When she opened her eyes, Jun Li's heart leapt. Not in response to what she could see, but from the violent noise of rushing wind that sheared across her ears as she flew uncontrolled through the air.
Tugging protectively at her limbs in response to her unexpected lapse in consciousness, Jun Li saw the Earth Dragon's heart vein, tied around her arm and trailing through the air behind her.
‘Oh, right! It worked!’ Suddenly understanding why she was flying through the air, Jun Li shifted her posture and assessed her momentum. Her flight path had somehow avoided the pillars that jutted up from the base of the cauldron, and at this rate, she would collide with the cauldron wall within a few moments.
’That’s intense…’ Glancing down to where she had come from, the heart in the center of the cauldron now seemed small in the distance, to the point that Jun Li could hold out her hand and entirely block it from her view if she wished.
Jun Li was aware that her cloudburst technique was capable of outputting exceptional power compared to what one might expect of her cultivation, but she never expected it would scale up so cleanly, just by increasing the volume of Qi used in the process.
Stowing away the heart vein that was spooled around her arm into her Spatial Ring, Jun Li drew her the saber that had become her new primary weapon, and with it in hand, crashed heavily into the side of the cauldron, thrusting her saber into the wall at an angle as she did, creating a brace for herself to hang from for a moment.
‘Damn…’ With some difficulty, Jun Li shook off the pain and disorientation of her collision. ‘I had that much force, even after flying this far…?’ The pain she felt didn't feel like an entirely bad thing to her, almost as if it were proof of her own strength.
’Yeah… I can definitely make it out of this pit, the way I am now.’ Still hanging from her embedded saber, Jun Li began to execute the Glass Cloud Art once more, a sphere of roiling Qi manifesting beneath her hanging foot.
Slowly but surely, that sphere expanded beyond its normal dimensions, reaching the same size as the one Jun Li had used to tear the heart vein from the flesh below.
But it didn’t stop there. Even as Jun Li began to feel nauseous from the outflow of Qi, she didn’t hesitate to continue investing more and more into her technique, knowing it was her ticket out of this vile pit.
For multiple minutes, Jun Li hung limp from her saber’s hilt, infusing her technique with more and more Qi, feeling the act become more difficult by the second.
Eventually, she stopped. Even as she hung there limply, the sphere of Qi’s circumference was so great that, to maintain contact with it, Jun Li’s leg pointed outward at an angle, the size of the sphere ballooning so far out of proportion that it lacked the space to rest directly beneath her, even as she hung a half-meter out from the wall.
Letting out a deep breath, Jun Li gathered her strength and kicked out, letting the twisting sphere fall away from her body and out from the wall. As it fell, its shape warped and distorted like a half-full waterskin, maintaining only a vaguely rounded silhouette as it wobbled through the air.
Watching it slowly drift away for a moment, Jun Li steadied her breath and quelled the dizziness the technique's exertion put on her. 'It figures… using up a third of my Qi in a single technique feels pretty bad.'
After a brief moment of recovery, Jun Li looked sharply towards the carelessly drifting sphere, and beneath her foot bloomed a simple sphere of the Glass Cloud Art, as mild and orthodox as any she had ever used.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Pulling her saber back to her Spatial Ring, Jun Li leapt from the edge of the cauldron, flying towards the sphere she had let loose.
Her aim, however, was not to land on or even touch the sphere with her body, and as she grazed past it, her leg swept out gently, placing the active manifestation of her current technique against the older one, before rotating the active technique to the greatest extent she could.
Like a small gear compelling a larger one, the rotation of Jun Li's technique sent the sphere spinning like a small planet, stabilizing its shape into that of an oblate spheroid, and agitating the roiling Qi within to a profoundly chaotic tempest.
As that instant of imparting rotational force passed, Jun Li continued her descent, falling past her old technique and down to the base of the pit below.
Landing heavily into the sludge below, Jun Li's active technique instantly ruptured under her weight, catapulting her back into the air with a sudden force she had long since grown used to.
When Jun Li looked down, she could see the sludge parted where she landed, revealing the stained stone below in a great ring, gradually being covered once again by the slowly flowing rot.
But that sight was quickly eclipsed by the drifting mass of her hetrodoxical manifestation of the Glass Cloud Art. "Perfect!" Adjusting her stance mid-air, Jun Li breathed in accordance with the weight-intensifying Qinggong method she had refined over the years, and quickly plummeted towards the technique.
As she did, she held her arms out to catch the air and hardened the silvery metal that now permeated her superficial fascia, guarding herself from the potentially self-destructive consequences of her methodology.
As Jun Li's extended foot pierced the center of the twisting mass of Qi, and its membranous surface split open, what followed was not the instantaneous release of pressure that Jun Li had previously experienced with her 'Cloudburst' technique, but instead something entirely different.
Due to the size of the technique, a single hole did not cause it to rupture completely. Instead, that hole served like a funnel or nozzle, rapidly forcing all the chaotic energy flowing within the technique to flow out of that one, singular point.
The scale of this technique was approximately thirty times larger than Jun Li's normal Cloudburst technique, and Jun Li expected that the force it imparted on her would scale up equally, or perhaps less than equally, suffering some manner of efficiency loss.
However, the reality was that the upwards force imparted by this technique was more than one hundred times greater, focused to unprecedented extremes by the unique 'nozzle phenomenon' created at this scale.
When the terrible noise of the force that enveloped her body tore into her ears, Jun Li's mind turned blank, unable to endure the incredible pain and sensory devastation that overwhelmed her.
With her eyes shut, and her body locked in place by the silvery metal under her skin, it took Jun Li a long moment to realize that the force around her had subsided.
Unable to think straight, Jun Li quickly allowed the silver beneath her skin to liquify, freeing herself enough to witness her circumstances.
Before she even opened her eyes, she could tell that the wind she stirred up had not entirely subsided, and instead tapered off into an almost-natural seeming squall that swept and tugged at her numbed skin.
Colliding into something, Jun Li spat up blood and finally caught sight of her surroundings.
Below, she could see the cauldron, completely consumed by a firestorm that stretched far above the pillars.
Dozens of beasts scrambled about on their pillars, seeking refuge from the flames that engulfed their habitat, some even attempting to flee towards the Earth Dragon's claw, though their own instincts forbade it even in the face of death by flames.
Many had already been ignited and now stumbled aimlessly as their flesh charred and curled.
In disbelief, Jun Li looked up to what she had collided with a moment ago.
There, a few measly body-lengths away, the very roof of the Earth Dragon's Grave loomed over Jun Li, the interstitching bones of the Earth Dragon, which she had collided with.
Witnessing what she had achieved with her own strength, accidental and self-destructive though it was, Jun Li felt an emotion she had never felt before, between awe, fear, and pride. 'Is this… seriously the power of the Crimson Palace realm…?'
