A master cultivator never entered a fight without a clear strategy if they could help it.

A master cultivator never entered a group fight at all, strategy or not, unless the difference in power was enormous!

There was some romantic idea—Dorian blamed the poets and the bards for this—of one hero mowing down a dozen of his peers. Say, a Godking with a Multiversal Ranking of 20 slaying five peers of slightly lesser standing (a few Godkings ranked in the lower double-digits, maybe).

This was plainly insane. Unless it was one of those truly untouchable forces in this Multiverse—like his stuck-up brother Houyi—that Top-20 Godking was screwed!

Dorian’s minimum ‘one-versus-many’ threshold was usually one full power level above the many. In this case, he found himself in the weird situation of being one full power level below the many Torchdragons coming for him with unsettling swiftness—and yet perhaps due to his hyper-bloated reserves, he was still in effect a half-step stronger. These were uncharted waters.

[Serpent’s Senses!]

He bought himself a bare few seconds to think—a bare few seconds watching the colossal shadows of twining Torchdragons thicken, darken, grow ever-clearer as they raced for the Sinkhole’s surface.

[Level Up!]

[Serpent’s Senses] Lv. 1 -> 2

Nice. The burn rate to his qi hadn’t slowed, but now he could push even further—his senses slowed past tenfold to elevenfold, twelvefold…

Still, there were too many variables. Too little time, even with this level-up—those things were coming up at a blistering pace. Getting out of this clean and unscathed might be optimistic…. he snuck a glance at his newly regrown foot. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

There was a shock of thunderclaps as they broke the surface, dashing waves of Spirit Water across the shore. And then they were upon him.

Five, all rising at once, ugly knots of planes and sharp angles and piercing white teeth, great tongues of oil arching straight for him.

Dorian winced. Why was that bastard Houyi popping into his mind each time he faced these things? But perhaps it was natural; the man had taught Dorian how to fight, after all. His voice filtered in as clearly as if he were at Dorian’s side: “When forced to fight a group, always strike first. Eliminate them one by one with prejudice.”

Dorian summoned his Javelin, drew out a few thick Yama’s Chains, and went for it.

The Yama’s Chains he thrust out as pure distractions—to buy some time as he went for the first Torchdragon. The brunt of his focus was on nailing his Javelin’s arc to meet the nearest Torchdragon’s wide-open mouth. In it went, and he felt the satisfying ripping of Javelin on innards.

The rest of his attention, meanwhile, was spent on keeping those other little fuckers at bay as he hollowed out the first. He harried them, shoved them about with his Chains, and otherwise drew up a dense web of shadow. When a Torchdragon ripped through his efforts he leapt under it. Into its shadow he went. Out he popped amid the big swathe of shade made by the walls on the other side of the Sinkhole, unscathed—and his Javelin had at last carved through its victim, sending its body cratering into the waters. One down!

Dorian grinned. Maybe he’d been too cautious in his assessment. Maybe he was just a very good matchup against these creatures—too small to get ahold of, too powerful to snap up in a bite! The first one had gone down easy enough! Four to go. Simple.

And that instant of hubris, that fraction of time he let himself relax, made all the difference.

Four brutish heads whirled to glare at him.

Then they all opened their mouths, some fifty paces from him.

Out poured thick gobs of molten-rock qi.

Dorian snorted. His Serpent Senses were still active. They sapped so little of his powers nowadays that he hardly ever needed to turn them off in a fight. These gobs—while nasty-looking, and certain to deal great damage should they connect—hadn’t a prayer’s shot of hitting him!

And then the gobs vanished.

….Wait.

It took a beat for him to deduce where they went. That was a beat he’d wish he could get back very, very soon.

His heart sank like a stone.

He almost stepped into the shadows beside him on instinct. That would have ended this run then and there.

He leapt up, clinging onto his Javelin hovering mid-air, and only barely avoided death by burning.

From that shadow—from the shadows all around him, beneath his feet, even above him—enveloping him—came a stream of massive gobs, swallowing up the sky, flooding the world, welding into a huge dome all around him. A dome of qi hot as the Nine Hells. He wasn’t the only one who could send shit through the shadow-space! And it was coming fast, and in such vast quantities, a sea of the stuff pouring through the shadows—too fast for him escape this closing trap through the vanishing sliver of light above him. He at least had the wherewithal to produce a qi-lamp from his Interspatial Ring, dispelling the shadows starting to form on himself, before the dome closed up for good. Before he was locked in this hellish furnace.

And then the furnace began to shrink at an alarming rate.

He couldn’t even exit through the shadow-space; it was filled with steaming-hot qi! He was stuck, suddenly hemmed in by this mass of horrible boiling qi advancing on him from all sides. He was stuck here, clinging onto his Javelin mid-air, helpless. It was grotesque.

He couldn’t even use Void Shield, that marvelous new Technique he hadn’t even gotten a chance to dust off and try! That thing would use shadow to envelop the enemy’s attack. But the enemy’s attack came from within the shadow itself. The fight had turned on him so fast he felt like he’d gotten whiplash. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

He had maybe half a heartbeat’s time before those walls smothered him utterly, melting him to mere bones. Stretched out with Serpent’s Senses that made for a little over six heartbeats’ time—barely anything. FUCK—

Beat one. He tapped his Interspatial Ring and chucked out a shield artifact, just to test it. The oily attack turned the shield to smoke in an instant. Shit.

Beat two. He tried another artifact. A chunk of obsidian. But Torchdragon’s qi when superheated was the stuff of the inner volcanoes of the higher planes; even from here Dorian could feel its shocking heat scalding his skin. This stuff burned through anything. There was no escape. He even threw a Yama’s Chain at it, just to see if he could disrupt the wall even a little. Nope. Burned up on contact, like that. Just sank into the wall and smoked to nothing.

Hells, this Bloodline is potent!

Beat three. Panic beat. It was starting to hit him just how dire this was. Now the attack had closed in on him so much he felt his skin starting to squirm; the skin on the back of his hands were already starting to peel off his body.

Beat four was when the idea came. If there’s one thing that has a hope of surviving the superheated qi of a Torchdragon—it’s the bones of the Torchdragon itself!

The last two beats he spent hurriedly constructing perhaps the shittiest flood shelter in Multiverse history.

First he yanked out that piss-stained skull. Then he squeezed himself into it, qi-lamp still tucked at his side, while yanking out every last chunk of Torchdragon skeleton he had in his Interspatial Ring.

There were only four openings he had to account for. Two eye holes, two nose holes. The jaw was welded shut enough—he’d just have to trust it’d hold.

Those holes he plugged with as many bones and fragments as he could. And then, in the final moments before impact, he threw up four Yama’s Chains to pack the things in tight. Hold them in place.

The impact was less brutal than he’d expected. Less an instant walloping, more a soft start—then a steady increase of pressure, a constricting. Dorian gritted his teeth. Was it working? There was an ominous hiss above him, but at least for now the bone hadn’t melted to slag. It had gotten uncomfortably hot. But that was all.

He sensed the Bloodline Resonances drawing nearer. He sensed within them a confusion—as in, why is the human not dead yet? And then, one by one, the confusions dissipated. They felt, or saw, what he was doing. Despite it all he was holding them off. Their strike had failed. He was rather miserable in here—it was far hotter than his liking, and he should never have let this attack get half this far—but it was a moot point. He’d survived.

Yet they did not let up, weirdly. If anything they poured more qi into the mix. And so Dorian lay there, suspended mid-air in this skull inside a sphere of boiling qi, holding back the flood and wondering just what the hells these creatures were up to.

As far as he could tell the bones weren’t melting in the slightest. They were only getting hotter.

And hotter.

And hotter…

…

So hot the air was starting to hurt his lungs to breathe. And he knew then what they were trying.

He had made a shelter, true—but seen another way, he was like prey trapped in a pot of its own creation.

And these Beasts intended to cook him alive!