Within a giant ditch, a group of six stood around a charred corpse. The huge trench was newly excavated and a fire in the distance with people huddled around it showed its status as a temporary camp.

The charred corpse was not human. Burnt bone protruded from between torn scales and blackened flesh. The corpse was smashed flat and spread over a large area, looking much like a piece of burnt roadkill large enough to floor a whole living room.

One man covered in black from head to toe was kneeling next to the mess. He brought his hand to his chest to salute a similarly dressed man that was still standing, “Sir, this is everything.”

The standing man waved his hand and the kneeling man quickly ran off, leaving the other five there. Three of them were grouped together while the other stood behind them and off to the side. Those three were, of course, the trio of Nascent Soul’s continuing the hunt. The man with a sword at his back grumbled, “What a mess. Why did you bother to even collect this?”

The serious Yincha woman clenched her teeth, but didn’t open her mouth. She was quite used to how frivolous the swordsman was. The masked Fu Clan man rolled his eyes and waved at the two women standing behind them while he spoke, “Time to earn your keep.”

Stepping forward, a well muscled woman with white hair and an old woman eagerly walked forward and started sifting through the mess on the ground. It was hard to tell what exactly the two women were doing, one of them was just poking through the mess with her staff, while the other just walked around without touching anything. The old woman was hunched over, staring at the ground with rapt attention, but she kept her hands to herself, gingerly stepping between the piles of charred flesh, bone and scale.

Whitestaff stopped for a moment, her staff was stabbed into a pile that looked just as gross as any other, but for some reason she seemed interested. She closed her eyes and froze in place for a while. After a minute she finally moved again and turned back to the three Nascent Souls. She gave them a bow, “I confirmed it, he is still alive and just as you thought.”

Hei Bai snapped to attention from where she was carefully scouring the mess with her eyes, “I knew it!”

Whitestaff nodded, “He’s inside the Living Disaster.”

The three Nascent Souls turned their gazes towards the small mountain in the distance. These once flat and empty plains now had a single mountain. Something that had garnered more than a little attention from the local wildlife the past few days. Animals that had never seen a mountain except as little bumps on the horizon, came to investigate, but were subsequently sent running in fear when the mountain moved and the ground rumbled.

The tortoise had settled itself, laying down onto the ground, but from its actions the last few days, they had grown suspicious. Initially, the beast had been rooting around in the ground, forming canyons in the flat landscape. Then it laid itself down and stopped moving. During that time of calm, they’d collected Lang Sheng’s remains and in these last few hours the Tortoise had started to shake. They’d moved the whole mess with an expensive Storage Treasure, to ensure nothing was disturbed, and only now were they able to truly confirm what was going on in the distance. They’d speculated the Tortoise was trying to deal with its internal stowaway, but now Whitestaff’s strange techniques had confirmed it.

The Fu Clansman, the Yincha woman, and the Swordsmen met eyes and then looked into the distance at the tortoise that suddenly stopped moving. It had been shaking about agitatedly for quite some time and now it was suddenly quiet again?

Just as they were about to send some of their people to investigate, the night was suddenly lit up with bright light. A column of bright red lava shot into the sky, a geyser thousands of feet high. A glowing pillar connecting the sky and the earth.

Their surprise was short lived, the three of them suddenly disappearing from their places and rushing to their people, releasing their own power to cover a wide area. A moment later, the reason for their hurried reactions came upon them. The violent force of that extreme eruption only struck them a moment later. A wave of sound and pressure blasted outward from the point where the Living Disaster did its volcano impression. Worse yet, that volcano was a living being that could control its eruption, channeling the power into a more violent and devastating blast. The cloud of ash and smoke spewing into the sky hit the upper atmosphere and blossomed into a giant black mushroom shape.

If it wasn’t for the fact they were already in a trench and the Nascent Souls spread their energy out to shield them, all those lower rank cultivators so close to the Living Disaster would have been blasted apart. As it was, even the Core Formation cultivators could feel that the fearsome power was way beyond anything they were capable of.

Whitestaff was quick to act, racing after the Nascent Souls, but Hei Bai was caught in the detonation. She, along with the charred remains were blasted apart.

When the initial blast wave had finally rolled over them, the group of cultivators was busy staring up at the mushroom cloud in the air with amazement. The Fu Clansman reappeared at the spot where Hei Bai had been blasted apart and he stared at a space on the ground for a moment.

Then he coughed audibly, “I know you’re deciding whether or not you want to sneak off and work on your own. Don’t bother thinking about it. You can’t hide from us.”

A ghostly red skull, surrounded by burning orange flames lifted out of the ground. Its eyes started to brighten in intensity and then the light in them went out. The orange flame dimmed and then finally disappeared. The skull faded away and an old woman appeared in its place, kneeling on the ground completely naked. A complicated symbol appeared on her forehead, glowing brightly. She swore for a while and the Fu Clansman threw a robe to her, “Get yourself together.”

The two of them turned to look. The red pillar lost its shape, the flow of lava tilting and losing cohesion, splashing apart into the sky. They both shared a look and then ran towards the rest of their people. Lava, ash, and smoke would be raining from the sky and they needed to deal with it.

Inside the Living Disaster, a few minutes prior.

Sage had finally managed to smash apart enough of the ground to clear the space around the Heart of Eruption. The Blacksilver Knight continued to completely destroy the defensive lava chutes, constantly adding more stone to the lava pool and absorbing more of its heat. The Soul Clone had cleared the way for him from a distance, since they didn’t want to repeat the same mistake as last time. Who knew how many times the Heart of Eruption could detonate like that. From what he knew about Heavenly Materials, they converted the Qi of the owner into their specific energy type. Normal Qi Techniques used the many meridians and Qi channels in the body as well as special hand seals and maneuvers to transform Qi into a myriad of different energies and effects. A Heavenly Material was like a supercharged version of this same process, Qi in, miraculous energy out.

The problem here was that the Heart of Eruption was owned by the Living Disaster. The Demonic Beast was the size of a mountain, so there was no telling how much Qi the monster could produce. For all he knew that damned turtle could make the Heart of Eruption explode like that constantly for days at a time. Thankfully, the blast radius of that attack was pretty small so they could harass the Heart easily from a distance.

Finally, he reached a point where he felt confident of success and the Blacksilver Knight stopped moving. Sage teamed up with the Soul Clone, the both of them using the Third Hand Technique to grasp the Heart of Eruption. Gripping it with telekinetic force they gave it a tug, but even floating in mid-air it resisted them. Heh, I guess we’ll need to be a little more rough.

The two telekinetic hands pressed together and instead of pulling, they smashed against the obsidian heart with their full force. Sage regretted it immediately. The tortoise's whole body started rumbling and he barely had time to recall the Soul Clone before the whole world exploded.