The sky over Sector 4 wasn't just dark; it appeared bruised. A tear in reality, jagged and pulsing with sickening violet light that dominated the horizon. This was the "Gaping Maw," a massive rift that had torn open the fabric of the Wastes like a rotten cloth.

  Beneath it the white sands were stained black with the chitin of thousands of Void-Chitin Beetles. In the center of the swarm, a golden barrier flickered, barely holding back the tide. Inside, ten cultivators fought back-to-back.

  "My Qi is running dry!" a person shouted. His shield shattered under the weight of three of the beetles.

  "Hold the line!" A woman’s voice cut through the chaos. She stood at the center, her robes were torn and she was wielding a sword. It was someone that Li Yu would have recognized. High Mystic Caelia of the Southern Continent was pale and her spiritual energy drained to dangerous levels but her eyes remained fierce. She was a powerhouse but even she couldn't fight an infinite army forever while protecting everyone else.

  Beside her, a young woman moved like liquid wind. Her sword was a blur of azure light, decapitating beetles with surgical precision. It was none other than Sylvia, the "Azure Wind."

  "Master!" Sylvia gasped while deflecting a mandible strike that had slipped past the outer guard. "There are too many! Their General is advancing as well."

  They looked up. Striding through the sea of beetles was a nightmare. A Void-Chitin General, standing twelve feet tall. It was a mutated beast that looked like a cross between a mantis and an armored tank. Its armor was thick enough to deflect their attacks and its scythe-arms dripped with corrosive void energy.

  The General screeched as it was raising a scythe that gleamed with violet light. It brought the limb down in a horizontal arc, a wave of force blades screaming toward the exhausted team.

  Caelia stepped forward while gritting her teeth. She slammed her foot into the ground and made several hand seals with her unarmed hand. She was summoning the last reserves of her energy to reinforce the barrier.

  CRACK.

  The barrier held but the backlash made Caelia fall to one knee. Blood was trickling from her nose. The impact rattled her bones and entire body. She had bared the grunt of it for the others.

  BOOM.

  A second sound echoed across the battlefield. It didn't come from the rift. It came from the south.

  The ground shook violently, knocking beetles off their feet.

  "What is that?" Sylvia shouted.

  A cloud of dust was tearing across the Wastes. At the head of the cloud was a massive centipede. It was flying low to the ground like a runaway train.

  "Is that... a centipede?" Caelia whispered while wiping the blood from her lip.

  On the back of the giant centipede stood a figure holding a black staff. Li Yu and his team didn't slow down one bit. He saw the barrier, general and the nearly collapsed team.

  "Tekton," Li Yu shouted over the wind. "Smash them!"

  'Lunch time!' Tekton roared. He rammed directly into the flank of the beetle swarm.

  CRUNCH.

  It was the sound of hundreds of armored shells being pulverized instantly. Tekton plowed through the army like a hot knife through butter. His metal shell ignored the beetles' attacks completely while crushing them at the same time. He thrashed his massive body about and was sending broken husks flying into the air.

  'Spicy!' Tekton laughed to himself as he snapped a beetle in half with his mandibles. 'I love spicy food! Nutritious too!'

  Li Yu leaped from Tekton’s back as he rammed into the beetles. He soared through the air and was arcing over the heads of the stunned Alliance team. He then blurred and landed directly in front of the Void-Chitin General.

  The General hissed as it sensed a new threat. It swung its massive scythe down, aiming to split this new arrival in two. Nothing could stop its might.

  Li Yu didn't dodge the incoming blow. He planted his feet. He gripped Star-Crusher with both hands. ‘The Mountain Collapse.’ He channeled the weight of his being into the tip of his staff and brought it up.

  THWACK.

  The staff met the General’s scythe.

  There was no contest to speak of. The mutated bone scythe shattered into a thousand fragments. The staff continued its upwards trajectory, completely unbothered by the obstruction and slammed into the General’s head.

  BOOM.

  The impact was visceral. The General was driven upward but it was now missing a head. The head had been completely erased. Only the body remained as it flew upwards and then down. The shockwave blew the surrounding beetles away from where he had stood.

  Li Yu stood over the dead body of the general with his staff resting on it. He gave it a few pokes to make sure that it was truly dead.

  "That," Li Yu noted, "was satisfying."

  From his chest two streaks of light shot out.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "Si Luo. Bai Ruo. Support the perimeter."

  Si Luo appeared in a flash of purple smoke. She was clad in her full battle armor. It was a suit of woven violet void-silk that covered her from neck to toe and it was somehow shimmering like it was made of metal. Her face was serious and didn’t have any of her usual playfulness. She knew when it was time to play and when it was time to get to work.

  "Filthy bugs," Si Luo hissed.

  She raised both her hands. Thousands of razor-thin threads shot out and turned the air around the remaining beetles into a meat grinder.

  Bai Ruo appeared elsewhere on the battlefield. She had a look of determination on her face. She wasn’t one to underestimate an opponent and her scholarly traits carried out onto the battlefield. She was analyzing, predicting and planning her best course of action. She slapped her hands onto the ground.

  "Spatial... Lock!"

  A ripple of distortion spread out and was freezing the smaller beetles in place and slowing down the stronger ones. This made them even easier targets for Tekton and the recovering Alliance team.

  Inside the barrier that had barely withstood the attacks moments ago, Sylvia lowered her sword. Her mouth was slightly agape as she saw the four newcomers and how drastically they were changing the battlefield.

  "Master..." she whispered while fighting and watching the carnage. "That back... that staff..."

  Caelia let out a breath she didn't know she was holding. She watched the young man continue his attack to the other beetles as if he hadn't just flattened a creature that nearly killed her.

  "The freak has arrived," Caelia murmured with a tired smile tugging at her lips. She’s seen Li Yu fight a few times now and each time was a surprise. He continuously got better and she couldn’t see his depths. His companions were powerful as well, all at least on the same level as her. She had already heard the stories of him capturing Tekton and destroying one of the strongest clans on this continent.

  Li Yu fought for a bit more to make sure the pressure was lessened. Once he saw that things were relatively more safe he turned to the barrier.

  "Is everyone okay?" Li Yu asked.

  The barrier flickered and then disappeared. The massive threat was gone now and it was just a clean up job. Caelia stepped forward to greet him. She was wielding her sword and was breathing heavily. It would take a bit more time before she would be recovered from the intense battle.

  "Li Yu," she said with her voice steady despite her exhaustion. "You certainly know how to make an entrance. Thank the ancestors you came when you did."

  Li Yu was taken back when he finally noticed who it was. He had been so focused on killing and ensuring safety that he hadn’t thought to scan people’s faces with his spiritual sense. He smiled brightly. "High Mystic Caelia! Sylvia! I didn't know you were on this team! It is good to see familiar faces. Happy to see that you are both relatively unharmed."

  Sylvia sheathed her sword and was also walking up to him. She looked at the crater from Tekton’s entrance. She looked at Tekton, who was currently crunching on a beetle leg like a dog with a bone. The beetles were scattering in different directions but were being chased by him. She looked over at Si Luo and Bai Ruo and were impressed by their abilities.

  "We joined this team after splitting up with you. After deciding that we were going to help close rifts, we let the Alliance headquarters know and they assigned us into this team." Sylvia said. "We... we thought we were dead."

  "Not today. You were also willing to fight to protect the towns near here." Li Yu said. He looked up at the rift. The tear in the sky was still pulsing, though the flow of beasts had stopped drastically after the general fell.

  Li Yu walked toward the rift. Si Luo and Bai Ruo followed him.

  "Do you have a way to close it? Last time, I only sealed the area around it so beasts coming here couldn’t escape. I had to wait until it closed on its own." Li Yu asked them.

  Bai Ruo pulled out a strange device that looked like a compass. "It's a large tear but natural. It will collapse on itself within an hour or so."

  Si Luo looked at the rift and her milky eyes narrowed. "This is a natural occurrence. We should study this as best as we can. Try to learn from it, perhaps we will learn something that will let us get back home."

  While the two women worked on the rift with Bai Ruo calculating spatial laws and Si Luo weaving a net of void-silk to "clog" the opening, Li Yu returned to the group. He had agreed with the two that they should study it while it was still up. He had tried to before but he learned just a little.

  The surviving Alliance members were staring at him with a mixture of awe and fear. They realized who it was after seeing the centipede. They had all heard the stories of his feats already.

  "Thank you," the team leader, a man missing an arm but still standing managed to say. "We owe you our lives."

  "Just doing what is expected of me. You are the true heroes for holding on as long as you did." Li Yu. "Heal up. The rift will be gone soon. We will take over guard duty of it until it closes."

  Caelia walked over to him. She studied him closely. Caelia had done this several times already, as though she wanted to understand and see through him more. She couldn’t believe someone so young was this strong.

  "You've gotten stronger," she said softly. "Much stronger. The rumors were true. When we were coming to this continent, I thought you were strong... but this? That General was at the peak of Soul Formation power or even more. You crushed it like a bug."

  "I have been eating well since arriving here." Li Yu grinned. "And exercising."

  "And who are they?" Sylvia asked while nodding toward Si Luo and Bai Ruo. "They feel... different. Their Qi is strange. And that woman... her weaving technique is terrifying. They don’t feel any weaker than my master."

  "New companions," Li Yu said simply. "Local experts I met in the Wastes. They are helping me navigate. We have formed a team."

  Sylvia raised an eyebrow. "You picked up two women in the middle of a desert wasteland? Two women that are as strong as my master? Are these experts like cabbage alongside the road to be plucked?"

  "It's a long story on how we met," Li Yu sighed.

  Sylvia just shook her head. "Of course it does."

  The rest of the team sat down to consume healing pills and harvest materials from slain beasts, including the dead Void-General. Li Yu finished his conversation with Caelia and Sylvia and let them go to rest as well. He walked back towards the rift.

  Si Luo and Bai Ruo were standing at the edge of the tear. The violet light illuminated their faces.

  "See this?" Si Luo pointed to a ripple in the energy. "This frequency. It matches somewhat to the World-Veins around our realm as well. If we can find a rift like this that is stable and allows access for us to enter... we might be able to use it as a door."

  "Instead of an exit?" Li Yu asked.

  "Exactly," Bai Ruo nodded while scribbling notes into a jade slip. "But we need a Key or some sort of technique. Something that resonates with both this world and ours. We need to study these natural tears more closely."

  Li Yu looked at the swirling void. Somewhere on the other side of that purple curtain was a world he had promised to help them reach. He too wanted to explore. There were many different realms to visit and explore and he wanted to see them all.

  "We'll find a way," Li Yu promised. "We have time on our side. One day we will figure it out."

  He turned back to the desert. The sun was rising now.

  'Li Yu,' Tekton called out while dragging one of the scythe arms from the general. 'Can we keep this? It would make a great back-scratcher.'

  Li Yu laughed at the sight. "Sure, Tekton. Put it in the inventory."