Fire Calamity Fruit

Mo Fan had pieced together the situation from their exchange. Seeing that Zhao Manyan was at a loss for words, he changed the subject. "So the burns on her body — those were caused by the flames here?"

Chenying pulled herself back from the edge of her bitterness and spoke in as level a tone as she could manage. "They came from the calamity flames. About twelve years ago, my father and mother traveled together to the North Corner of the Blazing Plains in search of a Fire Element Spirit Seed. They had no way of knowing a fire calamity would break out. They ran as hard as they could for the far edge, but the calamity rolled over them faster than they could run, and the flames were about to swallow them whole."

As she spoke, something shifted in Chenying's eyes. She only knew this story from her mother, but her mother had repeated it to her again and again across the years. Every time she heard it, Chenying could feel the grief and fury that lived inside her mother — the urge to claw the charred, ruined skin from her own body piece by piece. She had felt her mother's despair as though it were her own.

"That doesn't add up," Zhao Manyan said. "If your parents both ran into a fire calamity twelve years ago, they should both be dead. But my uncle Zhao Yulin is alive and well, living it up with his second wife."

"My mother's secondary element was Wind. To give one of them a chance to survive, she stripped herself of every Wind Element Enchanted Gear she had and channeled the last Wind Track she could manage — all of it — into my father. That's what brought him home without a scratch. He claimed the treasures he carried back were exactly what the clan needed most at the time, and that they helped the family through a serious crisis. After that, his standing in the clan was completely transformed."

The group fell quiet. They had all experienced the terror of a fire calamity firsthand. Faced with a force of nature like that, human beings were utterly small — the kind of dread that fills you completely, leaving room for nothing except turning and running.

To think clearly of another person in that moment. To pour everything you had into pushing them out of harm's way. That was truly extraordinary.

"My mother was swallowed by the calamity flames. But she survived — her primary element was Fire, and for reasons neither she nor anyone else could fully explain, she lived through it. A creature wreathed entirely in flames found her and came to her rescue, feeding her certain rare fruits native to the Blazing Plains. That was just barely enough to keep the fire from incinerating her organs along with everything else. She lived in the Blazing Plains for years. The damage to her body was severe, and she needed a very long time just to be able to move again. After many years, she encountered a pair of Hunter-mages who had come to the region in search of valuables. She traded rare treasures for their help, and they agreed to bring her back to Dunhuang."

"What happened after that — you can probably figure out. My father had no wish to disturb the comfortable life he'd built, so he simply refused to acknowledge her. He gave her some vague cover story and installed her in a house. He did hire a few well-known Healing Element mages to treat her, but he never truly tried. It's as if he never once stopped to think that every good thing he has today — every last bit of it — exists because my mother threw herself into those flames to save him. My mother's life is worse than death. The only reason she hasn't given up is because I promised her: I would find a way to cure her, no matter what."

As Chenying told this story, the quiet confidence that usually marked her face was entirely absent. What remained was layered with resentment and something that refused to accept defeat — it was plain that her mother's fate had carved itself deep into who she was.

"So that's why you came to the Blazing Plains," Mo Fan said. "But if your mother spent all that time here, why couldn't she find the cure herself? I'm guessing you came here because whatever can save her only exists in this place."

"Because it only grows after a fire calamity. The fruit appears only in the wake of calamity flames, and it doesn't survive long — a few days at most before it withers on its own. My mother stayed here for years and never once witnessed a calamity. After she returned, she asked my father to send people in after each calamity to retrieve the fruit. He never took it seriously — sometimes he missed the timing of the calamity entirely, other times the fruit's window had already closed. Year after year, my mother has remained as she is: a figure the entire clan sees as frightening and untouchable, like a ghost, a dependent in someone else's home."

"I learned from my mother how to calculate when a calamity would occur. I was still working out a way to cross the Shamang River when you happened to be coming here to find the Flame Queen — so I followed along."

With that, Chenying had laid everything bare. The reason she had been reluctant before was simple: this involved her parents' history — not easy to share with outsiders, and even harder to share with Zhao Manyan, who was family.

But Chenying understood that if she stayed silent, her teammates — who had already begun to doubt her — would not give her their full support. And without their help, there was no chance of getting her hands on a Fire Calamity Fruit. Curing her mother would become an even more distant dream.

"That explains why, when we first entered the Blazing Plains, you told us to slow down," Lingling said, the memory surfacing. "You were afraid of the calamity flames."

When the group had entered the Blazing Plains and moved to press deeper in, Chenying had used exhaustion and injuries as excuses to hold everyone near the outer edge of the North Corner. She must have been afraid the fire calamity would erupt without warning.

Chenying nodded. "My timing was accurate — I just hadn't expected the calamity to be this powerful. What I kept from you was wrong of me, and I'm truly sorry. I only hope you'll help me. Help me find the Fire Calamity Fruit. This fruit is extraordinarily valuable. If we find some, all I need is one — just one — to treat my mother. Everything else, you can divide however you like. There's one more thing: my mother mentioned the Flame Queen before. Apparently the Flame Queen is the guardian of the Fire Calamity Fruit, so..."

"Find the fruit, and we find the Flame Queen?" Mo Fan's eyes lit up instantly.

"Yes. That's also why I didn't want you spending too much time hunting for Spirit Seeds — because I know roughly where the Fire Calamity Fruit grows. It won't be long before every faction out there comes flooding in. Some of the veterans among them will know about the fruit, and they'll push whoever managed to cross the Shamang River straight toward it."

"Then we move fast," Mo Fan said, barely containing his urgency. "Once fighters one or two ranks above us start pouring in, we won't be left with anything."

Nobody needed money the way Mo Fan did. A man cultivating four elements burned through resources at a rate no ordinary mage could match. This was fortune dropping into his lap — there was no walking away from Fire Calamity Fruit. And with the Flame Queen appearing at the same time? *Absolutely no reason to pass this up.*

Xinxia caught the barely-contained impatience on Mo Fan's face and couldn't help but smile. "Actually, the powerful fighters you're worried about may not even be able to get in," she said. "I can feel it — after the fire calamity, the Shamang River has become extraordinarily turbulent. Getting through it isn't as simple as combining Mind Element magic with brute strength anymore..."