technique. He opened himself completely, not with the controlled breathing of the tornado, but with the raw, desperate absorption he'd used in the tomb.
He reached down with his senses and his mark and pulled on the volcanic chaos.
It was like drinking lava.
Power, raw and annihilating, flooded into him. It wasn't just energy; it was the essence of dissolution, of matter unmade into pure heat and force. His storm-chaosis reserves were overwhelmed in an instant. His meridians screamed as they were scoured by elemental fire. His skin reddened, then blistered. The silver mark on his forehead glowed white-hot.
But he didn't stop. He took it all.
Power Boost: His cultivation stage, just solidly in the Middle Stage, surged violently toward the peak. But it was a distorted, unstable growth. Cracks of fiery light appeared on his skin. He was becoming a vessel for something he couldn't contain.
Elder Guo's smile vanished, replaced by shock, then dawning horror. "You fool! You'll destroy yourself!"
Ling Xiao raised a hand. It was wreathed in flames that were not fire, but visible chaos—swirling violet streaked with volcanic orange. He didn't know any techniques. So he simply released a fraction of the cataclysm inside him.
A wave of distorted space and heat, silent and shimmering, shot forward.
Elder Guo crossed his arms, summoning his strongest defensive technique. "Verdant Dragon Scales!"
The wave hit. There was no explosion. The ordered green scales of the defense simply... eroded. They dissolved into motes of light that were sucked into the chaotic wave. It washed over Guo, not burning him, but unraveling the spiritual cohesion of his body. He screamed, a sound of profound violation, as he was thrown backward off the ridge, not from impact, but from his own cultivation violently rejecting itself.
He fell into the ash cloud below and did not rise.
Ling Xiao stood, trembling, wreathed in unstable energy. The power was ebbing, leaving behind a body on the verge of coming apart. The cracks on his skin pulsed with inner light. He felt like a over-pressurized geyser. He had maybe minutes before he destabilized completely.
He stumbled to Li Ming's side. His friend was breathing, but each breath was a wet, ragged gasp. Blood stained his lips and shirt. His eyes were half-open, glazed with pain.
"Li Ming... hold on."
Li Ming tried to speak, coughed up more blood. "Told you... to run..."
The volcano, perhaps triggered by the massive energy release, entered a new, more violent phase. With a deafening detonation, the main cone erupted properly. A column of fire and ash shot kilometers into the sky. The ground shook violently. New fissures opened, spewing lava.
It was the final cover. The apocalypse that would hide their escape—or their deaths.
Gritting his teeth against the pain of his own destabilizing body, Ling Xiao hauled Li Ming's limp form over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. He was six, small, but fueled by desperate, chaotic strength. He half-ran, half-staggered away from the erupting volcano, into the wasteland of ash and cooling lava flows.
Behind them, the Verdant Dragon Sect's hunting party was buried under the volcano's wrath. Ahead, there was only barren survival.
He walked until the roar faded to a rumble, until the ash fall lightened. He found a shallow cave formed by a tilted lava slab and gently laid Li Ming down.
In the dim light, he could see the damage was bad. Broken ribs for sure. Possibly internal bleeding. Li Ming's breathing was growing shallower, his skin clammy.
Ling Xiao knelt beside him, hands hovering uselessly. He could sense the chaotic disruption inside Li Ming's body—the trauma, the bleeding, the life force flickering. But he didn't know how to fix it. He only knew how to absorb, to redirect, to break.
He had the power to move mountains. But he didn't know how to mend a single broken rib.
"Hold on," he whispered again, voice breaking. "Just hold on."
But Li Ming's eyes were closing, and his breaths were becoming whispers.
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END OF CHAPTER 11