Below the boiling dark that infected the sky a half dozen monsters clashed, gigantic rocs and snake-like dragons slamming into the form of the Titan.

Poppy raised her fists. Anna slipped away from my sight, disappearing. Eros drew an arrow.

A bar of lightning as wide as a person broke from the cloud, so bright that the entire world darkened in comparison. It hit the corrupted memory of the Titan mid flight. The single moment where the lightning connected with the bird dragged out, the image seared into my mind.

The Titan fell.

I stared, shocked, as it plumetted. Dancing electricity bound its wings; lightning contained and shaped into three rings of circling power restrained it as it fell from the sky. A monster that I had no hope of ever touching, that could’ve killed me in a single instant, brought low by three people who, thirty days ago, were weaker than me.

Of course, they had two years to grow.

And now they smacked the memory of the Titan out of the air like a fly.

But it wasn’t dead yet. Even while falling, it writhed and fought against its new bindings. The monsters that had clashed when it in the sky shot away. When the bird hit the ground, one of the three bindings snapped, exploding in an arc of electricity.

It screeched, a horrid noise that no normal living creature could produce. It was the sound of a storm mixed with a death wail. It almost looked comical as it stood to its full height on the ground, wings bound to its back. It stumbled forward, then ran, its artifical wing boiling out through its binding and crackling with power. Lightning danced out of it.

Poppy charged, her fists coated with Black Light. She had fully mastered the [Void Fist,] a technique that should have only been available to cultivators. But, like me, her party had started to gain the powers of two separate worlds. And unlike me, they had two years to grow and practice using it.

Seeing the bird next to Poppy changed my perspective of it. It was almost as tall as she was, something that had been unclear while it chased me.

The bird met her fist with a peck of its beak, also coated in black light, and the clash made a noise like thunder erupting. The Titan, bound and slowed and damaged from an hour long fight, boxed Poppy with just its mouth.

Just the memories of monsters here were strong enough to pose threats to cultivators.

Eros dashed forward, flanking the bird. Arrows twanged from his bow. The Titan dodged most of them. The remainder were repelled by the tough feather coat surrounding it. All the while, the Titan continued to box Poppy, occasionally even landing a blow that scraped her armor with a terrible rending noise.

The sight was absolutely ludicrous. I had seen enough.

I reached out, flexing my Willpower around Poppy, and activated [Zone: Acceleration.]

The fight shifted instantly. Poppy sped up, feinting her blow, and instead of meeting the birds beak, hit it in the neck. It stumbled backwards. One of the two remaining chains of lightning surrounding it popped. Its left wing, a storm of boiling black, spread outward, free from the constraint.

Poppy reigned blows into its stomach, dashing forward out of the [Zone] and diving back into it before launching her next attack. Each blow sent the Anti-Light Qi coiled around her hands into the bird. Burn marks appeared where the raw power seared away its feathers, ablating reality — and the monster’s flesh.

Poppy kicked the bird backward on its back just as the [Zone] disappeared. Eros’ arrows erupted out of the bird, shot with the speed and force of a cultivator. This entire time, they had bounced off the bird’s thick coat of feathers. Now, they found purchase where Poppy had seared the feathers away, rising out of the bird’s stomach.

Anna’s three shades appeared a moment later, each with daggers raised above the birds head. The three clones stabbed downward with manic intensity, tearing into the bird. Poppy dashed forward to catch up.

We were going to win this. We really were. It was almost too easy.

Then the third binding holding the bird chained popped. Lightning exploded outward. Anna’s shades melted, black sludge splattering outward as the bird stretched its wings once before slapping them downward. Dust and earth explode as it threw itself into the air.

Anna herself reappeared, staggering to her knees as if the destruction of her shades had injured her. She pulled herself to her feet quickly, becoming harder and harder to focus on.

The Titan slammed downward. Poppy threw herself to the side, but it was too late.

I watched in horror as Poppy hit the ground, her side smoking. The Titan had shot through the ground entirely, disappearing before reappearing out of the ground in a second explosion. It screeched triumphantly.

Poppy pushed herself to her feet. The entire left side of her armor was gone. Her body smoked.

But she was still standing.

The Titan cawed triumphantly, hovering. Then it dove toward Poppy again.

I threw out a [Zone: Slow] between them, then, for the first time, pulled on [Zone: Slaughter] after.

A sphere of blades erupted in the space between the bird and Poppy. It dragged in midair, trying to throw itself out of the way of a self contained storm of silver. It looked like a hundred shimmering razor edges contained in a perfect circle. The bird slammed into it and feathers erupted outward.

I used [Zone: Acceleration] on Poppy.

I wasn’t sure if I needed to or not.

It saved Poppy’s life.

The mangled Titan hit the ground again, cawing with rage.

It didn’t rise back up out of the ground.

“Is it dead?” Eros asked, quick. “Sai, did you level?”

“No!” I said.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Then run!” Eros said. He was already dashing forward. Poppy, too, ran back toward the city. Bars of black light, erupted out from below the island, carving up into the sky.

I recognized them as the attack the Titan had used to try to sink the section of the floating island I was on.

A triangle of the island fell away. The ground around it creaked in a horrible noise followed by grinding stone. Dirt slid inward, trees snapping as the tension from the section of lost floating stone disappeared. Trees and earth tumbled inward like water floating into the hole. The Titan shot out of it.

Poppy ran so fast that she was already eye to eye with me. Her eyes locked with mine for a single moment before widening. Poppy and Eros were both behind me. Anna was invisible. I activated [Zone: Acceleration] on myself as I turned to run. It was too late. The sun darkened above me as the Titan descended almost too fast to see, a blur of pure black that darkened the world around it. Heat seared my back and static electricity made my hair stand on end.

Littlebird cawed defiantly.

“No — “ It was too late.

Littlebird threw itself from my shoulder and upward.

An explosion erupted around me, white and black mixing together and throwing me tumbling over the ground with ringing ears. I forced my eyes open, forced myself to my feet.

The memory of the Titan was laying on the ground, chest heaving. It stared up at me with an angry expression in its face. My ears rang. Poppy shouted something at me. She clutched at her side. Eros was on the ground a dozen feet away, pushing himself to his feet shakily.

Anna stabbed the memory of the Titan.

The exit opened out of its corpse, shooting up into the sky. It spread up and up, a column of rainbow colored prismatic power that towered in the sky. Then it exploded outward in all directions, engulfing me before I could react.

[Quest Complete!]

[Processing Rewards…]

[System Error: Connection to Ludus Arbor Overridden]

The portal swelled outward and over me. But I wasn’t instantly teleported away. My breath hitched for a moment as I took in the sight. The warbling material that made up the dungeon’s portal doors replaced the air all around me. Poppy’s party vanished. Then the world around me seemed to dissolve. Earth floated upwards, breaking into minuscule pieces of dust, turning into streams of black. Trees collapsed, compressed, and flowed. Rivers of power raced toward where the Gale Titan of the Core Chamber had died.

[Attempting to establish connection with local World Tree]

[World Seed Identified: ♫ ♪ ♩]

The text slammed into my mind with the noise of bird song. I instinctively knew that it was the name of the Gale Titan — a name it had never shared before.

But the System connected to a World Seed, not a tree. The Anti-Light playback mentioned that the trees were supposed to fall,

A spark of power rose up out of where the Gale Titan fell, floating toward me. I opened my hands. It floated there, sparking and glittering. Rivers of black power flowed into it.

The walls of this pocket world slipped away. Beyond, I saw the forest of World Trees, white pillars bigger than the sky. It was the same place that had given me the revelation necessary to learn the Anti-Lightning Sword Art and cultivation path.

A Dao from beyond the world.

“You were on your way to becoming a whole world.” I said to the spark of light in my hands. Instinctively, I knew it was what remained of the Gale Titan. Not just the part of it that had composed Littlebird — that was but a tiny piece of its naive youth.

The spark floating over my hands was all of it.

I felt connected to it; I could feel resentment, grief, anger. But also the tiniest spark of happiness.

Its name appeared in system prompts over and over, a longer and longer melody of bird song. It had never shared it with anyone. Littlebird had died having never met a member of its family; it hatched alone in an empty nest.

The chambers of the dungeon collapsed around me, flowing into this tiny spark.

Horror filled me for a moment as I saw other Trailblazers stop in midair, dozens around me simply floating in the void. They hadn’t escaped the dungeon before it collapsed. The spark of power in my hands responded to that feeling.

Trailblazers vanished as they were teleported out of the dungeon. Every time the teleportation wave reached them, a little power drained from the spark. It was burning its own power to teleport them away.

A tiny spark of grief for the bird’s life rose in me to match it.

[System Error: Rewards hijacked.]

“Hey — ” I said, that grief turning to alarm.

[System Error: Connection to World Seed Lost. World Seed Collapsed.]

The spark in my hands took the shape of an egg before falling into my open hands. The warping colors around me disappeared. I stood on a single platform of floating earth, dust falling away into the void. Behind me, a world tree stretched so unimaginably large it looked like an infinite wall; it looked like the edge of reality. Before me, the forest of trees stretched out.

The Titanfall dungeon had been on the edge of the world. I realized what I was seeing. This was the Way Between Worlds.

A distinct feeling of dread and horror slowly built above me. Clouds rose above the forest, flashing with lightning the size of worlds. They writhed like living things. Below, an ocean of sick black turned with formless flesh that rose until it stained the trunks of world trees. The trees were sick. They were wrong. There was something distinctly wrong about each of them, like blotches of rotting flesh stretching up where the dark ocean corrupted them.

It was wrong. It was all wrong.

“It has to burn.”

The voice wasn’t mine. It floated next to me in the void. A horrible instinct overtook me. It told me not to look. My body went rigid.

A chill passed through my body. There was no qi here, and now that I looked, I could see that my own was boiling off of me, spilling out into the void and rapidly becoming so disparate that I couldn’t even identify it.

[Connection Successful]

[Processing Rewards…]

[Error: Insufficient Change]

Then the Way Between Worlds was gone, and I stood in a clearing of grass.

My chest was heaving. A silver egg with black stripes, bigger than both of my fists together, rested in my open hands.

“Feng Sai!” Poppy shouted.

Her voice boomed in the clearing, only a few feet away from me. She attracted attention from the dozens — the hundreds of people around me. The Gale Titan’s corpse had collapsed into a pile of glittering bones.

One of my hands rushed to touch my ear.

“Where did you go?” Eros asked, walking up a half second after Poppy.

Poppy was no longer wearing metal armor. Eros, too, had changed. His bow was notably missing. My eyes must have hovered on his back for too long.

“Do you know how long I had that bow? More than a year! The one before that I sold. You’re cursed.”

“I’m sorry?” I asked, stepping back.

Poppy’s eyes hovered on the egg in my hands.

I belatedly realized that it was dawn. The sun painted the world in red hues as it crested distant mountains.

[Dimensional Rebound in 53 Hours]

My eyes widened at the alert.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Eros said. “You got my bow broken. Again. With that explosion! What was that?”

Eros misinterpreted my eyes widening as being about losing his bow. I had lost more than twelve hours of time.

“Ah… apologies.” I said. “If I may ask… how long ago did you exit the dungeon?”

“Six hours ago!” Poppy said. “Anna is already back in town, asleep. The loss of so many [Shades] in one day took it out of her.”

I paused. I looked at the egg in my hand.

[Anti-Light Roc Egg]

[A spirit bound egg tied to Feng Sai. It contains the remnant consciousness of a Titan level entity with an embryonic perfected body. This egg is feeding off of its connection to Feng Sai’s power. Time until hatching: 15 days.]

I checked my qi. There was a hole in my dantian. A needle thin string exited out of it. I tried to follow it with my perception, but struggled to. I could sense that the other end was at the egg, though. A tiny trickle of qi and something else bled into it.

The egg was heavy. It must have weighed ten pounds. I could save investigating it more for later, though.

“You offered drinks earlier?” I asked.

“You’re paying this time.” Eros said.

“Ah… Apologies. I lost all my silver in the dungeon.”

Eros groaned.

“How about you tell us a bit about…” Poppy paused. She looked around the clearing. Dozens of people suddenly busied themselves, pretending they weren’t paying attention. “About your homeland.”

I paused to consider. If all of them were using Qi Techniques, they needed education in them. Otherwise they were liable to injure themselves eventually. Just possessing Qi inside of you would subtly push you towards progression. They probably only hadn’t damaged themselves opening their meridians due to the enhanced stats the System provided.

“That’s agreeable. In exchange I have some questions about your own House.”

Mostly how much she knew about their hunt of the Anti-Light Order whose power I inherited.

“Why don’t we get him some bandages first?” Eros interrupted.