My feet fell into rhythm. They smashed against the earth, tearing it apart as I ran forward.

I ran toward the place I’d seen flashes of light, where Jing was fighting. It wasn’t long before I realized I was running towards the Blue FIre Sect. For some reason, Jing had taken her fight to the Blue Fire Sect’s mountain.

I looked back at my garden. It didn’t look anything like a garden anymore. Illuminated by the moonlight, it was a tall monolith of solid vegetation, now the tomb of the most powerful members of the Crimson Fire Sect.

I passed countless buildings as I ran. Jing's fight had left huge chunks of the city in shambles, but those were only tiny pieces compared to the entire city. Even at my speed, it took me a few minutes to get to the Blue Fire Sect.

Jing is a powerful and smart girl. And they hadn’t used the last Prolonged seed yet, but I couldn't help but be worried.

My eyes found their sect walls. A morbidly obese man sat atop the wall. I could barely see his eyes through the layer of fat dripping down from his eyebrows. I'd lived in America(and even attended some magic the gathering events), and I still couldn't believe anybody could possibly become so fat.

I decided to ignore him, seeing that he didn't have anything to do with my family.

The two men put their hands to the sky.

Wait…where did that second one come from?

I barely had the time to have that thought before the two men became four, and the four became eight, and so on. They multiplied into a wall of fat. There must’ve been at least a thousand of them.

I dug my feet into the earth and grinded to a stop.

The wall of flesh disappeared, replaced by just the original obese man. He tried to get up but his legs crumpled under his weight.

I couldn’t ignore this man. I walked to the wall and looked up at the man.

He opened his blubbery mouth, “Hey Vincent.”

“...hey. Which one are you?”

“Sorry, this isn’t the best body to talk in,” a young, teenage girl appeared in front of the fat man and the fat man vanished. She wrapped a towel around herself and stood on top of the wall.

“Allison!” I gulped.

She was one of the shortest people in my class. I remembered her with shorter hair, but today, her dyed red hair flowed a little past her shoulders. In class, she was the cute shy girl with a few close friends. Kinda like me, except I wouldn’t call myself cute.

But what I knew of her from before wasn’t enough for me to make judgements of how she would act now.

“I’m sorry but I need to leave right now. Please let me pass.”

“I’m not trying to block you,” she spoke quickly and urgently, “but I need to warn you! There’s somebody extremely powerful who’s beaten Mark. I don’t know who she is. I don’t think she’s from our class.”

I sighed in relief.

“Don’t go in recklessly,” her voice trembled, “let’s back off. We can form an alliance with our other classmates and defeat her later.”

I tried to jump over the fence. A clump of ten obese men appeared in front of me. I couldn’t stop myself mid-jump. I rammed into them, the crash killing my momentum. The fat men vanished again, leaving me alone in midair. I landed on the wall beside Allison. She grabbed my robes. “You can’t go!”

I was about to shake her off, but a tingling sensation suddenly filled my body.

Allison and I both breathed sharply. We looked up to the sky, where a tiny cloud was forming. Qi from all over the mountains converging on the cloud.

The Qi assimilated with the cloud, adding to its size. Qi also poured out from within the cloud. It was as if it were a living being, using both the ambient Qi and its inner Qi.

I recognized the flavor of this aura. I had felt it once before, back when Hui Ming pledged her loyalty to me.

This was The Will Of The World.