Sage twisted his flexible neck and bit down onto the blood ghost’s arm, severing it near the elbow. His jaws snapped shut and he started to fall. At the same time, the blood ghost brought its other arm over and sank its burning claws into Sage’s side. Some of them struck his ribs while others punctured his internal organs. Hei Bai only had time to realize that the blood ghost’s arm was not just severed, but completely gone. She had already started to swing her staff again, infusing her energy into it, but it was too late. Sage swallowed the viciously hot energy that the blood ghost was made out of, drawing it into his third set of internal channels.

The rampaging energy seared his meridians as it traveled through his body. This third set of meridians were very special. They were extremely tough and resilient, modeled after those in the Warp Worm’s body. They didn’t just have the fortitude to match, they were also unsealed, just like the Warp Worms. By unsealed, that meant they didn’t form a complete circuit. They couldn’t accumulate any energy. They were merely a pathway to dump the energy that was swallowed. Given that trait, Sage decided to combine it with another ability that also couldn’t be controlled. The energy vents of the Fire Crested Iguana. They constantly sapped the energy of the iguana and transformed it into a beautiful flaming spine ridge. Although they weren’t controllable, they were very efficient and powerful in their conversion of energy. If a normal Qi Pore was a fan, the ‘Qi Nozzles’ were jet thrusters.

Sage couldn’t stop or contain the energy that was fed into his third meridian system, but he could control which pathways they traveled down. Each of the pathways in the system ran to a different one of the Qi Nozzles on his body, and they all led to the intake area in his mouth. Swallowing that portion of the blood ghost caused him some damage, that extreme heat was more than even the Warp Worm’s swallowing ability could handle, but it filled his body with fiery might.

Hei Bai only saw a flash of red light before she felt something was wrong. Her vision swung upwards without her control and then rotated backwards, showing her the path behind her. Only then did she realize that her head had left her body and spun until it hit the ground. Her mouth fell open limply and the blood ghost faded from sight, slowly disappearing. As it did, the red glow in the eyes of the staff faded away.

Sage suddenly found himself alone, terribly injured all over his body. More than three quarters of the scales on his entire body had been burned or torn off. Many of his internal organs were heavily damaged from the internal cauterization, and one of his legs had been broken at some point in the fight.

Hei Bai’s headless body fell to the ground with a loud thump. She fell face, err… make that front, down. The remainder of the burning energy continued to burn out from the many energy vents lining Sage’s tail. They had combined to form a large blade, doubling the range of his tail and turning into a very deadly weapon that had instantly ended Hei Bai’s life.

At least, that was what she wanted him to think. Sage held out his hand and a yellow light was emitted from his palm creating a glowing hemisphere around it. Hei Bai’s body shuddered. The head, which was outside the glowing dome, dissolved into black oil and formed into a puddle on the ground. In the meanwhile, the headless body molded itself like putty and a new head appeared on its shoulders.

Hei Bai started screaming, this time with pain, “Ahhhh, how did you know!? Mercy, mercy, stop it! Spare me!”

The yellow light increased in intensity and Hei Bai’s oil body rippled. It looked like a blowdryer on water, pushing back the liquid to reveal a crystal. More of the oil was pushed away and it revealed a clear quartz crystal the size of a fist. Inside the crystal there was a hollow cavity that contained a black liquid, that looked just like the oil or tar that had given Sage so much trouble. At this point, the yellow light revealed its source. A cyan colored sphere appeared in Sage’s hand, the Sovereign Stone. Dominion over the earth. More specifically it could overpower and control other Heavenly Jewels.

The clear quartz confirmed the identity of the Heavenly Material that Hei Bai had. It was the Heavenly Jewel: Black Enhydros. It was known for creating black oil puppet soldiers, but Hei Bai’s methods were very strange. The description of the Black Enhydros said that it created faceless and featureless mud like beasts, yet the ones Hei Bai created had the exact faces and voices of the people she’d killed. She was much stronger than Sage was, so the Sovereign Stone could only restrain the Black Enhydros under her command. He’d tried to use it earlier in the fight, but the effect was limited so he didn’t go all out. Instead, saving it as a finishing move.

The same had happened when he tried to use the First Light. It had created those blinding bright white flames, but they weren’t that effective against Hei Bai. The First Light was very powerful against evil, and spirit forms. It had matched up well against the green flame ghost. Unfortunately, the oil created by the Black Enhydros was not evil, nor was it a spirit form. As a Heavenly Jewel it was of the Earth element, combined with the Wood element, and a hint of death energy. The death portion was restrained by the First Light, but given Hei Bai’s higher cultivation there was little he could do.

It also didn’t help that the First Light was a very strict Heavenly Material as well. It only had its full strength at dusk, and dawn. It was also similar to certain fireworks, extremely powerful, but only for an instant.

Hei Bai continued to scream, her body looking like melted clay that had been dropped from a great height. Her chest was peeled back and exposing the fist sized quartz crystal, resting at the place where a heart would usually be. Thankfully, her body was made of black oil so there were no gruesome blood, flesh, and organs spilling everywhere. Instead the yellow light grew more and more condensed as Sage regained enough Qi to give it more power.

Soon her screaming stopped and her body melted completely, losing all cohesion and leaving just the quartz crystal. Sage felt the connection between Hei Bai and the crystal was severed and he finally was convinced of her death. At that same instant, the bone staff shattered into dust and then dissolved into nothingness. As it did, the red light faded away completely and Sage no longer felt any power or aura coming from it. The yellow light of the Sovereign Stone drew the Black Enhydros over to his hand and then both Heavenly Jewels disappeared into his body. Sage looked inward and saw the Black Enhydros drawn into the core of his Inner World, joining the other Heavenly Materials there.

I’ll link to it later, but for now…

Sage moved over to the huge rock and collected all the pieces back into his Inner World. He put Hei Bai’s corpse into the Universe Ring. Then he collected the Formation Machine as well as all the Formation Plates and other objects he’d left around the battlefield, like the dead Warp Worm. The poor thing had its meager little mind completely destroyed by Hei Bai’s spiritual attack. Since he was linked to it at the time, Sage had also suffered from the attack. At this time, he took a few pills and started to make his way back up towards the surface. Now in his true form, he could use the pads on his palms and feet to climb directly up the cliff face without wasting any energy. It was a trait taken from the Viridian Gecko and one he’d applied to his own limbs and even a little bit along his belly to help him slither up walls.

He focused all his energy on healing his wounds, so he didn’t want to waste any on Cosmic Traction, nor did he feel like climbing up a spider thread when he could just scale the walls of the crevice.

After he left, a small wisp of red drifted up out of the ground. It was a much smaller version of the blood ghost, only a few inches tall. The dark holes that were its eyes stared viciously upwards. At least for a moment. A ghostly black orb with a white skull design on its front face smashed into the tiny red ghost. The two spirits struggled for a while before the black ghost completely absorbed the red ghost. The white skull design on its face slowly changed colors, changing from pink to light red, and darkening when it stopped at a bloody crimson.