Why isn’t Nyla helping them? She was only a few dozen metres above the siblings, Aine and Alicia suspended behind her by a mist of spiritual energy. After their last stint in the glade, she had trained to the point where she could create so many artificial platforms that she could run through the air as if it were solid land.

With no time to talk, Nolan cast a net of energy around Esteban and then made to chase after his friends when Ian’s aura suddenly showed signs of stabilization. A moment later, the siblings began to rise back up into the air unaided by any treasures or energy projections.

Nolan joined up with them a moment later, to see Ian holding onto his abdominal injury with one hand and grasping his sister with the other. Pale as he was, his golden eyes shone with an odd brand of delight as he slowed to a stop a couple of metres in front of Nolan. Lyra looked relieved, proud, and anxious as she held onto her brother, her golden hair flailing in the heavy winds like wild ribbons.

Without saying anything, Nolan gave his friend a slightly relieved look and then motioned for him to follow. He flew off to join up with the others as another intimidating boom sounded from about a kilometre away, where he could sense two massive craters that had just been carved into the earth. A small forest in the area was completely engulfed in flames, at least the thirty or so percent that hadn’t been ripped from the ground and disintegrated by an unknown attack.

“May’s fighting someone,” Ian called over the din. “The old one, I think.”

Nyla had gone to fetch Sean while Nolan had rushed toward the Varai siblings, so the two groups were able to reunite a few moments later.

Loud crashes and echoing concussions sounded off as both the storm and the unseen battle continued to intensify.

“We need to help May,” said Nolan, who had an ominous feeling as he floated in place. “She could be killed any minute!”

“So could we,” said Lyra, who truly seemed at a loss. “What can we even do here?” She turned her gaze toward the sounds of battle, her hair and clothes suddenly thrown back by a strong, artificial blast of wind.

“I hate saying this,” frowned Ian. “But if we want any hope of getting out of here then we need to leave while she’s holding them off.” His face had lost a bit of its haunted pallor, and the wound on his abdomen was no longer bleeding.

The group was silent for several eternal moments until Nyla finally took out her jewel-encrusted picture frame and set the blank canvas aglow with an exertion of her will. “Ian’s right. With us here, she actually has a worse chance of escaping. She’s fighting people that’re just as strong as she is, so we can’t expect her to look after us.” The glowing canvas rose to hover above the group, widening as it readied to engulf them.

“A wise choice,” came the white-haired woman’s mischievous voice, her location unknown despite the clarity of her tone.

It was Nolan’s turn to feel her constricting grip around his neck as she abruptly appeared in their midst like a figment of his imagination, his magic sword falling to the ground as a foreign energy source suppressed his spiritual energies. His vision began to blur as blood rushed to his head like metal to a magnet.

“Nolan!” called his friends.

“Y—you know the c—city!” A moment after he was caught, Nolan forced the picture frame downward with a projected mass of spiritual energy. The others abruptly disappeared, their voices cutting off as if he’d just muted a TV in the middle of a show.

“You’re quite the smart kid,” said the woman, as sounds of impact and explosions of wind described the distant fight. “I'll have to have Tems fetch your little friends. For now, we’re going to go someplace private where I can investigate your body in peace.”

Her grip lessened slightly before she turned around and flew off in a seemingly random direction. Looking at her up close, she was right up there with May and Nyla on the list of the most beautiful women that he’d ever seen. Her naturally thin eyebrows and long eyelashes were particularly striking, for they were the same pearly white as her long, straight hair. Her robes were also a uniform white, enticingly thin like some sexy pair of satin pajamas. Unfortunately the person behind her gorgeous face was an absolute demon, so the beauty was wasted on her.

Nolan glared at the woman as the thunderstorm continued to dominate the backdrop like a sinister song. The sounds of May’s desperate fight for survival became more distant as his captor soared through the air at about eighty kilometres per hour. Not only had Nolan’s energies been suppressed, but a blanket of the woman’s energy now covered his body and rendered him unable to move.

Closing his eyes, he focused on the fluctuations that still emanated from his pulsating dantian, which the woman immediately noticed.

Laughing, she said, “Don’t even think about trying to break through right now. We’ll have to save that for after I’ve thoroughly inspected your body at your current realm.”

He stopped struggling to conserve his energy and began to meditate. What was taking Uncle Grey so long? As things were, Nolan’s only chance of survival relied on him somehow managing to trigger his tribulation without the woman sensing the movement of energies within his body. How the hell was he supposed to manage that, though? As the palpitating moments continued to pass, Nolan came up with another reckless plan. If he operated his internal energies in any capacity, the woman’s invasive energies would detect and threaten his own.

Even if you do…

Now that he had learned the White Flame Scripture, he was able to cultivate in his current state. This meant that it was wholly possible for him to provoke a reaction from his dantian, which was minutes away from reaching its boiling point. Once he prompted the woman to act, he would manipulate the Millennial Ring to swallow up all of the spiritual energy and inner essence that she had projected into his body, since the ancient artifact relied on such energies to power whatever reaction it was that instigated its effects of transportation.

Unwilling to get dissected and murdered or whatever else the woman had in store for him, Nolan didn’t plan to simply roll over and accept such a fate. He didn’t care how fast someone was, there was no way that they could avoid a bolt of lightning.

He waited until a particularly loud peel of thunder shook the air throughout the area, and then quickly revolved the specific inner essence circulation routes necessary for the White Flame Scripture to activate.

The woman scoffed as she noticed his intentions. As expected, his dantian was immediately targeted by the foreign energy within him, though all of this energy was quickly absorbed by the Millennial Ring as soon as he began to pour his own energy into it.

A searing pain simultaneously erupted within Nolan’s chest as his dantian began sending waves of energy all throughout his body. His eyes shot upward with instinctual awareness, acutely conscious of a fresh bolt of lightning that had just roared to life within the confines of the largest cloud above. No sooner had he sensed the strange bolt when it fell down upon him with the full force of the storm’s wrath. Unlike the golden energy that had characterized Ian’s tribulation, Nolan’s was a deep violet shade and much more volatile. It didn’t simply disappear after it struck him, but maintained a vibrant pillar of light that connected his dantian to the sky above, coincidently surrounding both him and his abductor with a powerful field of purple electricity.

He immediately lost feeling in all of his limbs, dominated by a pervasive numbness that made it seem as if all the blood within his body had been drained in a matter of milliseconds. Is this why Ian hadn’t been able to move for so long?

While his vision was mostly obscured, he could sense the ground nearing at a rapid pace. While he wouldn’t die if he fell from such a height, he’d be much worse off than the woman that was currently falling alongside him. Her expression was one of grimacing astonishment, and unlike the previous time that she had been struck by somebody else’s tribulation lightning, her body was shaking uncontrollably as if she were fighting off a violent seizure.

Since Nolan’s body couldn’t move, he tried to send out some spiritual energy with which to cushion his fall, but found himself unable to control his own energies. Just as he was making peace with the fact that he was about to reach the end of his plummeting fall, an odd bit of foreign information filled his mind and immediately prompted him to withdraw his consciousness into his spiritual space.