Unlike a usual fog that would spread out and dissipate, the {Mystic Realm} fog stayed in a small compact area around half the size of the central courtyard.
Considering it was an S-grade ability Ashlock was baffled. There had to be so much more to it than a simple fog blocking his senses. Panic had naturally set in as Stella, Diana, Larry, and even Maple, who might be in a higher realm than him, hadn't returned from the fog.
The stone in the central courtyard cracked and fell aside as black roots surged from within the mountain and into the dense fog. Ashlock tried to sense anything through his roots, but they felt numb as if he'd dipped his toes in freezing water.
The fog began to sparkle with a myriad of colors as if someone had dumped glitter into it. Ashlock's numb roots then began to feel different sensations. One felt burning hot, another in warm water, another in sand.
It was beyond perplexing, as Ashlock had no idea what was happening inside the fog. He tried to control the fog and bring it closer to his trunk so he could get a better look, but it refused to budge.
Everything about this skill was beyond confusing, and Ashlock felt frustrated at his inability to help.
***
Stella inwardly cursed as a strange white fog that cut off all her senses enveloped her. She looked down at her feet, which felt weightless—the floor was gone. There was only a ghostly fog that swirled around her feet. Was she standing on a cloud?
"Diana, what is going on—" Stella realized Diana wasn't standing beside her anymore. She desperately looked around, but only the weird white fog could be seen.
Finally, after frantically searching for Diana and coming up with nothing, she stepped forward hesitantly and began wandering through the swirling fog.
"Tree! Diana! Anyone!" She shouted into the fog all around her, but nobody responded. It was eerie. She held her sword tightly in her grip as her heart pounded in her chest.
Then her surroundings began to change—the white fog became filled with flakes of shattered glass that gleamed and showed tiny bits of scenery.
Some pieces were tiny, no larger than a speck of dust, but others were the size of her hand. One of these larger ones drifted by, and Stella caught a glimpse of a lightning storm within as if she were looking through a tiny window into another world.
Curious, Stella reached out and poked it as the shard floated by. She then yelped as the hard floor she had been standing on vanished from beneath her, and in blinding light, she dropped down.
Blinking the blinding light away, Stella found herself standing on a grey surface—all around were black clouds flashing with lightning. Thunder roared in her ears, and hail rushed upwards like a reverse waterfall.
"Alright, where in the nine realms is this?" Stella yelled, and only the roaring thunder replied.
Moments ago, she had been enjoying a pleasant morning in the central courtyard atop Red Vine Peak. Then Ash had wanted to test a new technique, and now she was in some weird upside-down world inside a storm. She was all alone, and no matter where she looked, there was no sign of Diana, Maple, or even Larry.
The grey surface below her trembled, and then she heard a terrifying roar. The sturdy ground beneath her vibrated and shifted as if it were alive.
Then, looking behind her, she saw the grey surface tilt upwards and reveal a tail the size of a mountain. At this moment, Stella realized she wasn't standing on land, as she had been moving this entire time. It had just been hard to tell without a point of reference.
Stella clamped her mouth shut and hoped the supersized sky whale she stood on would forget about her. A while passed, and the trembling stopped.
While waiting, she had desperately looked around but couldn't find a way out of this place. The weird fog had vanished, and she hadn't learned her portal technique yet. "Ash, have you sent me here to die?" Stella muttered as her hands clenched.
She then shook her head. If Ash's new technique was really that dangerous, she was confident he would find a way to bring her back with time. "He considers you family...there's no way he would send you here to die," Stella quietly convinced herself.
All she needed to do was wait, make the best of this disaster, and turn it into an opportunity.
With a sigh, Stella decided to sit down cross-legged and cultivate. She had enough food within her spatial ring to last years and could always melt the upside-down hail into water.
Closing her eyes, she began to meditate and try to connect with heaven. Unfortunately, the whispers of heaven's will were once again difficult to understand, and Stella sincerely wished she had another truffle to make the greatest use of this opportunity.
After a while, she had to stop cultivating, as her Soul Core was overwhelmed.
"Phew, the Qi is so dense here. Is this an upper realm or something?" Stella wondered aloud as her body overflowed with power. "I should be careful. If I cultivate too much pure Qi like this, I'll find it difficult to continue cultivating with that weaker Qi if I ever return to Red Vine Peak."
While taking a break, Stella watched the clouds flashing with lightning. She knew for a fact that the lightning Dao was intoxicating here. So, with her Soul Core overflowing with power, she coated herself in purple flames and reached out her hand.
She paused briefly as she prepared for the pain—even with her Dao comprehension of lightning, it was undoubtedly a no-pain, no-gain type of Dao to contemplate.
"Well, here goes nothing." Stella closed her eyes and tried to call the lightning to her.
For better or worse, it answered.
Like when Ashlock formed his Star Core, Stella's hand became the focal point for all the lightning in the area. After just a few strikes hit her hand, she could already feel her flesh burning and had to pop a low-grade healing pill to endure the pain.
***
Diana breathed out a cloud of vapor due to the cold as she stood upon a tiny iceberg the size of a small courtyard. She surveyed the perfectly calm waters surrounding her in all directions until the horizon.
"Is this a pocket realm?" Diana mused to herself as she tried to ignore the panic rising in her chest. She knew her spatial ring didn't have many supplies for an extended stay inside such a perilous place.
Cultivators could survive for a long time without food or water, but Diana wasn't in the Star Core Realm, so her need for sustenance hadn't been fully overcome yet.
Getting down on her knees, she plunged her head into the icy water and was amazed at its clarity. The crystal-clear waters gave her a full view of the endless nothingness below her tiny iceberg. It was just a void of water that got darker the deeper she looked.
There wasn't a single fish in sight, nor the ocean floor. She whipped her head back out of the water and frowned.
"Is this entire world nothing but ocean?" Diana mused as she collected the water from her hair into a Qi ball above her palm and dumped it back into the ocean.
Rubbing her chin in deep thought, Diana came to a conclusion. Out of those weird shards within the fog that gave glimpses of other worlds, she had felt the most compelled to grab onto this one, likely from its extreme amount of water Qi, which her body was naturally drawn toward.
Deciding there was nothing for her to do in this situation, she sat down on the iceberg and began to meditate.
A long time passed, and Diana felt overwhelmed with power. Although she had just broken into the 7th stage, she felt herself closing in on the bottleneck for the 8th stage, as the Qi here was so pure.
She then noticed something odd as she breathed out and fully emerged from her zen-like state.
The ocean was...gone.
The iceberg was on the ocean floor, which was nothing but black mud.
The clouds that had dotted the sky suddenly looked so far away as she gazed up.
Diana stood and stepped off the iceberg with a squelch as the muddy ocean floor splattered on her clothes and enveloped her shoe like quicksand.
Using her cultivation, she could extract the moisture out of the mud around her, making it hard enough to walk upon. Looking all around, she couldn't see anything but black mud in all directions, so she decided to walk in a random direction and began wandering the endless mudflats.
Eventually, she stumbled upon a group of sparkling rocks buried under the mud. She had only noticed one of the rocks, as a tiny piece stuck out from the black mud and was made very obvious.
Naturally, she summoned a sword to her hand and cautiously approached the suspicious rock. Then, with the very tip of her sword, she tapped the sparking rock, and the entire ground trembled.
"Expected as much," Diana commented in a dull tone as she stepped back and watched the mud explode. Hundreds of tendrils resembling spines of bone lashed out as if searching for the one who disturbed them.
Within the center of these tendrils was a gaping maw where each tooth ended in a tiny sparkling rock. Diana calmly evaluated the monster, memorizing its attack pattern and searching for a weakness.
She estimated its cultivation realm to be slightly below hers, but it had the terrain advantage, as its massive body was mostly protected by a thick layer of mud.
Diana slowly circled the creature as she made great use of the abundant water Qi lingering in the air to fill the entire area with her mist. It still carried a hint of demonic Qi, which seemed to startle the monster as it thrashed out violently with its tendrils, trying to hit the laughing illusions.
"So the monster has sight or hearing, then," Diana mumbled as she kept looking for an opening. If she could destroy its sensory organ, then killing the creature would be simple.
Diana hated to admit it, but she did feel a hint of desperation. This was the first living creature she had come across, and she had no idea how long she would be stuck in this pocket realm or how to even get back.
As far as she was concerned, this was a life-or-death battle. Her only solace was that her foe seemed incapable of movement, so she could always slowly whittle it down as she recovered outside its attack range.
Noting an opening as one of its tendrils lashed out a bit too far into her mist, she dashed forward, coated her blade in blue flames, and swung down with as much might as she could muster.
A flash of earthy brown flames coated the tendril at the last moment, which absorbed her sword's flames, and her metal blade bounced off the surprisingly durable tendril despite it looking like a spine of brittle bone.
She skillfully dodged to the side as a second tendril of bone rushed past her face intending to skewer her and bring her cold corpse to the waiting maw of the monster.
The ground began to tremble. The monster slowly moved through the mud as if swimming toward her.
Diana calmly lept back and reassessed her attack plan from a safe distance. The monster was slow and fell for her illusions, but it was an earth-affinity, so its defensive powers, especially when half submerged in mud, would prove somewhat troublesome.
Tapping her sword on the mud in annoyance, Diana sighed as she watched the wiggling mess of tendrils move through the mud toward her.
"This is going to be a long battle..." Diana complained as she dashed through her mist again, dodging random tendrils as she went. The only path to victory she could see was abusing her superior cultivation stage to outlast the monster and deplete all of its Qi.
However, despite the circumstances, Diana couldn't help but grin, as she knew that after this fight, she would be on the verge of the 8th stage of the Soul Fire Realm.
***
Diana was confident that days' worth of time had passed in this pocket realm, yet the sun had remained in the exact same position the entire time, beating down her back with its scorching heat. She hadn't noticed it when she first arrived, but without any shade, this was more like a desert than a frozen waterworld.
Sweat dripped from her short hair and face, yet she dared not use any Qi to remove the water, as she needed to conserve every drop of Qi in her Soul Core.
Even with her running off and cultivating outside of the monster's reach, it hurled lumps of Qi-charged mud in her direction, meaning she could never stay still for too long, and if she strayed too far, she feared the monster would retreat underground and recuperate its Qi.
Her only chance at victory was relying on its stupidity and rage to keep it aboveground. And its hunger. It was likely just as hungry as she was due to the lack of food around here.
Diana stumbled as she cycled her Qi—using her sword as a makeshift cane.
As she had gotten more tired, the monster had landed some hits on her. None lethal, thankfully. But they had left nasty gashes that had been healed with her rapidly decreasing supply of healing pills.
She had cut off a load of the monster's tendrils over the past few days, and the last few were sagging on the ground as the beast was worn out. Deciding she had dragged it out long enough and with no will to continue this farce, she now charged in with an aimed strike.
Her target? A weird dome hidden off to the side of the monster's maw where most of its tendrils originated. Diana had identified it as the likely location of the monster's brain.
Ducking under a sluggish tendril and sliding through the mud, she stabbed at the fleshy dome and wasn't surprised when a final flicker of brown flames defended it. Unfazed, she summoned a dagger from her spatial ring and viciously stabbed at the fleshy dome with all her stored-up wrath.
Murky green blood sprayed everywhere, and a tendril aiming at her slammed into the mud beside her and all the other tendrils that flopped down with sickening squelching sounds into the black mud.
The monster had been slain, and Diana shakily stood up, sighing in relief and wiping the sweat, blood, and mud from her eyes.
She began looting the monster's corpse, as it was far too large to fit inside her spatial ring, but as she pulled off the shiny rocks from atop teeth that were taller than her, she felt the ground faintly tremble. Was another one of these monsters coming?
Climbing out of the monster's mouth and surveying the horizon from atop a tooth, she looked to the horizon opposite the sun and noticed that a new mountain range took up her entire view?
"That hadn't been there before..." Diana wondered as she heard a faint thundering sound accompany the trembling. It wasn't until Diana realized the mountain in the distance was getting closer that panic set in once again.
She fumbled to rip off as much as she could from the monster's corpse and then took off running. Her lungs burned from immense fatigue, and her Soul Core was utterly empty after the fight.
The small puddles of water amongst the mud vibrated as the trembling and roaring behind her worsened. She ran for what felt like an eternity, but the situation only grew more dire. A part of her didn't even want to look over her shoulder, but after finally collapsing from exhaustion onto the mud, she had no choice but to stare at the impending threat.
With the sun behind her back, there was no looming shadow, but she couldn't even see the sky anymore.
Now that it was close enough, she could confirm it had never been mountains.
Instead, it was a planet-sized wave of water and rock that was surging toward her at speeds many times her maximum running speed. This giant wave likely cycled around the pocket realm, obliterating everything in its path.
"I must have entered the pocket dimension on the other side of this wave." Diana cursed as she pushed herself up into a meditation position.
She now understood why nothing was alive here except the monster that could hide beneath the mud, as nothing could survive such a wave except maybe a Monarch Realm cultivator or a spirit beast.
"Is that what the beast tide is going to be like?" Diana mused as she looked up at her impending doom. She had never seen a beast tide, but from the legends she had heard of them, they were likely more survivable than this wave... She was so dead.
Diana decided to shut her eyes and prepare to die, but something poked her on the back.
Her eyes snapped open, and despite her exhaustion, she whirled around, ready to face another one of those monsters. Instead, she was greeted with a familiar black root and possible salvation.