CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The levels of the mine seventy through eighty begin to rumble. This is being caused by Li Feng’s ground magic, shaking the ground to imitate an earthquake. The mine is supported by steel beams, which means Li Feng’s magic won’t collapse any levels other than the ones he’s shaking. Loose dirt and rocks fall from ceilings and walls, and Li Feng gradually increases the amount of shaking in the ground.

“Are you causing this?” Ya asks, astonished and looking at Li Feng.

“Just watch the stairway,” Li Feng replies and continues his magic.

The first people to come up the stairway are weak cultivators who don’t have faith in their ability to survive a collapse. Li Feng hasn’t made any large chunks of rock fall, yet, but weakest cultivators are leaving before the large chunks fall. This is all according to Li Feng’s plan, which is to let the majority of people living in the ten levels below him escape first.

From what Li Feng already knows about the men that raped Ya and likely kidnapped Lam Bai, they are powerful cultivators of the Body stage. They could be all together, but that is unlikely after Li Feng searched every floor for a large group. Instead, the men have probably split up and only a few are still with Lam Bai.

Ya watches many men and a few woman pass the sixty ninth level of the mine, most of them calmly walking up the stairs. When the stream of people slows, Li Feng turns to Ya. “Any of them?” He asks her.

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“Nope,” She replies.

“Alright,” Li Feng says, and the ground shakes harder than before. This time, even more people evacuate, but Ya still doesn’t recognize any of them.

‘Headstrong cultivators,’ Li Feng curses in his mind and uses air magic to create sonic booms throughout the levels seventy through eighty. The booms shake the mines slightly, but their biggest effect is the noise they create. Even the strongest cultivators, who thought they’d put their arms above their head to protect themselves from falling rocks, feal fear when faced with the unknown. For almost every cultivator in the mine, a sonic boom is something they’ve never heard before.

Far more miners walk up the stairway this time, and Ya has a hard time getting a look at all of them. Some miners are even walking up the stairs used for descending, something which didn’t happen the entire time Li Feng was going through the mines.

“Th, there!” Ya shouts, pointing at a man ascending the stairs. He’s huge, easily seven feet tall, and has a bushy brown beard. He’s clothed in a black tunic, and his shoulders take up half the width of the stairway. “The tall one with the beard!”

“Thank you,” Li Feng says and starts walking toward the stairway. Next to the man that Ya identified as one of her attackers, the chains that prevent people from falling into the hole in the center of the mine lash out and grab onto the man.

Feeling trapped, the man pulls on the chains with his arms and breaks them, snapping them like twigs. ‘What the hell?’ The man questions, looking at the chains, but more come to grab onto him. He fights them off, but finally falls to a bundle of chains grabbing his legs.

Li Feng opens a hole in the chain guards and pulls the man into the hole, then dives into the hole after him, ignoring the stares of everyone around him. Even Ya is too shocked to say anything.