With a great twisting of her perception, Jun Li fell through empty space, feeling herself pulled in contradictory directions. In the faintly swirling darkness of her descent, she could not tell if some gravitational force was tugging at her from the side, or if she had simply begun to spin as she fell.

  Instantly, color returned to Jun Li’s sight as the space around her normalized, sending her plummeting towards solid ground. With a split-second glance at her surroundings as she fell, Jun Li saw that the other eleven disciples were present, falling with her, and that they were now in some unfamiliar, seemingly underground space.

  With some rudimentary Qinggong, Jun Li righted her orientation mid-air.

  With her perspective corrected, Jun Li looked out over the Earth Dragon’s Grave while she landed. Within a single second of proper observation, it was clear why this Secret Realm was named the way it was.

  Far above, lining the walls and roof of this immense, cavern-like space, were the bones of an ancient beast the likes of which made Jun Li’s heart leap when she realized what she was looking at.

  The space was vast indeed. Larger than Lanxiu by double or more. And even so, no direction was spared from the sight of the skeletonized coils of the colossal Earth Dragon that defined this space.

  From the deepest recesses where the bones dove through and surfaced from the stone, to the peaked ridges of earth grasped by its claw, to the center of the realm, where the head rested, its jaw gaping open towards the earth, eternally preserved with the agony of its final moments.

  In the presence of the great being whose death created this Secret Realm, many of the disciples had the same thought. ‘Just what could have caused this beast to die like this?’

  When the dozen touched down onto the ruddy stone below, an explosion rang out, and shattered pieces of stone battered many of those gathered, to little effect.

  Guarding against the hail of stones with the sleeve of his robe, Qin Yihua saw the source of the blast and yelled out. “Bai Yuelin!” By the time his words had rung out, Bai Yuelin was already disappearing into the distance, the explosion born from the force of her starting sprint.

  ”Going for last decade’s Drop right out of the gate!?” Grasping the hilt of his greatsword, Qin Yihua shot forward in pursuit, followed by Guan Heng, who charged forward at a speed disturbing to see from someone of his bulk.

  ”Damn…!” Frustrated at how quickly things had started, Jun Li let out a sigh and decided to pursue the three ‘seeds.’

  Jun Li raised her right leg back, as if reeling back to kick a cuju ball, and formed the spherical mass of the Glass Cloud Art.

  However, Jun Li’s Movement Technique could no longer be accurately called ‘the Glass Cloud Art.’

  With a sharp swing of her leg, Jun Li scraped the mass of Qi against the ground, imparting an incredible spin on it.

  With the keening sound of etching glass, Jun Li’s Technique distorted, thinning and stretching under the force of its rotation before splitting open in the center, forming a hollow, spokeless wheel.

  Jun Li leaned forward, as if to tip over entirely, but the instant the wheel of Qi touched the ground, she shot forward with such force that the air resistance pushed her back to an upright posture. If she had started in such a posture, the sudden wind pressure would have forced her to flip back before she could brace herself.

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  Within seconds, Jun Li had caught up with Qin Yihua and Guan Heng, racing over ravines of orange stone and red dust, and through bone arches of silvery grey.

  Glancing back at their unexpected competition, the two men had a similar thought. ‘That alchemist? Just who are they…?’

  But, just as Jun Li pursued them, they pursued Bai Yuelin and could spare no thought for any other factors.

  Moments ahead, Bai Yuelin traced up the cracks and seams of the realm's central mountain like a river flowing in reverse. Jun Li couldn’t help but feel some curiosity at her impressive-looking Movement Technique.

  When the two men and Jun Li reached the mountain and began their ascent, Jun Li quickly noticed something about the ‘stone’ before them.

  Grey in color and hard as rock, the shape of the mountain before them revealed its true nature as the desiccated and calcified viscera of the Earth Dragon. Looking up, one could only see the Beast’s maw looming from above, as if it had literally been forced to vomit up its guts as it died.

  ’What a horrifying way to die, and for such an incredible beast…’ Although these were Jun Li’s thoughts, it was a sentiment shared by the disciples ahead of her as well.

  ”Hmm!?” The sound of cracking caught each disciple’s attention, as Bai Yuelin’s passage garnered the attention of something below.

  In Guan Heng’s path, a mammalian scavenger beast that bore features resembling a furless hound crawled up from a crumbling orifice of this calcified mountain of viscera, leering at him as if it thought he had come to compete for ancient, rotten flesh.

  Before Qin Yihua, the disturbance of subterranean beasts caused the ‘ground’ before him to crumble, spewing bursts of noxious gas born of untold years of rot and decay. It could not be said what horrible effect these fumes might have on the human body.

  Around Jun Li, a swarm of flesh-feeding insects crawled out from holes too numerous and small to perceive, gathering together in a frenzy, flying in circles and spirals at the opportunity for fresher sustenance.

  Within seconds, the emerging swarm began to flood over Jun Li like a wave, intent on peeling her open like a fruit and crawling inside.

  “Ice Lotus Scripture - Pale Shell!” Slamming her palms together, Jun Li’s fingers contorted into a hand seal, and a thin layer of ice rapidly spread across her body, from the palms of her hands to the tips of her hairs.

  When the insects crashed over Jun Li, attempting to cut into her skin with their mandibles, the ice barred their path. Beneath this layer of ice, Jun Li’s lips moved. “…Expand!”

  With the sound of popping and creaking, the ice surrounding Jun Li began to puff up into a vague shape, the previously transparent ice turning cloudy.

  As it did, the insects that relentlessly stuck to Jun Li and continued to assail her found themselves unable to move. Within one breath, their legs were swallowed by the expanding ice. Within two breaths, the rest of their bodies followed suit.

  Now, where Jun Li and the insects stood, only a cloudy mass of hazy ice stood, speckled with innumerable dots of black.

  The ice began to creak further, and further, cracks running through its surface until, finally, the entire structure burst, clumps of ice as large as a torso collapsing to the calcified ground below as Jun Li freed herself from the shell that served as a trap.

  Looking to her peers, Jun Li saw that the spouting streams of gas that had interrupted Qin Yihua's path had been parted, as though by a great stream of wind, and Qin Yihua himself surged forward on the other side of his obstruction, easily having passed through.

  Guan Heng charged in pursuit, although his sleeve was torn by an attack of fang and claw, no blood could be seen, save for what he tossed aside as he moved to continue his ascent.

  When Jun Li glanced at the bloody thing Guan Heng tossed aside, her heart skipped a beat as she realized, it was the crushed and mangled corpse of the hound-like beast he had been faced with, compressed into an uneven sphere, spurting blood as it decompressed and unfolded across the ground, run through with its own shattered bones.

  'Is that really the strength of someone in the Crimson Palace stage…!?'