"The only disadvantage of this battle formation is that it destroys the enemy extremely thoroughly, with barely any materials left to harvest." Youjin Chao explained, appearing completely impassive at Yung and Su Nanya's PDA. Perhaps he did not know what PDA meant, but the boy's empathic link was as clear as day.
Shock, rage, scorn.
Yung went on guard.
The Youjin cultivators walked forward steadily. With each step they inched, their formation carved into the voidfiend horde like a hurricane of steel threads. The physical embodiment of the term ‘offence is the best defence’, the dome of wires left nary a blind spot for even the strongest enemy fiend to crawl through.
Some of the monsters tried to dash past the formation, to get to where Yung and the gang were lazily chatting away, but every time, tentacles of golden wires would reach out of the formation and mow the beasts to gore and dust.
Yung patted Su Nanya’s tail which was covering his nose. It was fluffy and had a strawberry scent that cancelled out the putrid miasma.
The battle raged on one-sidedly.
There was a large Wretched hornbeast at the back. Pale purple light gathered on its temple horn, and the circuits of sickly green on its body lit up with an eldritch neon hue.
It aimed at the dome and fired a beam of void qi the colour of puce. The drill-shaped attack tore through hundreds of voidfiends, its own ally horde, before reaching the formation, where it clashed with the millions of dim gold silk wires. For a few seconds, the ear-piercing sound of metal scratching against granite rang out. The laser then fizzled out, having only pushed back the battle formation a few steps.
The Youjin cultivators were unharmed, and they moved forward again with grim determination in their eyes.
The fiends tried all they could, and the Imperfect Heaven 2nd order murder bunny shot a few more attacks. But it was to no avail.
The ending of the battle was as anti-climactic as the start, and with an hour of slow but patient grinding, lots of pills and potions having been taken to replenish their qi, the horde was no more.
The Youjin cultivators broke formation after mortally wounding the Imperfect Heaven 2nd order Wretched hornbeast, cutting open its abdomen as its guts poured out. They ganged up on it like dogs on a rabbit, and Youjin Gangkai struck the last hit, decapitating the fiend, head up.
“Imperfect Heaven 2nd order material should not be wasted, and the battle formation would have, well, wasted it.” Youjin Chao said. “The fiendcore can be refined into a foundation or meridian building pill too.”
“What about stigmata building?” Yung asked excitedly.
“Oh, foolish servant of mine.” Su Nanya tutted.
“Unfortunately, that isn’t possible. Heart qi cultivation is too unique.” Youjin Chao replied with a grin.
“Then is that one pill all it takes to break through?” Yung asked, a bit disheartened.
“If the cultivator has a stable foundation.” Youjin Chao said.
“Why isn’t the clan over-run with powerhouses then?”
Youjin Chao looked at Yung incredulously. Then he nodded as if understanding the problem, "We have run into the Dusk Valley lion king, and now this Imperfect Heaven 2nd order Wretched hornbeast. This might have given you the wrong impression Brother Yung, that such fiends are common. They are not. The clan can only retrieve such a fiendcore after months of planning a hunt in the Warring twilight forest or when they find a rogue voidrift such as this, and that's maybe once or twice a year.
“And even when they can slay such fiends and refine their core into a pill, the clan would need to have a 12th stage Imperfect Heaven 1st realm cultivator with a stable cultivation base. Out of the hundreds of clansmen, and thousands if counting all associate and dependant families such as guards and servants, perhaps only a handful of cultivators can reach that level in a decade. The clan usually sells the pill if they don’t craft an Imperfect Heaven 2nd grade artefact with it.”
“Makes sense.”
After the fight was over, Yung walked towards the back of the cave. He’d finally see what a voidrift looked like in person.
"Indeed, that yang stench'ed busy boy is wrong," Su Nanya scoffed with utter disregard, "In our imperfect reality, such ill-mannered voidfiends are everywhere, plaguing our wonderful landbridge like the common vermin they." She said like a stern elder sister, hoping Yung would discard his lousy company.
"I think he was talking in the context of the area surrounding Dim Gold City." Yung said, rolling his eyes.
"The voidrift, is it safe?" He asked the Youjin woman who had been accompanying him as a guard and asked. She was resting on a stone, drinking from a vat of floral water, wiping the gore off her daggers.
“Not a fiend is sight. A good chance as any to see a voidrift. Your first time, yeah?” She said.
“Yes.” Yung thanked the woman and turned around. But before leaving, he asked, “What’s your name? I’m Ziyou Yung. And this imperial princess is the honoured revived grace from the south, Su Nanya, if you didn’t know.”
“Who doesn’t! I am Youjin Linbi. You’re a funny kid.” She laughed, then waved him away. The vixen didn’t even acknowledge the woman in the meanwhile.
Yung rounded the dark hollow, and came face to face with the construct.
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The voidrift, as Yung had guessed from its name, was a distinct tear in the fabric of the cosmos. At first glance, it appeared unassuming. But when Yung activated his link sight with a nagging feeling in his palpating heart, it was as though it had revealed a glimpse into a dark, chaotic realm of deep nothingness filled with dead stars, and Yung stopped breathing.
Its irregular edges resembled frayed cloth, while its unstable and pulsating nature hinted at an inherent instability. From this rift emerged the grotesque voidfiends, their writhing forms and menacing presence instilling a primal terror into the air. Creatures of death being birthed from nothingness, with the sole mission to kill the alive. As each fiend dropped, a wire would kill it, ending its miserable existence. It was a conduit, this rift in the void, a manifestation of forbidden knowledge, eliciting a mix of curiosity, trepidation, and a deep-seated fear to whoever was foolish enough to approach it, by whichever dead god beyond the veil.
Surrounding the rift were mysterious tears, defying comprehension and shimmering with arcane energies of an infinite flavour of void and qi, slowly crystallising the very atmosphere near it into transparent lattice mounds.
Yung took it all in, the rift, the tears, the mounds, and his eyes quivered with sheer terror, making Su Nanya who was on top of his head, look on with worry. Yung didn't notice; his vision fixed on the portal as he raised a trembling finger at the dark unreal crack. It was unsaturated, with nothing but a silent void beyond. The dead stars were a lie, so were the fiends and the void.
For he had seen one of these before, in his last moments as Jung. In the virtual world his nephew had created.
The voidrift was nearly identical to the portal that had brought the bone god to Gaia. And then it carried Jung, who transmigrated into Yung.
***
The magical formation elder was the one who closed the rift. He pounded metallic stakes on the ground around the circumference of the space crack-while lighting strange incense and chanting weirder mantras, almost as if he were exorcising a house of foreign ghosts. The other cultivators helped, each holding up a corner of a new formation that surrounded the voidrift.
It looked like the process would take a while, as the voidrift closed very slowly. Like closing the zipper of a duffel bag with too many towels inside. If the towels were alive, had many eyes, and were out to kill you.
Still, Yung stared at the malevolent construct with bloodshot eyes.
If I jump in…
Su Nanya had climbed down from his head. She looked at him, then at the rift, then at him again, her eyes clouded with a blank light.
Yung had already bade farewell to his life as Jung, with his favourite song as his tribute, accompanied by his girlfriend's fantastic pipa. Finding a possibility, a possibility that there might be a way to…
To what exactly? If I jump in…
It felt as though he was cheapening his resolve. Su Nanya lifted her paws and nudged Yung's leg. The golden fox sat there, staring at him while gracefully waving her tail. Floofy joined her, as did Silky. They were worried, he could read.
…I’ll probably die.
The voidrift spat out flesh-eating monsters. He was not strong enough to survive on the other side, and he couldn’t expect Su Nanya and the rest to follow him. And why would they? So that he could go back to his paralysed fossil of a body again?
No, if I could just talk to Mum and Dad one last time. I…
Moira had cut off the connection between the universes for good. She said so! But it grated Yung’s mind like an itch that refused to fade. Questions, questions, more questions upon questions.
Why did this voidrift look so much like the portal in the virtual world? What was that bone god exactly? Is… it possible to re-enact the process the bone-god had used?
Qi slowly rose from the stakes on the ground as the new formation came to life. The formation elder had sweat dripping down his forehead, but didn't look fatigued otherwise. His smile was radiant, like a craftsman in his flow state; he worked with gusto.
The qi, manifesting as delicate dim gold ribbons of energy, gracefully wrapped around the crack in the fabric of reality. With each careful flare of the formation, guided by the chants of the cultivators, the voidrift responded by closing further. And this gradual closure was accompanied by a draining of colours from the world in the cavern, as if life itself retreated in anticipation. The qi ribbons diligently weaved their tapestry of mending, until finally, the voidrift was sealed off nigh entirely. In its wake, only a small scar remained, which too would fade soon, if the mantra rhymes were to be believed.
It reminded Yung of fixing a glass tank with duct tape, water still trying to gush out. Hopefully, the results would be better.
The colours of the world shook, and a distorted ray waved out from the final visages of the scar.
“Cover your ears, oh boyfriend of mine.” Su Nanya said, and Yung did so instinctively.
Just as the scar closed for good, a deafening screech echoed from the other side of this conduit of evil, accompanied by the delicate sound of shattering glassware magnified by a thousand folds. Yung’s very body shook with the vibrations, and he closed his eyes too.
He waited, and a small fox brushed against his leg.
As the vibration smoothed, an ethereal aura radiated outwards, tingling Yung's skin, filling the cavern with an otherworldly glow that he could see through his eyelids. Yung opened them slowly as he uncovered his ears and witnessed an astonishing transformation: the cavern was now adorned with abundant crystal mounds, far more than there had been before. Almost thirty metres surrounding the location where the rift had been, was now casting a brilliant spectacle of light and shadow, as the colours had returned with seemingly extra contrast and saturation.
Most mounds were complete, standing about knee high, but some were cracked, their lattice falling apart, and unit cells scattering on the ground. Yung picked one of the cells up. It was a long, narrow, six-sided prism. As a jade carver, he recognised it instantly.
“A void jade.” So this is what the scrolls mentioned! All these hundreds of mounds, how much is this worth in pure spirit stones? At least a few silvercast ones! Man, voidrifts are good business. No wonder the Su fox clan are the richest in the world!
Thinking about money was a good way to distract his mind from the possibility of going back to the before.
Su Nanya pouted, thumping the ground with her tail. “We, such sensible a girlfriend, shall not allow you to squander our wealth. Dare you not understand, oh foolish boyfriend?” She whispered, and Yung grinned. The vixen beamed back.
"Not a bad haul." The grizzly-haired elder stroked his fuzzy beard, a rare smile on his face. "Gather it up." He ordered his Youjin subordinates, who brought out large sacks with runes embroidered. They started butchering the fiends for fiendcores and carefully disassembling the lattice mounds for void jades.
“It’s crazy how they appear out of nowhere.” Yung asked no one in particular. Just a general observation about how crazy this world was, and how much his past world made sense, at least at the surface level where the Moira-like supernatural beings were not out about making scenes.
"The void jades?" Youjin Chao said, loitering nearby as if waiting for a chance to talk. "Some say it is the planar consciousness rewarding us for closing a voidrift. Others say the rifts are alive, and the void jades are like fiendcores. Both make little sense to me, even though they are the most prevalent opinions. Because when a voidrift is left open for long enough, void jades will grow like crystal trees on their own in the area. Who is the planar consciousness rewarding here? And which fiend would be foolish enough to expose their core outside their body?"
Yung thought for a bit, finding the questions uninteresting, and not because Su Nanya was smirking deviously after Youjin Chao had expressed them. “Do you know what’s on the other side?” He asked, his eyes still on the vixen, but his inquiry pointed at the protagonist.