The annual tournament of the five local jade sects had concluded in a manner which left an already emotionally exhausted crowd speechless. A strange young boy who lacked the manners of a disciple and regularly interacted with the lowly mundane workers had revealed that he was both immune to Yin famous Thunder Clap technique and physically capable of picking up the reigning champion like a child and dropping him out of bounds, and this was after the revelation that a pixie had been officially recognized as both a disciple of one of the weaker sects and a participant in the tournament.
As Micro stood victorious at the edge of the stage pointing up at the sky, the majority of the cultivators in the audience simply continued to stare, the announcer included. It was Tohan who first followed Micro’s finger up to the sky, and what he saw nearly caused him to drop the gold in his hand.
“The moon…!” Tohan screamed with such terror that the arena felt colder as his voice echoed.
“It’s green!”
Every cultivator suddenly jumped out of their seats as the tension of the tournament’s strange end was swept away with Tohan’s cry. The announcer and several of his colleagues immediately left their booth and ran to one of the exits, just as many others scrambled to do the same. Of the contestants, only Kel and Tae ran toward the stage rather than straight to an exit. Some cultivators even jumped into the air and started flying to the edge of the building.
“Is that a sign that the tournament is over?” Micro asked Kel.
“We must run!” Kel shouted back.
“The only reason the moon could look green is magic!”
“What?” Micro said as he tilted his head back to look at it again, this time noticing that even the stars looked vaguely green.
“We’re trapped!” The panicked voice of a spectator called out from the gate where dozens of cultivators were trying to push through, but nobody was able to leave through the seemingly open door.
“It goes all the way around!” Another panicked cultivator screamed from across the arena.
“Agh!” A scream suddenly rang out from above the arena as a woman tried to fly straight over the wall, but she ricocheted off of the barrier with an impact that sent odd-coloured sparks in every direction.
When Micro looked down again, he found himself between Lena and Azar, neither of whom looked as patient as they had only moments prior.
“Did you plan this, boy?” Azar asked with fury in his eyes. He began to reach for Micro’s throat, but Lena stopped him.
“Was this your doing?” Lena asked, her own eyes muhc more intimidating.
“What’s happening?” Micro asked.
“I thought green was a good sign. Green means go…”
Lena stared at him intently for a moment before sighing and shaking her head solemnly.
“He knows nothing.” She spat angrily.
“Are we under attack?” Kel asked Lena anxiously.
“The attack is done.” Lena replied with despair.
“This barrier is pure chaos energy. Even the Silver Core Magistrate would never break through… But where are the magicians?”
“I sense no chaos in any of the people here.” Azar replied, looking around at the panicking spectators.
“Only jade and some amber core cultivators… no one suspicious.”
As Azar and Lena continued to scan the crowd for any sign of the magicians, every surface of the arena suddenly began to sparkle.
“Oh no…” Lena gasped.
“This many sigils… It can’t be…”
Micro looked down at his feet to see a strange pattern on the ground glowing intensely.
“Oh, it’s the pictures they were drawing.” Micro said with a smile.
“That’s really nice.”
“What!? You know who prepared this array?!” Lena shrieked, taking hold of both of Micro’s shoulders.
“Of course I do.” Micro frowned.
“All the workers put a lot of effort into decorating.”
“The workers…” Lena took a step back as she gasped.
“They were hidden among the workers?! Which ones? Where are they?”
“I don’t know.” Micro replied.
“They went home a while ago.”
“It’s true.” Azar added with a scowl.
“I can’t sense a single mundane soul, much less one tainted by chaos…”
“To be trapped like rats in a cage…” Lena mumbled with a hoarse voice.
“Wait, this one looks familiar…” micro said as he noticed a particular symbol on the ground nearby. He walked over and knelt down next to it, and nodded upon taking a closer look.
“What is it?” Azar asked as he ran over to wear Micro now knelt. His face was more full of fear than anger for the first time since Micro had met him.
“Tell me what you know!”
“I’m pretty sure this one was near me when I was summoned to this world… This one too!” Micro pointed at the symbols on the ground as he explained.
“Nora told me to go help some magicians, then I woke up next to some symbols like this.”
“Are you certain?!” Azar shouted, his face pale.
“I think so.” Micro nodded, beginning to share their anxieties. He turned to Kel and Tae, hoping they might offer some advice or reassurance, but they were locked in an embrace and didn’t seem interested in conversing with him, so he continued.
“It feels familiar too. It’s not like the other elements…”
“You’re sensing chaos energy. It isn’t an energy that normally exists in this realm.” Lena replied.
“It’s a chaotic force which destroys all it comes into contact with before removing itself from existence…”
“That sounds bad.” Micro added awkwardly.
“If what you say is true though, and the magicians have prepared an array this size…” Lena looked around in fear at the uncountable number of glowing sigils around the arena.
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Micro’s pocket suddenly rustled, and Blue’s sleepy head poked out to greet the situation.
“Why do I feel like I’m being sacrificed again?” She said with a yawn.
“Anybody care to explain?”
“If I’m not mistaken…” Lena replied slowly.
“We are witnessing a summoning of unprecedented scale. They managed to transform the entire building into a sacrificial altar…”
“Then do something about it.” Blue shrugged.
“You’re the super fantasy guards of the imperial something or whatever…”
Lena suddenly coated her hand in energy, the same way Micro had witnessed Azar do in the cave where they found the Mycelial Art dungeon. With her ethereal tiger claws, she swiped at a glowing sigil with a shout more like a roar. But the moment her claw came near the sigil, the armour around her hand instantly evaporated. She withdrew her hand with a yelp as sparks engulfed the finger which came closest to the strange symbol, and she shook her head in despair.
“Surrounded on all sides by chaos…” She whispered sorrowfully.
“We can only wait for death…”
“What should we-” Micro began to ask, but a sharp, familiar pain in his chest suddenly brought him to his knees. He then noticed every single one of the hundreds of other cultivators in the arena was doing the same thing, filling the air with terrible screams of pain.
“My core…!” Azar coughed as he rolled over onto his back, clutching his chest with his hand helplessly.
Micro lay beside Blue as they experienced the sensation of their cores being drained of energy at an alarming rate. He could feel the same happening to Trill, who had been obediently resting in his other pocket.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted…!” Blue managed to mumble through the pain.
“You were a good passenger…” Micro replied with a strained smile.
He watched with watery eyes as the energy leaving his core mingled with the energy of a thousand cultivators in a ball above the stage where he was fighting only a short time before. It swirled around like a small sun, increasing in brightness with each bit of energy it absorbed. Gradually it began to mold itself into the shape of a human.
Micro could only lay there on the stage and accept that not even the strength of a thousand cultivators could stand against the mysterious force that now drained him of his power, and the familiar sensation of drawing nearer to death washed over him like a cold, heavy rain. He closed his eyes and looked inward as he grew weaker, attempting to enjoy one last moment in the garage he recreated before it was gone forever.
He slipped into that state between consciousness and unconsciousness and looked around at the storm of energy swirling around him, the energy of a thousand cultivators being drawn into the monstrous being forming in the air, then he turned away from the chaos and found himself next to his core. He was relieved to find that time still seemed to pass more quickly in this state, but he was saddened to see the state of his old home.
Sure enough, the dense energy which made up every brick of his core was drifting away, beginning to expose the soul within. He could feel the pressure of his soul against the walls of the core as it weakened. Even the rings of fire and water the dragon and turtle had placed around his core couldn’t prevent the energy from dissipating.
He tried to catch some of the energy in the air, but his effort proved futile as it slipped through his fingers in the current. However, when he looked at his hand, he noticed that something had remained, something strange and unsettling.
“What is this…?” Micro wondered as he brought his hand close to his face to inspect its contents.
In the palm of his hand he observed several specs of energy that felt nothing like the elemental forces of the world around him, and yet they felt familiar. The closer he moved his face toward them, the more familiar it felt, until he realized what he held in his hand.
“Chaos energy…” He mumbled as he recalled the strange presence of the mysterious force which had pulled him through the stars into a new world. The tingling in his hand soon grew unbearable and he was forced to release the particles at once. He immediately waved his hand to try and catch more, and he was surprised to find he’d collected a large handful of the ethereal dust.
The chaos energy didn’t glow like any of the other energies he had learned to harness. Instead, it felt like it was sucking the light out of the world around it. He used his other hand to collect another handful from the air and combined them to form a small ball, and he was mesmerized by the result. He could now see faint lights in the distance through the ball of chaos energy, as if he were looking through a small window at a night sky, though the strangely coloured lights he saw only partially resembled the stars he knew. He tried to get an even closer look at what lay beyond the small window he held in his hand, bringing it right up to his left eye, but he suddenly felt a terrible pain in his eye that caused him to drop the ball into the abyss.
Reeling from the discomfort that lingered in his left eye, he walked through a hole that had formed in his garage door, and looked around at the dissolving garage he missed so much. He placed his hand on the passenger side mirror, noticing it had shifted slightly in the current of energy, and he could feel the truck itself beginning to vibrate and shake as the garage continued to weaken.
“Huh?” Micro suddenly blurted out as he realized his hand was stuck to the mirror.
He managed to pry his hand off with some effort, but noticed something even stranger. Some of the chaos energy which he’d tried to throw away had stuck to hand, and now it was stuck to the passenger mirror of his soul.
“What the…!” He shouted somewhat angrily as he began wiping the black stain on the mirror furiously, but it only served to spread the stain in every direction. Before long, the entire passenger store was covered in the substance.
He stepped back with his hands on his head as he looked at the stain with disgust, despairing that he’d spend his last moments watching his soul explode through his core while covered in something similar to glittering tar. However, as the feeling of disgust settled into his heart, he noticed another feeling.
“That actually feels really warm…” He muttered softly. The feeling of unease that his dissolving core had caused him lessened the moment he coated the door of his truck-shaped soul with chaos energy.
“I wonder…”
Without dwelling on the thought for too long, he rushed outside his core to collect another handful of the chaos energy which was abundant in the arena, then ran back in to wipe it all over the glowing white truck inside. It made him feel sick to deliberately cover himself in something so dirty, but he repeated the process until every part of the truck was coated.
“So that’s what I’d look like with black paint…” Micro thought to himself as he stepped back to inspect his handwork.
“That’s actually not bad…”
As he admired the new paint job of his soul, what little remained of the garage he’d replicated continued to fade away, along with much of the internal energy he’d been storing there. He felt weak and tired as his core dissolved, but he also felt calm.
“So you can make a core out of this stuff too…” He confirmed as he tapped the surface of the black coating with his knuckles. He’d had to spread the chaos energy over the top of the core cards in the bed, so he worried that he may not be able to master any more until he’d restored his core, but there was no time to dwell on Core Cards at the moment.
“Hah…!” Micro sighed as he woke up in the arena, much to Blue’s surprise, with some of his vitality restored. He stood up slowly and took a moment to collect himself.
He looked around to see the barrier made of chaos energy still standing, and the air was still filled with the pained screams of everyone trapped within. It was difficult to breathe in the midst of so much energy without being able to use any of it to shield himself, but he was relieved to have a stable core again, even if it was only enough to keep him alive.
“How…” Lena groaned as she looked up at him.
“I made a new core…” Micro replied.
“The chaos energy… was really sticky…”
She looked up at him in disbelief, but she had no strength to question him.
Micro looked up to see the humanoid figure being formed from the stolen energy of a thousand cultivators’ cores was no longer just a glowing mass of energy. As it rotated slowly above the arena, he noticed a face similar to his own had grown out of the mass of energy.
“A hero…” Azar gasped, still laying on the ground in pain.
“With an… Emerald Core…?!”
Micro looked down at Blue with a confused expression.
“Jade, amber, sapphire, emerald…” Blue grunted at him as she writhed in pain.
“You idiot…”
“Thanks, Blue.” Micro nodded.
He looked at Kel, Tae, and the hundred of other jade and amber level cultivators throughout the arena, their writhing figures illuminated by the magicians’ glowing sigils. He then looked back at Lena and Azar, the only sapphire level cultivators trapped with him in the arena, and both of whom were equally immobilized by the core-consuming trap laid by the magicians.
“Huh…” Micro weakly sighed.
“That’s not good.”