Sage walled the Jinxi Patriarch onto a quarter of the stage, and the old man responded by turning his giant cricket into a swarm of golden crickets. In response to the crickets spreading over the forest, the purple lotus blossoms darkened.

The giant golden cricket had transformed into a thousand smaller crickets, and these crickets started to fly in a strange pattern that caused two of their four wings to brush together. Just like the giant one, this released a chirping sound, but from a thousand different places at the same time. Their ‘voices’ layered together as one, and the sound spread through the sky. Unlike before, where the attacks were direct, the Jinxi Patriarch was taking a different approach this time. The air above the forest took on a different feeling, like a vibration spreading through the air, proliferating onto the entire Dueling Arena.

A simple crickets chirp had become a deadly large scale weapon when wielded by the Jinxi Patriarch. The air started to ripple, the leaves of the trees knocked together, and their branches and boughs started to sway, making it sound like a hurricane was blowing through the forest. The old man had completely avoided Sage’s defensive fence with this attack and he felt the vibration traveling into his body, causing him to cough up another mouthful of blood as it agitated his internal organs. Yet, that was only the superficial effect, the true attack caused his Spiritual Sea to be assaulted by a storm.

The sound waves were a medium for the old man’s mental attack and a vicious storm blew into Sage’s Spiritual Sea. Huge waves crashed against the walls of his mental fortress and now a golden cricket appeared there. It burst through the thick featureless mist at the edge of the Spiritual Sea and then landed upon the dark waters. Like a waterbug it landed upon the sea and somehow ignored the choppy waves without falling below the surface. Then it leapt forward, bouncing from the crest of one wave to the next until it passed into the brighter area of the Spiritual Sea around the island. It stopped for a moment to examine the calmer waters and the island that sprouted up at the center of that area. Then it proceeded onward and rammed its ‘forehead’ up against the wall of the fortress. When it did, the walls shook, but the gates rattled. The cricket crashed its body against the wall a second time and when it did it seemed to notice the loosened gate.

Seizing the opportunity the spiritual cricket smashed against the gates of the fortress. Upon the first strike the gates creaked loudly. Then at the second hit there was a cracking sound and the gates were partially forced open, almost enough for the cricket to squeeze through. Then the cricket jumped back just in time to avoid a burst of Spirit Power that shot out from between the doors. The cricket saw something moving in the gap between the doors, and whatever it was quickly fled. The cricket was powered by a thread of the Jinxi Patriarch’s will and he was cautious of another counter attack when the golden cricket smashed against the gates for a third and fourth time. On the fifth, the gates burst apart and the golden cricket rushed into the fortress.

In the outside world, the thousand crickets continued to inundate the area with their violent song. Sage seemed to be injured by that initial assault, coughing blood and not moving from where he was standing after being hit by this brand new attack. Yet, that weakened state lasted for less than a minute before he was seen to recover and press both of his hands against the trunk of the nearest tree.

Outside of the lotus blossoms that covered the root fence, the others changed colors again. They started to redden and their purple petals turned a dark reddish color. The many petals shriveled and then fell from the central seed pod of each lotus. The seed pods turned a bright fiery red color at which point they twisted where they were sprouted from the tree branches. They pointed towards the small crickets nearest them and a strange sight followed. From each of those red lotus seed pods, a burning projectile was released. Tiny flaming bullets were shot from each lotus pod, aimed towards the crickets, bombarding them with fiery attacks.

The shots weren’t very accurate, but they moved at high speed and the crickets weren’t fast enough to avoid them all. There might have been a thousand of the small crickets, but there were tens of thousands of flower blossoms upon those hundred foot high trees. Each of the crickets were subjected to a rapid fire bombardment from many small motes of flame. The projectiles were moving too fast for most of the crowd to notice what happened when they struck the tiny crickets, so they assumed the small crickets were too fast to be hit.

Yet the more powerful people in the crowd, like the Elders, saw that wasn’t the case. Each of those burning motes was actually a seed fired from the lotus seed pods. These seeds were physical projectiles, but the tiny crickets were not. They were merely illusions, giving a face to an immaterial bundle of Qi that the Jinxi Patriarch was using to channel his attacks and law power. The seeds passed through the crickets without affecting them, but they weren’t just seeds. They each carried a fiery aura that was infused with Sage’s newly acquired law. The Thermal Law that he’d understood within Icefire Valley encompassed hot and cold, a primal law that dealt with two complete opposites, or at least that’s how the people of this world saw them.

Since he was from Earth, his understanding of the relationship of hot and cold was fundamentally different than most of the people of this world and he believed that was why he was so easily able to comprehend the Thermal Law in Icefire Valley while the others used their opportunity to deepen the understanding of the laws they already had. Cold was not the opposite of Heat. Things were cold in the absence of heat. Heat caused atoms and molecules to vibrate, increasing the distance between them and causing changes in the state of matter. Fire and Ice were not opposites. Yet, even with that knowledge from Earth, it was hard to be sure if things were the same here. He’d already found that the fundamental rules of this world were different when he couldn’t harness electricity in the same way, so there was no telling how those rules were different for everything else. Even so, he still grasped the basics of the Thermal Law and now he applied it to the cold of the Blue Lotus and the heat of the Red Lotus seeds.

The Jinxi Patriarch’s illusory crickets also carried his own law, something that Sage felt was related to sounds and illusions. His Thermal Law was at a lower degree of mastery, but it was still potent enough that the fiery seeds were able to strip away some of the power from each of the crickets. Each shot bled away the Jinxi Patriarch’s energy. He was fueling each of these thousand crickets with his Qi and Law power, but Sage’s fiery seeds were weakening them, which reduced the amount of energy used to attack him.

Inside the Infinite Immaterial Seat, the large golden cricket burst through the gate and rushed forward. The path split to the left and right, but it didn’t care, ramming its head into the wall. It could feel a faint source of energy in the distance and wanted to reach it as directly as possible. The Jinxi Patriarch foolishly fell for the first trap in this mental Labyrinth, wasting his time and energy bashing through a wall rather than following the path. Of course, what it found after ramming against the wall a dozen times to punch through was that the two paths turned a corner and led to the spot it had just reached. It also realized that as soon as it burst through the wall, that faint energy signal disappeared. It was just a lure to incite just such a reaction.

Even worse, just as it burst through the wall, the fiery seeds started to strike the small crickets in the outside world and the flow of energy to this mental attack was reduced. This was the Jinxi Patriarch’s main attack and it was being interfered with constantly! In the outside world, the old man’s face lost its calm composure and he scowled fiercely at his opponent, glaring at the wall of roots in front of him with a stare that made it seem like his gaze could pierce through the roots and trees.