Terror on the Mountain Path (Part One)

Chenying's mother had spent several years living in the North Corner of the Blazing Plains. Though her movements were limited, she had come to know secrets about the North Corner that most Hunter-mages never had the chance to discover.

Following the terrain descriptions Chenying recalled from her mother, the group arrived at the base of a flat-topped mountain that rose in stark isolation from the surrounding earth. Chenying told them her mother had always lived somewhere near this mountain.

"This flat-topped mountain is bizarrely out of place," Zhang Xiaohou said, craning his neck back to gaze up the sheer cliff face. "We've been walking for so long and all we've seen is the flat terrain of the North Corner — not even a hint of hills or ridges anywhere — and then this thing just shoots straight up out of the ground."

Up close, it resembled a volcano more than anything else, but not the typical wide-base, narrow-peak variety. It was more like a volcanic column — perfectly cylindrical, driven straight up into the blue sky. Without the ability to fly, climbing it from the outside would have been impossible.

"Are you sure there are Fire Calamity Fruits up there?" Mo Fan asked. "And even if there are — how exactly are we supposed to get to the top?"

"The inside of the mountain is hollow," Chenying said. "My mother told me there should be a crack somewhere at the base that leads inside. Let's find it first."

They circled the massive volcanic column and, sure enough, found exactly that — a fissure in the rock that opened into the mountain's interior. Compared to the sheer scale of the mountain, it was a small gap, but to a human it was a torn-open cave mouth. The deeper they went, the more it widened.

Following the fissure inward, they could feel the passage rising in long, winding curves. The rock walls around them were half-crystallized, half-stone — smooth and glassy from prolonged heat. Along the way, they picked up more Spirit Seed Fragments scattered across the ground. The cave interior was clearly an excellent tempering environment; a thorough enough search would probably turn up another Spirit Seed or two.

**Clang — clang!**

From somewhere deep in the pitch-black cave came a sound like metal striking metal. The mountain's interior was utterly silent, and the sudden noise made everyone's skin crawl.

But it wasn't the clean ring of metal-on-metal they were used to. This sound was dull and grinding — an unpleasant, grating noise that crawled into the ear the way a fingernail drags across a chalkboard. They were already pressing through a winding, lightless tunnel that pressed in from all sides; having some unknowable sound drilling into their skulls from no discernible direction made the darkness feel that much more oppressive.

"That wasn't just me, right?" Zhang Xiaohou's teeth chattered as he looked around.

"Any guesses as to what it is?" Zhao Manyan said.

"Whatever it is, we keep moving," Mo Fan said, entirely unbothered. "Worrying about it now won't help anything. If it's hiding in the dark, we have no way of finding it anyway."

The way Mo Fan figured it, if this creature had the ability to kill all of them, it would have attacked already. Using strange noises to frighten people who were as good as dead would be a pointless exercise.

With that thought unspoken but understood, everyone quickened their pace. The flat-topped mountain rose to a tremendous height — climbing it from the outside would have taken a long time on its own, and winding upward through its labyrinthine internal passages only added to the journey.

The sound reached them a few more times as they climbed, but the creature never showed itself. Gradually, the group stopped flinching at it.

Walking upward through the dark was a tedious thing — the kind that could gnaw at a person's composure until fear took root on its own. But their collective nerve held, and none of them lost their footing over it.

At some point — they had no way of knowing how high they had climbed — molten lava began seeping from the cracks and fissures in the surrounding rock. It collected in the grooves and channels carved into the stone, pooling and flowing slowly in glowing rivulets.

The firelight cast by the lava served as natural illumination, letting everyone finally see their surroundings clearly. Zhao Manyan wouldn't need to cast Light Radiance for some time — the twin streams of molten rock on either side of the path lit the mountain passage as brightly as open daylight.

"Ha! The Blazing Plains isn't so unwelcoming after all," Zhang Xiaohou called from the front of the group, sounding rather pleased with himself. "Look at these lava streams — it's practically streetlights and a red carpet, all laid out to welcome us!"

Lava ran at extreme temperatures. An ordinary person submerged in it would be reduced to ash in moments. Mages could just barely keep their bodies intact, but prolonged exposure would still leave them with nothing but scorched bone. Fire Element Mages could tolerate lava to a greater degree — it all depended on their cultivation level. Those who had cultivated far enough could apparently bathe in it without issue.

Mo Fan hadn't reached that stage himself. He tried dipping a finger into the nearest rivulet. The heat hit immediately — not lethal, but far from trivial. Something like plunging your hand into boiling water.

"Has anyone else noticed that the lava streams are getting wider?" Xinxia said, almost as an aside.

The comment snapped Mo Fan's attention back to their surroundings. The inner mountain path varied in width, but it mostly resembled the passage of an Underground River — a winding corridor that a person could traverse, with lava seeping in from cracks in the walls on either side. At first it had been a trickle, the vivid red glow a guiding light in the dark. But now the low-lying sections, the grooves and channels and stone steps on both sides of the path, were filling up. In a few spots, the lava was nearly brimming over — on the verge of spilling onto the walkable surface.

"There's probably more lava up higher. Don't worry about it — lava flows downward. There's plenty of space below to absorb it. It won't fill in our entire path," Zhao Manyan said.

"That's one explanation," Xinxia said, a faint note of unease in her voice. "But what if the reason is something else?"

"What other reason?" Zhang Xiaohou asked.

While the others talked, Mo Fan had moved to stand at the edge of the lava stream and was watching it closely. He remembered clearly that just before the conversation started, the lava had been moving at a slow, steady drift. Within the span of that same conversation, the flow had changed — it was pushing faster now, more urgently, flooding into every low-lying channel around them. The accumulation of red liquid in this section was accelerating. The lava was beginning to creep toward the path they were standing on.

All of that had happened in under a minute.

"We need to leave. Right now." Mo Fan's expression was nothing like it had been a moment before. His voice left no room for argument.

"Why?" Zhao Manyan and Zhang Xiaohou asked in unison, their thoughts still fixed on the high-value Fire Calamity Fruits waiting at the summit.

Chenying didn't want to give up either. The fruits were right there — at the top of this very mountain.

"I said move, so *move!*" Mo Fan had no time to explain. He turned and shouted at the group.