At this altitude, the sun was completely unobscured by the clouds below, the air cold and thin. A few cumulonimbuses towered above the rest, like great mountains presiding over a bright seascape. The only time Nolan had ever seen a view like this was when he had been mid-flight on an airplane back when he was just a little kid, which left him with the thought that his eventual landing would doubtlessly kill him.

Without the stimulating energy from May, a dreary blackness began to encroach upon the peripherals of Nolan’s vision. Before he could black out, however, a stream of foreign yet familiar energy quickly filled his body. This energy quickly provoked an enthusiastic reaction from his dantian and inner essence channels, holding the latter together in the face of the many fractures that had appeared throughout the intangible system. By the time he and May lost their forward momentum and began to follow a downward arc in freefall, he had regained complete control of his consciousness, and with it all of the sensory perceptions that had been blocked out by the overwhelming amount of pain that stabbed at every cell in his body. Not only that, but Uncle Grey’s method had also freed him from the constraints of the sect’s grand formation.

Although his physical condition was the absolute worst, his dantian was completely full of energy, which he used to rapidly enhance the effects of his body’s natural healing mechanisms. Although he couldn’t regrow limbs like cultivators in the Genesis stage, now that he had stepped into the realm of Integration it wasn’t a problem for Nolan to repair broken bones within a matter of minutes. Still, things were different when there were hundreds of bones to take into account. In his current state, it would take at least half an hour to completely heal his body, and that was only if he relied on special medicines and Divine Spirit Fountain water.

The most pressing issue was that he only had a scant amount of time before gravity pulled him and May down to the lake’s surface. Falling from such heights would basically be the same as landing upon cement, so he needed to think quickly if he planned on having any sort of chance of surviving the fall.

Okay, he said to his teacher, blinking blood from his eyes and spitting out a mouthful of it. God it hurts. What should I do? I can hardly think. Everything hurts…so badly.

Don’t try conjuring any platforms to catch yourself on. They’ll just break, and it’ll only hurt you more.

I know. What can I do? They were falling so quickly that even with his unrestrained spiritual sense it was difficult to get a feel for his surroundings. One minute, he sensed the lake’s surface about eight kilometres below him, and the next the only thing beneath his feet was a vast expanse of cloud-pocked sky.

Steady yourself, first off. If you keep whirling about then it’ll only make things harder for you.

It took a handful of moments for him to do so, after completely relaxing his body while making sure to hold May firmly in a double-armed embrace. Once he got a feel for the wind resistance that was battering against him, he finally managed to steady himself so that he was facing the lake and not the sky.

Even from so high up, all he could see was placid water between the breaks in the clouds below.

Okay, he said in his mind as he winced from pain, so is there an arrayment you can teach me that’ll give me artificial wings or something? Or maybe a parachute?

Para-what? Be serious, Nolan. You know I don’t know your Earth-people-talk.

It’s like a big blanket that’ll catch air to give me more wind resistance.

As interesting as that sounds, no, I can’t help you with that. As for the wings, well, there are plenty of arrayments that can create some, but I can’t exactly teach you them right now. The tattoo on Nolan’s left forearm began to shine a bright, blood red. Let me take control for a moment, and I’ll take care of this for you.

Nolan and May were now about six kilometres away from the lake’s surface. Wait, he thought, struck by a sudden idea. I’ll let you do what you need to do, but will you be unable to contact me again because of it?

For a while, yes.

Then forget it.

But you’ll die?

I thought of something. He gradually adjusted his position so that he was plummeting downward head-first. Be ready to step in if it doesn’t work.

Separated from his friends and his recently acquired battle slave, Nolan didn’t want to use up his only trump card if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Thinking this, he decided to take a chance on a last-ditch idea, and focused intently on a small section of air about a kilometre below him. Keeping the spot at the fore of his mind, the moment that he passed it he conjured a platform beneath his feet and kicked off of it immediately, quickening his pace as he continued his face-down freefall. The instant he did this, he activated the Tranquil Void Step’s first step and suddenly appeared back at the spot that he had just passed, the one that he had been focusing on with all his mental might. When he appeared, however, his momentum carried him upward in an extremely disorienting manner, and such was the force behind his fall that the moment he used his technique to reverse directions, he actually rocketed upwards by a hundred metres or so.

Hoho! Interesting move, dear disciple.

The Tranquil Void Step’s unique qualities of shifting from one point in space to another allowed him to redirect all of his downward momentum into his upward jump, which is what the kick-off essentially amounted to.

Yep, now to repeat this a million times until—

Another tremendous crashing sound preceded a second catastrophic windstorm that carried over from the direction of the spirit of the lake, which was far away enough that Nolan couldn’t sense any of the disturbances in the water that would have betrayed its presence. Even at this distance he was still buffeted and thrown off course for a few hundred metres.

Jesus, what a monster.

Looking at the waters below, a knot twisted in Nolan’s stomach. All he could see were huge waves and crashing whitecaps, with no uniform motion to the way that the water moved. The sight of the beast’s massive tail as it finished its titan-like descent was replayed in his mind’s eye, along with the Armageddon-like response that the tail whip had caused.

I should write a book about my life one day, he thought as he prepared to use his movement skill’s first step again. This time around, however, the moment that his upward momentum levelled off and he began to fall, he conjured a platform of spiritual energy in the air and sat down upon it, though the way it creaked and swayed in the wild winds told him that his current foothold was precarious at best. Wasting no time, he produced a large barrel of Divine Spirit Fountain water and gently placed May inside, looking at the woman with a complicated stare as he recalled all that she had done for him.

Carrying the barrel within a cloud of spiritual energy, he summoned the flying sword that he’d forced the white-haired woman to give him and stepped atop its dense yet feather-weight blade with his broken feet. Gritting his teeth, he soared downwards until he was only about a kilometre above the water, at which point he idled in the air and focused on healing his injuries. The extent of the damage that had been done to his body was enough to kill any normal person, though the vast amounts of energy within him kept his ruptured organs and fractured bones functioning as usual.

Spitting up blood here and there, he marvelled over the tolerance to pain that he had built up since he had arrived on Venara. Parts of his body had been crushed, stabbed, slashed at, severely burnt, or otherwise mangled in the months since he had first been ferried off of Earth. Not only that, but every time he cultivated the Ancestral Body Technique with the aid of the basic meditation circle arrayment that Uncle Grey had taught him, his skin was literally torn apart on a microscopic level which caused him to bleed out of all of his pores.

Who would even read your book? Snickering, Uncle Grey went on, at best, it would be a waste of your time.

Who are you, my dad?

He hushed his teacher and quickly set about repairing his body to its peak condition, which took around thirty-five minutes. May woke up at some point during his meditations, though she didn’t disturb him and instead went about healing her injuries as well. Once Nolan was in tip-top condition, he slowly blinked open his eyes to find that May was silently regarding him with an intelligent hazel gaze.

“I don’t know how you saved us,” she said softly, “but thank you.”