Chapter 254 — Parting by Death

In an instant the whole of Fox Qi Mountain began to shudder violently. A colossal force surged and seethed savagely from deep underground; stone walls were collapsing everywhere, countless stretches of ground splitting open—and this time, from the rifts came a dreadful red radiance.

The stench of blood seeped into every corner.

More and more of the ground, unable to withstand the erosion of that terrible power, caved away; the red light grew ever brighter and vaster, until at last even whole slabs of stone wall came crashing down, plunging into that red haze of light.

Dread roars and mad laughter, like demons resurrected from the abyss, echoed deep within the red shadow.

Gradually, a vast and fathomless pit took shape. Crimson blood-light shot out from that great hole, and around its rim ever more ground and stone kept caving in, ceaselessly widening the dreadful chasm.

In the distant ice-cold stone chamber, the floor and walls were trembling violently as well, and stones kept raining down, some of them striking Ming Li's prostrate body with great force—yet his body did not stir in the slightest, giving no response at all. Beyond the stone chamber, that dreadful power in the distance seemed to be walking toward this place, step by step.

At that very moment, a white figure suddenly appeared at the doorway of the ice-cold stone chamber—none other than Xiao Bai. Her brows were tightly knit, her face grave; she cast a glance into the chamber, and when she saw that the stone platform was utterly empty, her countenance went pale at once. Then her eyes fell upon Ming Li, collapsed unconscious on the other side of the chamber.

Without further hesitation, Xiao Bai rushed over and turned Ming Li's body toward her. What met her eyes was a pale face, despairing and vacant; his flesh was cold to the touch, so cold that for a moment she thought she was holding a dead man.

She gritted her fine teeth, and from the corner of her eye she noticed that Ming Li's hand was clenched tightly around something—a torn scrap of green cloth. Her thoughts turned briefly, and she understood seven or eight parts of it at once; her eyes brimmed red.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

Yet this world, cruel enough that it would not even permit them their grief, erupted once more from beneath Mount Huqi with frenzied, thunderous roars. After a burst of savage upheaval, Xiao Bai suddenly felt the ground beneath her feet trembling—and then slowly caving in. Red light gushed madly from the great fissures splitting open in the earth below, carrying with it currents of searing heat.

What flowed beneath her feet seemed, in truth, to be the most scorching of magma.

Xiao Bai was thrown into no small alarm. With a sharp cry she gathered Ming Li's body into her arms, touched her feet lightly upon a falling stone, and flew out of the ice-cold stone chamber. Barely moments after she cleared it, the chamber collapsed entirely, plunging into that dreadful red radiance.

But once outside, Xiao Bai's face paled yet further—the scene beyond was worse than within the chamber. The vast crater was already expanding at an ever-quickening pace; by now it was not only the ground, but the surrounding rock walls and even the boulders overhead that were crashing down in droves. Xiao Bai leapt and darted among the surviving stones, and when she chanced to look down, she saw below her a blood-red radiance without end, searing hot beyond measure—and indeed a great mass of magma surging and churning within that bloody glow.

The places where she could set foot grew fewer and fewer, and the little that remained was collapsing fast. Xiao Bai clenched her teeth and sped onward, Ming Li's body in her arms. At this crisis of life and death, at this instant when the whole matter hung by a single thread, she suddenly felt a faint glimmer of light filtering down from above her head. She looked up quickly, and saw that where thick rock had once been, great swaths had caved away; amid the doomsday spectacle of boulders falling thick as rain, through a few narrow crevices the light of the sky was leaking down.

Could it be that the whole of Mount Huqi was about to collapse, and a hole had opened above to the open air?

A flash of resolve crossed Xiao Bai's face. She stamped down hard, sprang from the last remaining rock that still held, and flew upward. Beneath her feet, that stone too collapsed at last into the red shadows—there was no path of retreat left.

The crimson, scorching magma began to roar like an enraged giant, slowly welling upward, seething and churning. Beneath the magma, some immense force seemed to be driving it on; moments later the searing magma exploded with a thunderous roar, transforming into a colossal torrent that surged upward.

Amid that scene of madness, with the searing torrent of magma surging up from below and huge fragments of falling rock dense as raindrops above, Xiao Bai was like a white bird, wings beating in flight, threading through a wild tempest, desperately winging her way toward the sky.

Heaven and earth changed color; dark clouds rolled in billows.

Once the highest peak for a hundred li around, Mount Huqi now slowly sank and collapsed amid thunderous roars and a sky filled with smoke and dust.

The whole earth trembled violently, as though even heaven and earth were terrified by that power.

In the thunderous din, amid the dust and smoke that shot hundreds of zhang toward the horizon, the colossal torrent of searing magma burst straight up from underground and spewed toward the vault of heaven. And beneath that magnificent, terrible spectacle of heaven-and-earth forces, beside the vast magma torrent, a tiny white figure barely—at the very last moment—flew clear of that hellish crater mouth and sped off into the distance.