As he fled, Sage had traveled through a massive forest. Up hills and down into ravines and canyons. The ground cover had obscured his position and reduced the tortoise’s accuracy. He had to keep moving forward to prevent the other groups from catching up and taking shots at him. Unfortunately, the terrain started to change for Sage. The huge forest suddenly came to an end and spilled into a vast plains. There was no forest canopy or thick bushes to conceal him and the grass was sparse. It was not the right season for the grasses to be tall enough for him to hide within.

He started to change direction, ready to face his pursuers in order to stay within the tree cover, but they weren’t having it. They came in force, pushing forward to bottle him in and attack him from two sides. One of the molten boulders landed among them and caused a few deaths and injuries, but he already counted a few hundred cultivators with various musical instruments, glowing violet lights on their fingers, white staves, and the black masks of the Fu Clan. He would have to face them all head on to stay in the forest. With time running out, he checked on the progress of the Inner World.

“Can those with you be counted on to fight to the death?”

Ruanfu’s voice came through, with a saddened tone, “Not all of them. Only the cultists would do that. The others would probably flee and take their chances with a broken oath. A few of them might try and help the enemy capture you.”

Sage didn’t want to do such a thing in the first place, but he was still curious if the option was available. He’d wondered if it was possible to use all those Core Formation Cultivators to help him cut through the resistance and stay on track in the forest. Such a move would likely lead to some of their deaths, but if they all worked together they would probably be able to breakthrough. The problem was that if they didn’t act in unison they probably couldn’t push through while outnumbered. If they saw the odds against them and didn’t give their full effort, ran away, or worse, betrayed them… it would be disastrous. They’d be stopped in place and would die in droves.

“Alright, keep up the training. We need them all working as one, with unquestionable loyalty or they’ll just get us killed. Split them into two groups, and put all the questionable ones together. We can still send them out as scouts, distractions, or a vanguard.”

Sage was no slaver, or mass murderer, but he was also no saint. His life was on the line, and that meant the lives of all those living on his planet were also on the line. That meant this was war, and in war, sometimes sacrifices had to be made. It also meant his life was more important than all of those living in the Inner World. The philosophical implications of this situation were something he’d have to mull over later, but that was just the hard truth of his circumstances.

Without complete trust in the soldiers they’d assembled, Sage had to abandon his plan to stay in the forest and he put himself into the much more vulnerable position of fleeing across the vast open plains. He had avoided the mass of enemies waiting for him only to increase the threat from the most dangerous of his pursuers. Without any cover the molten boulders suddenly increased in accuracy and instead of just having to deal with moving through the debris, Sage had to actively dodge them.

Fiery meteors fell upon him and he had to scramble out of the way. He used Cosmic Traction to give him ‘walls’ to push off of to increase his evasive speed. A few times he even had to release a blast of Divine Breath to push himself aside faster when a boulder was going to strike his head. The barrage of boulders was fast and furious as soon as they entered the barren area and the tortoise soon learned that the boost from his Divine Breath came from his mouth. Sage could quickly move his upper half to the sides to avoid attacks, and his tail could sweep out of the way rapidly, but the most central part of his body was not nearly so agile. He had to rely on Cosmic Traction to push with head and tail to bounce his central sections out of the way quickly. The tortoise targeted that vulnerability and continued to attack his ‘torso’ area. Sage avoided most of the attacks, but some of them were very close calls and the residual heat and explosive force from the rocks smashing against the ground carried into him.

With so much energy spent on Cosmic Traction to dodge, he couldn’t devote as much energy to restoring the Blacksilver King and the two layers of defense were slowly being whittled down. Even so, he soldiered on. After a few hours he was quite battered, but at that point he released a bunch of huge insects into the air, sending them towards the giant tortoise with some very powerful Scent Markers. They were nothing against the monster’s giant strength and size and it ignored them at first. It snorted out flames to kill dragonflies and crushed the armored beetles with its building sized legs. It was only when a few of the Chameleon Mantids struck at its eyes that it finally took the insects seriously. A clawed forelimb bounced off its huge eyeball, and a mantis was crushed by the close of its eyelid, but the tortoise led out a ground rumbling growl and lowered its head to rub its face against the ground.

For any other creature that would just be a benign activity, like scratching an itch, but for the volcanic tortoise, it was absolutely destructive. Like a building crashing down, it’s face rubbing on the ground dug a huge trench and smashed the insects clinging to its head into paste. After clearing its head of the nuisance, the tortoise was angered and the temperature around it rose drastically. A wave of heat rolled off its body, igniting the wings of the nearby bugs, melting them off almost instantly. The more resilient insects continued to swarm around it and climb up its legs, but they were slowly cooked. They got slower and slower, until they fell from the tortoise, lifeless.

The huge swarm of thousands of giant insects he released did little more than annoy the giant tortoise, but they accomplished Sage’s goal. They took the tortoise’s attention and bought him some time to recover. A swarm of thousands of giant insects bought him only a few minutes, but as soon as they were all dead, he just released a few thousand more. Wave after wave until he’d had a couple hours to restore his Qi and restore the protective layers of the Blacksilver King around his body. That bought him another few hours against the tortoises attacks and then he repeated the tactic again. Night eventually fell and in the dark he could easily avoid the tortoises attacks again.

The next few days repeated the same way, it required three iterations of the insect swarm tactic to make it to the night. A day here was nearly a year on the Inner World, but even so he was slowly running out of bugs. He had half a world to grow them on, but for them to reach the third rank naturally still required time and resources. It took time for them to mature and there was a limit on how many of them the land could support at a high rank. As he threw out the big ones, the younger ones could take over their territory and grow larger, but the rate they were being sacrificed exceeded their rate of replenishment.

He was running out of time and there were still no improvements or big developments among the cultivators that the Tiankong Siblings were training. They’d started using crazy methods to try and make them understand laws, lighting them on fire, tying them to rocks and pushing them into the sea, trapping them in caves for weeks at a time, injecting them with powerful poisons, and many other harsh treatments. None of them seemed to work.

As the days passed and the plains continued on without end, Sage had to put his hope into one last card. He used up the last of the mature insect swarms to push his strength to the peak one last time, stopping his escape and turning to face the giant tortoise flinging fire to destroy the huge horde of bugs. The swarm was quite large this time, splitting into three parts to give his other enemies something to occupy themselves with.

He needed a bit of time for this. His eyes flickered, vibrating at a strange resonance as he turned the Hypnotic Eye upon the tortoise. It barely slowed the monster down, but it did get him some eye contact for just a moment and that was when Sage reached out, calling upon one of the Spirit Powers he learned on that Psychic World. His mind connected to that of the massive beast and a rush of memories traveled back and forth between them.

Soul Resonance!