The moment I “landed” and the vision contained within the strange crystal began, I found myself in the middle of a massive fight. For the moment, I was witnessing the entire conflict from the point-of-view of a burly two-handed sword wielder, and I could see “myself” struggling against waves upon waves of maddened fanatics which were rushing at me with sacrificial daggers while screaming battle cries in a strange garbled tongue.
Without seemingly any effort, “I” swung my sword left and right, and it seemed to cleave through any weapons and armors like butter, as I progressed down a darkened hallway which led towards a mysterious red light that glowed at the end, all while clearing a path of carnage through all of my opposition.
It's like I could feel the flow of the battle on my very fingertips, I instantly knew what moves I had to perform next to strike my opponents with maximum efficiency. This was an ease-of-movement that was obviously based on many years of exercise and practically applied skills. The motions that my sword made were devoid of any excessive energy-consumption or pointless flash, and were meant to do only one thing: kill the enemy as quickly as possible.
Through whomever’s eyes I was watching the entire fight, this guy had most certainly dedicated his entire life to mastering the sword, so I couldn't help but feel a little bit jealous when comparing myself to his mastery, and also wondered for how long would I actually need to practice anything to get anywhere near to this level of skill.
*Spin*Spin*Block*Parry*Dodge*Slashback*
It's like “I” was a whirling dance of death, and anything that happened to come into my vision instantly got ripped into tiny shreds
After cleaving my way through a bunch of Cultists and Demons who had unfortunately stacked together in my path, I finally reached a bunch of bloodied altars where a pile of victims that had been stacked on top of each other, terror and incredulity still looking frozen inside of their dead eyes.
I could literally feel a righteous anger bubble deep inside of myself, as I called towards my rear where I knew my “friends” and team-mates were located at.
"I've keptz mai promize." I spoke to the mages behind me in a funny islander accent which reminded me of the same language-style in which Lei Lei used to speak. "Ze path iz clear. All ze Cultists are dead. Now it iz yor turn, zcolarz!" I pointed my sword at the strange glowing red runic circle which had been painted on the wall at the end of the hallway.
"R...right." one of the mages replied while looking pale and clutching onto his staff to support his own body weight. "C...call for Lord Xinxin" he yelled at the other mages down the hallway.
A minute later, a fat Lordling in silk finery came bouncing down the hallway, as he pushed everybody aside with practiced arrogance. Reaching the formation on the wall, he whipped out a monocle and began inspecting all of the runic circuits.
"Fascinating!" The fatty uttered. "Also, absolutely terrifying. I do believe we are in quite a predicament, Gentlemen. This is an essence-siphoning formation that is used for draining away the life and magic of anybody in its proximity, with the purpose of creating an unholy artifact, and judging by the size and complexity of it all, if this thing manages to go off, it could probably cover the entire City with its effects. I am glad that we have managed to reach here in time!"
"Yu zink yu can dizarm it?" I asked the fat noble.
"Well of course I can. I am not known as the best Enchanter in the entire Qin Empire for no reason! Runes from enchanting and formations have quite a large overlapping domain, so I am quite skilled at dealing with runic arrays like this one as well! Now stand back, this is quite some complex work that I need to perform, so I need the breathing space."
“I” pulled back a few paces while I began wiping the blood away from my sword with a piece of cloth, watching as the bundle of lard kept fussing over the formation, and I could literally feel the distrust against all mage-kind fuming inside of myself.
"Aha! I have found it!" The noble began to brag. "The creator of the formation was quite a smart person, and has left quite a few traps for the uninitiated to fall for! But for an expert of my caliber, this is mere child's play. All I need to do is erase this triangle rune, and the circuit should power down by itself after a while."
Before he could do anything else, I immediately grabbed at the Lordling's hand, as I felt the shadow of death suddenly encroaching upon me.
"No! Don’t touch zat!"
"Unhand me, peasant! Are you the runic expert here? No? Of course not, I did not think so! All you know how to do with that small brain of yours is to swing that humongous blade around. Now stand back, and let me do my work!"
*Scritch* The Lordling suddenly erased the triangle rune with his other hand.
*Fizzle* The whole formation began to dim out.
"Well, there! That's done, see?" The noble began to wipe the dust off his hands. "I told you that I knew what I was doing. What did you think would happen? That we would all die or something?"
But exactly the moment the Noble uttered those words, the formation suddenly reactivated itself and began glowing so strongly that it immediately blinded everybody inside of the room.
As I felt myself getting hit by that blinding light, the vision also suddenly ended and I felt myself falling through the floor once again.
After the falling sensation persisted for a while longer, I got hit with another bout of disorientation, then I found myself inside the body of another person, this time some sort of a spellcaster that specialized in ice magic.
This time around, the fight was occurring around the outskirts of a City, inside of a building that looked like a dilapidated military outpost who had not seen use in many years. Cobwebs and half-collapsed buildings could be seen everywhere, and the Cultists seemed to have barricaded themselves on the topmost floor of the main keep. They were still conducting unholy summoning rituals up there, as the bodies of the dead sacrificial victims were getting tossed onto the pavement below from the topmost floor which had a missing roof and walls altogether, in an attempt to demoralize the incoming assailants.
In truth, this only served to antagonize the handful of Adventurers and Mercenaries which had discovered the Cultists by accident when they had tried to take shelter from the rain inside of the old building. Even as far as I was concerned, I could feel the blood freeze inside of “my” veins as I saw the body of a young girl that couldn't have been more than 10 years old hit the pavement in front of me and contort in ways that shouldn't have been humanly possible. But for “me”, such a sensation was a good “rage-fuel” for my magic, as it helped boost the effects of my ice spells, so I began tossing ice-spears at the Cultists with impunity while swearing bloody vengeance.
The jagged shards of ice simply went through the bodies of the Demoniacs like paper, and “I” was carefully directing my projectiles to hit the Cultists and the red Demons they had summoned exactly in their most vulnerable parts, like in the eyes or their open mouths, since nobody could survive a 30 cm-long jagged shard of ice straight through the brain.
And whenever “I” encountered better-armored opponents wearing full plate which did not seem to have such vulnerabilities, I would simply kite them around while leaving my frost to work its magic upon their armors until they literally shattered around their targets because of the cold, or simply trapped the assailants inside, creating some gruesome ice sculptures as a result.
After they got frozen stiff, a simple whack of my mage's staff was enough to shatter the entire sculpture into a myriad of tiny ice cubes, forever ending the life of whoever had been encased.
Still, the entire assault seemed to be a joint-effort of many professional fighters, and I was not the only one displaying my spellcaster prowess. Besides me, I saw two more fire mages and even a rare lightning one, even though they had been forced by the circumstance to use less destructive spells, as the entire fort was dilapidated-enough that it could collapse on top of everybody at any moment, if they were to damage some load-bearing supports by accident due to the explosive nature of their spells.
As our entire group finally reached the top floor, I spotted a bunch of masked priests which were waving their curved daggers above some bloodied altars on top of which some still-living women and children were bound, so before the Cultists could kill even more people, “I” immediately slammed the end tip of my mage's staff onto the floor and sent out a rampaging wave of cold magic across the entire room which caused an innumerable number of ice-spikes to grow immediately from the floor and impale all of the enemies who were still standing. The magic spell had also been smart enough to avoid any of the “friendly” units and the altar-bound victims, damaging only the Cultists alongside with their Demons and leaving each and every one of the enemies riddled with holes while frozen stiff.
“I” immediately felt the backlash from that instant magic-release inside of myself though, like some part of my internal body had frozen over as well, but I knew that it had been worth the sacrifice. I knew that I would be able to “thaw” it back over a long period of time.
But for now, what drew my attention away was the rather large formation circle which had been painted onto one of the keep's walls, which had suddenly begun glowing red. I immediately felt the chills of impending terror and doom rush down my spine, as I recognized the purpose of the entire formation. A wide-range sacrificial formation! Insanity! How the hell had the Cultists managed to mask the spell-emanations from such a large object until right now, I had no idea, since all Major Cities usually built directly into their wall-guard-towers magical alarm-sensors who were supposed to detect exactly the existence of such abnormalities, as it was a common pre-siege tactic to try and deploy hostile formations within the enemy's City before actually engaging in combat.
But it was too late to complain about such an oversight right now, as the glowing formation had already begun to humm with power in front of everybody.
"Shit, is that what I think it is?" One of the other mages cursed.
"Yes, it is…"
"Oh man, we are so screwed! That formation looks too complex for me to figure out!"
"Is anybody around here knowledgeable in formations?"
"Bing-Xue should be… He finished on top of the class at the Imperial Mage Academy!" Someone yelled from the back.
"Ugh...My past has come back to haunt me once again" I mumbled while I sighed under my beard. "Fine, whatever I'll see what I can do about it."
After that, I began tracing the circle, and some rather obtuse knowledge brushed past my thoughts inside of my mind, warning me over and over again that not everything was as it seemed when I stared at the runes which made up the entire circle. Traps upon traps had been layered inside of the formation, preventing any further tampering. After going five times over the entire circle, I was now convinced that I had found the vulnerability section inside of the entire formation, and I prepared to erase the ~ symbol in front of me. I sighed deeply one more time while staring at the two moons which had come out from dissipating rain clouds above me, and then I scratched-off the symbol.
Immediately, the entire formation began to sputter and die down, becoming more and more inert with each passing second.
"Phfew!" I let out a guffaw.
"Is it disarmed already? That's all it took, erasing a single symbol?" One of the other younger mages quipped back at me.
"Of course it's disarmed! I've done this hundreds of times in the pa…"
Before I could even finish my words, I suddenly got engulfed into a brilliant light, and I felt myself dropping through the floor once again as the vision ended.
As I kept falling downwards, I remembered the positions of the two moons in the sky, which had been right above me when the vision from the ice mage had occurred, but that was completely incorrect compared to my current time, as when I had dunked myself in the vat, the two moons had not even risen yet, which meant that these visions were indeed of some possible nearby future outcomes which had not happened yet, just as Morgan had promised.
After another round of disorientation, I found myself in the body of another fighter, this time a guy wielding a shield and a mace while being dressed in full plate armor, which meant that he was probably some sort of a frontline tanker.
“I” was also smashing the skulls of screaming Cultists which were lunging at me with their curved daggers, but all of their attacks were simply bouncing harmlessly off my armor. I was stuck together with another group of Adventurers inside a dark hallway of a building that resembled a large Labyrinth, trying to find the path towards the center of the entire structure, and we were causing countless casualties among the group of crazed men and women which seemed more than willing to defend whatever was in the middle of the Labyrinth with their own lives.
After blowing away from the hinges with sheer brute strength a rickety old wooden door which had been barring my path, myself and the group who had been following me finally burst inside a large circular room, only to come face-to-face with a gigantic red Demon which was currently fighting another party.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The guys which were holding back the Demon I immediately recognized as the same people who I had “seen” in the stream when I had accidentally intercepted that “secret” conversation from of inside my house back at the Blue Mountains of Books, which were obviously Lingfeng's former party members, Mina, Beyn and Lady Hoho.
Hoho had picked up the tanker role for the moment, but she was struggling to keep the large Demon at bay and was taking quite a lot of hard hits from the monster. Only through the immense healing prowess that Mina could output was Lady Hoho currently still able to stand upright and keep on fighting, while Beyn also kept pumping the creature full of arrows from behind.
As “I” tried to rush to their aid, the big red Demon suddenly backhanded Hoho away, and then turned right towards me. Before I could even blink, I felt my head getting cracked even through the protection of my metal helmet from the punch that the huge red Demon overlord had administered to me, and then I simply blacked out while the vision ended.
Unfortunately, the dread of seeing “my” life end in such a way persisted even after the whole “cinematic” had ended, so I woke up screaming inside of the tempering vat, causing me to instantly propel myself out of the water.
After catching my breath, I gazed up at the sky and saw that the moons had not reached the middle point yet, which meant that there was still time to do something about that dreadful future. I immediately ignored everything else, since I knew that time was of the essence, so I ran inside of the house while still naked and dripping wet, desperately trying to find Lingfeng.
When I ran past my party members which were practicing in one of the rooms, Fungus suddenly got sucker-punched in the face by Jin because he got distracted by my sudden disrobed appearance, since he had been sparring together with the Fireboy to help him better-cope with any monsters that were capable of coming right up in melee range and smacking him in the face. As a result, he was now sporting a nose-bleed like one of those silly anime protagonists, and I couldn't help myself but chuckle a little bit at the whole situation.
The moment I got into the other room, I instantly shook Lingfeng awake, as he had been dozing-off in a corner of the room over a desk filled with writing implements, since he had been creating a few more of those town portal scrolls for everybody to use, and I immediately told him to rush to the Weirdwood Tree and use the Platinum Guild-Plate of the former Hero of the Sun to contact his fellow party members, especially Mina ASAP.
”W...what...what's wrong…? And why are you naked?"
"There is no time to explain, just tell Mina that the “triangle” and the “snake” symbols are both traps! Go to the Weirdwood Tree and contact her right now!" I yanked him up from his chair and I dragged him into the backyard. "The lives of everybody in all three Capital Cities are in danger! And also tell her to contact the Adventurer's Guild branches in the other Empires as well, and warn them too! Everybody is in similar trouble! GO! NOW!"
"YES!"
Lingfeng widened his eyes at the news, then immediately jumped on his flying sword, and rushed towards the Weirdwood Tree exactly as I had instructed him.
Unfortunately, that meant that I had also been left alone in the middle of the backyard, with everybody else from my group staring at my naked ass from inside of the house. Fungus was partially staring at the ceiling while trying to reduce his nose bleed, Xibei had already whipped out his paper-notebook and was drawing a pencil-sketch of my body's outline, Liliam had put her hands over Jin's eyes and was trying to pull him into another room, Quan had closed his vision off and was muttering a series of calming sutras, and Carmine was whittling down a small piece of wood at lightning speed while making it resemble the shape of my ass.
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Inside the Ming Capital-City of Leyuan, Adventurer's Guild Hall:
Mina had been getting an impending feeling of Doom inside of her guts throughout the entire day. She had not felt something so disturbing in many years, because whenever this feeling had manifested inside of herself, she had always wound up in some sort of mortal danger.
Yet most of the day had gone by without any major incidents, and even the conflicts between the Noble Houses that were vying for the Throne had been rather subdued. It was almost night-time now, but she could still not shake away the feeling of dread that had been building up inside of her.
Yet the moment the wounded Guardsman from the city ran into the Adventurer's Guild Hall while bleeding from multiple stab wounds, she immediately knew that the time had come for her to face the yet-unknown impending crisis that might claim her life. She instantly began healing the Guardsman, as the man started yelling at the entire Guild Hall that a rather large group of Demonic Cultists from the Evil Sects had been found lurking within the City limits, and that the Cityguard had already engaged them but had taken heavy casualties and they were currently in need of every able-bodied person who was willing to come to their aid as reinforcement.
The Cultists had been lurking beneath an abandoned hotel building in the slums, and the entire basement of the structure had proven to be an insanely complicated Labyrinth filled with traps which had caused a rather large amount of casualties among the Guardsmen who had chased after the Demoniacs. The Cultists had also barricaded themselves and were currently holding certain key positions inside of the narrow hallways, seemingly intent on preventing all intruders from getting to the center of the maze.
When Mina and her group finally arrived at the abandoned hotel the Guard had described and went into the basement alongside many of the other Adventurer teams, they did not expect to encounter such a fierce resistance from a ragtag-group of low-level Cultists. The major problem had turned out to be that the Demoniacs had summoned a few powerful Demon-Elites via blood sacrifices, and those currently seemed to be strong enough to keep even some of the high-level Adventurers at bay.
The entire Labyrinth of hallways was now filled with the stench of death and burnt flesh, and screams could be heard everywhere. Both the Adventurer teams and the Cultists were taking heavy losses, but neither of them seemed to be willing to give up. Also, the closer the Adventurers got to the center of the Labyrinth and towards whatever object the Cultists were protecting, the stronger the feeling in her gut kept screaming at Mina.
After putting down a three-meter-tall red-Demon Overlord by getting it stuck inside one of the door-frames, the Hero of the Sun's former party finally managed to push their way through the Cultists on their side and wound up inside a very large circular atrium which seemed to connect together the many exits of the Labyrinth.
In the middle of the room, a bunch of sacrificial altars could be seen, with naked women and children still lying dead upon them as they had been bled-dry by the Cultists to summon the Demons. On one of the walls, exactly on the opposite side of the room from where the Hero's former party had entered, a rather large and menacing formation circle could be seen, and it was glowing bloody-red, as if it was ready to activate at any moment.
When Mina first saw that formation circle, the blood in her veins simply froze over, as she instantly recognized the dreadful object as the source of her unease, as this was a runic-formation which had been purposely built to drain away both the magic and life essences from every person in a very large area of space and condense them into an unholy object of power. The more blood was getting spilled around the formation, the faster it would activate, so Mina instantly screamed at the entire force of arms that had burst into the room to abstain from killing any of the Cultists, as that was exactly what they wanted at the moment. It took a short while for the other people to comprehend what was going on, but they had taken her words seriously and had instead tried to knock unconscious all of the remaining Cultists who had still remained behind inside the atrium room.
Once the Demoniacs has been subdued, as the foremost expert in formations that currently resided in the Capital-City of the Ming Dynasty, Mina was now faced with the formation that was glowing on the wall, and was burdened with the daunting task of disarming the whole runic circle which was still building-up energy and seemed ready to activate at the drop of a hat.
After a thorough analysis of the energy pathways, Mina was now convinced that she had found a way to disarm the entire formation. Just as she was about to reach out to the wall and erase some of the formation's strokes, the guild plate inside of her pocket began to vibrate furiously. She tried to ignore it, but the guild-plate started to vibrate over and over again, and she thought it was rather unusual, as each one of those direct pings would cost the person requesting the contact a spirit stone, so whoever was pinging her like that was continuously throwing spirit stones out the window.
Unable to bear the buzzing sound anymore, she grabbed her Platinum guild plate, only to see the short message displayed on it:
"HOTS△&~RTRAPSDNTERSLFY"
"Ughh...what? Wait...hummm...Heroes Of The Sun, triangle and snake are traps, don't erase? Liffy."
The moment Mina read the message she froze, and started rethinking about her whole disarming strategy. Because right in front of her face, the two strokes she had intended to erase had been a triangle and a wiggly worm-like symbol that you could call a snake. How the hell had Lingfeng managed to know what she was currently doing at the moment, she would have to figure out later, but he might actually have saved everybody's lives with his persistent pinging, as on a second observation of the entire rune-circuit, she now realized that erasing those two strokes was indeed an elaborate trap, and it would have actually triggered the entire runic circle instead. The trap was so devious, that it was no surprise that she would have fallen for it, if she had not received the warning from her plate. Basically, any scholar that knew anything about runes and formations would have fallen for that trick, because the entire trap was exactly based on such preconceived notions and expectations that a formation artisan would possess.
But now that she had seen through the deceit, she immediately altered her line of thinking, and then tasked a bunch of the more burly Adventurers that were in the room to strike with their heavy weapons at certain positions on the runic-circle, and fracture the circuit together at the same time.
Immediately as the formation got smashed into pieces by the angry strikes of the Adventurers, it powered down with a fizzle and stopped glowing altogether. The instant the formation died down, that dreadful feeling which had been lurking inside of her stomach had also gone extinct, allowing her to finally crash onto the floor from the exhaustion and the built-up tension.
Fortunately, there were plenty of able-bodied men around to carry her out of the Labyrinth, so she basically got crowd-surfed all the way back to the Adventurer’s Guild, where she immediately screamed at the persons handling the external communications to the other Cities that the formations were all trapped, and they should be destroyed instead of disarmed. As everybody now considered her and the other members of the party as the Saviours of the City, they immediately complied, and a mad rush of external messages immediately ran out through the Adventurer’s Guild network.
Unfortunately, after a couple of hours after the whole incident had died down locally, another wave of dire news suddenly reached the Adventurer’s Guild Hall, informing everybody who was present that the Capital Cities of the Han and the Qin Empires had unfortunately fallen for the exact same ploy of the Cultists, and now lay in ruins with hundreds of thousands of victims dead who had been drained of their earthly essences by the unholy magic.
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It took quite a few hours before Lingfeng came back, so it was almost the late hours of the whole night before he strolled back into the Smithy with a bitter ugly look of defeat pasted upon his face.
"Shit, did we not make it in time?" I immediately asked him.
"No, we made it, but only partially. Mina got my message and successfully disarmed the formation in the Ming Capital, but the other two cities weren’t so lucky. The Qin and Han Capitals have both succumbed to the formations, and hundreds of thousands of dead are being reported right as we speak. "
"FUCK! Shit...damn...UGH...I'm sorry...I…don’t even know what to say about such a thing…"
"There is no point in blaming yourself. If anything, everybody inside the Ming Capital should be kissing your ass right now. Because of your message, Mina was able to save everybody down there, but the messages she sent to the other Capital Cities did not reach their intended targets before the whole landscape succumbed to those dreadful formations. If I ever get my hands on those bastards which have caused all of this insanity, I don't think I will let them get away with a swift death."
"Actually, I might have a vague idea about who the persons behind all of this madness actually are. In one of my earlier visions, I have experienced a traumatic death from the point of view of a sacrificial victim, but I can still clearly remember the appearance of my tormentors. Xibei, be a dear and grab a pen-and-paper to help me draw something, since my sketching skills are pretty crappy."
"Right away!"
After that, under my instructions, I managed to get the artistically inclined Bard to draw something similar to a forensic police sketch of both of the culprits I remembered. When Lingfeng finally took a look at the finished page, he absolutely went apeshit and began cursing with so many flowery profanities that I didn't even know existed in the vocabulary.
"I take it that you recognize these two people?"
"Hell yeah, I do. That one is Hongmu Qin, the fifth prince of the Qin Dynasty. Actually, scratch that, he is actually the current Qin Dynasty heir-apparent for the Emperor's throne, because the old Qin Emperor recently kicked the bucket together with Fung's father, the Ming Emperor, and also together with the Han Emperor, plus all of their families. Apparently, only Prince Hongmu survived that dreadful blast which leveled the insides of the Forbidden City, because he had been visiting a far-away brothel when the weird explosion occurred, as he is a well-known womanizer.
"The second picture any scholar worth their salt would be able to recognize immediately, because it is the dreadful face of the Demon Ifritt when in his humanoid form, which is exactly the same Demon that you recently banished back to the Nine Hells when you ruined Jin's Fire-Tome. Apparently, he somehow got himself summoned back to the surface after you ruined his plans of taking over Jin's body, and is now in the company of the Qin Princeling for whatever reason, even though he is in a weakened form.
"But, if what you say about them is true, this also means that there is a high probability that the one responsible for blowing up all of the Emperors is Hongmu himself, as he probably had the aid of the Fire-Demon in doing so.
"Since you say that you have witnessed him personally preparing the formation circle together with Ifritt, it also means that he has been colluding with the Demonic Sects for quite a while now, and it would also explain why the hell the Blue Mountains of Books got assaulted by so many Demoniacs. It was probably just Ifritt trying to get back at you for ruining his Fire-Tome plan."
"FUCK!"
"NO SHIT! And considering that all three Capitals have been targeted at the same time, it seems like the ambition of the Princeling does not seem to limit itself to only becoming the Qin Emperor. I think he wants to take over all of the three Empires, and recreate the ancient country of Djaina."
"Djaina...(pfffhegehe)! Yeah, but why the hell would he target his own Capital-City too?"
"Because he probably wants to play the Uniter angle, and shift all of the blame on the Demonic Sects and the Ancient Evil while he glues together all of the Empires while pretending to be some sort of a Savior, even though he is actually the one behind all of the troubles. If my assumptions are correct, then we are in some very deep shit indeed. Such a shift in the powers-that-be could have some major global ramifications!"
"Ugh...global ramifications you say? Fuck...then that's the Quest Aadmin was talking about...the End of this Beta stage!"
"Say that again? WHO was talking about what?"
"Aadmin the God... I mean, this planet's owner. I ran into him while I was meditating in the bath-tub. Quite a nice guy once you get to know Him, if a little goofy."
"Aadmin, as in the fucking Allfather, the God that created everything in this world including all of the other Gods?"
"Yep, that one."
"And you simply RAN into him by taking a BATH?"
"Well, it's more complex than that but basically...Yeah? I even got a couple of achievements out of it!"
*Deep inhale* "Oh Heavens above, I don't even know why I'm surprised anymore." Lingfeng facepalmed himself. "What exactly did he say to you?"
I then immediately began detailing to Lingfeng my encounter with Morgan Aadmin, which left him speechless once again, especially the part where I had been designated as a “Holy Prophet” of the Allfather.
"Well, all of this information is most certainly going to sprout a few more white hairs on top of my head." Lingfeng quipped."Go get everybody else inside of this room even if you have to wake them up, because we all need to have a very long and serious talk about what we are going to do from now on. Things have suddenly gotten insanely more complicated, as if they weren't bad enough already."