The Flame Witch

"He's been swept away by the lava — forget about him for now!" Lingling's voice was cold, almost cruel.

Xinxia pressed her lips together, tears threatening to spill. But she knew Lingling had made the right call.

Zhao Manyan gritted his teeth and didn't waste another moment. He swiftly cast Light Grace — Painted Wall, raising a curved barrier of light across the cave entrance...

At the same time, Chenying lent her support, using Stone Wall to layer an additional reinforcement across the back of Light Grace — Painted Wall, keeping the molten surge from breaking through.

Zhang Xiaohou took far too long before he came back to himself. In the end, he wiped tears that simply refused to fall and added one more layer of Stone Wall across the opening.

They retreated deeper into the cave. Scorched and hollow-eyed, they sank to the ground.

No one spoke. The silence pressed down on them like a weight.

Finally, it was Zhang Xiaohou who couldn't take it any longer. He raised his head and looked at Xinxia.

Xinxia already knew what he was going to ask. She glanced toward the Swift Star Wolf. "He's not dead... Swift Star Wolf hasn't disappeared, which means he's still alive."

Everyone was on their feet in an instant.

Of course. The Swift Star Wolf was Mo Fan's Summoned Beast. If Mo Fan had died, the wolf would have been immediately pulled back through a dimensional rift to another plane. It was still here, still beside them — and that meant Mo Fan was alive.

"Mo Fan cultivates the Fire Element — lava can't incinerate him in such a short time. But if we hadn't sealed the entrance, we would all have died here, and everything he did would have been meaningless." Lingling maintained a composure none of them could quite understand.

"We have to survive this first. Then we can go look for him. Let's hope the lava doesn't keep flowing for too long, or we'll suffocate in here regardless," Chenying said.

His whole body felt like it was ablaze. The pain was beyond enduring.

The force of the molten current kept slamming him against solid rock. Each impact felt like more bones snapping.

The heat wasn't quite enough to incinerate a body with Fire Element resistance outright, but the scalding sensation — like being plunged into boiling water — still had his flesh nearly cooked through.

He had expected that once the current drove him into the two-faced creature's territory, he would simply be trapped there until he suffocated. But through his fading awareness, he felt himself being carried further and further down. It seemed the two-faced tortoise had already moved on.

Mo Fan had no idea where the lava had taken him. He blacked out, with no sense of how much time had passed. Each successive collision against stone blurred his mind a little further, until finally, after one tremendous crash, all awareness left him entirely.

The sun blazed directly overhead, suspended above the North Corner of the Blazing Plains as though the land itself were a vast furnace. The only peak that rose from this scorched expanse — the Flame Pillar Mountain — stood closest to that relentless sun. Almost nothing lived on its flat summit save for the plants that thrived on flame-heat, which had spread in dense swathes across every inch of the plateau.

They were a deep, vivid crimson — a thick carpet of red, like autumn maples spread wide and generous across the land.

When a leaf fell, it drifted down through the air like a candle flame descending in slow spirals. When a rough gust swept through, the sky filled with swirling sparks of color — a scene of strange, breathtaking beauty.

Amid that sea of crimson fire-leaves, a naked man lay unconscious. His skin was blistered and ruptured in places, and even his face bore clear signs of burns.

Beside him, a graceful figure wreathed in flame-red light stood in silence, gazing down. In her hands she held the pulped juice of those fire-red leaves, and she was carefully feeding the liquid into the unconscious man's mouth.

The juice seemed to be a potent remedy for flame-inflicted wounds. As it flowed into him, the blistered, ruptured skin began closing and healing at a remarkable pace.

Lava burns, while severe, are comparatively clean — they carry none of the toxins or corruption found in more exotic flames. For that reason, these wounds were not especially difficult to treat. The unconscious man also possessed a powerful natural resistance to fire. What had put him under was not the heat, but suffocation.

The sun tilted and sank slowly below the horizon. By dusk, the man finally stirred.

Mo Fan opened his eyes and looked around. At first he thought he was lying on a sea of fire; when he realized these were just crimson leaves drifting down from all around him, he let out a quiet breath of relief. The leaves were soft. They had absorbed so much sunlight and carried so much inherent warmth that in the gathering chill of evening, they felt like a vast, comfortable blanket beneath him.

*How did I end up here?* Mo Fan was completely baffled. He clearly remembered being swept all the way down to the deepest point by the lava.

But now, looking out as far as he could see, he found himself under an open, curving sky. The ground was a flat expanse blanketed in red leaves, and cold gusts came drifting down from above every so often.

*Am I on a mountain?* he murmured to himself.

He checked his body and found almost no trace of injury. That made absolutely no sense.

While he was still puzzling over this, a vivid crimson humanoid shape came drifting slowly toward him. Its movement was deeply unsettling — it hovered with toes barely grazing the ground, legs held slightly suspended, gliding like a specter between several fire-cloud trees that towered more than ten meters tall.

It drifted to his side. Though its body was composed entirely of flame, Mo Fan felt no heat radiating from it — none at all.

He watched it warily, reaching instinctively for some form of defense, only to find his body felt like it had completely come apart. Every small movement sent pain shooting through him. Casting magic was out of the question; he doubted he could even stand.

The flame figure made no move to attack. Instead, it slowly held out a cluster of fire-cloud fruits — ripe-looking things that made his empty stomach clench — while keeping its distance, as though afraid of startling him.

"For me?" Mo Fan stared at the fruits, which looked capable of both nourishing and healing him, and couldn't quite bring himself to believe it.

The flame figure gave a slow, gentle nod.

"Did you save me? Bring me here?" Mo Fan asked.

The flame figure nodded again, clearly able to understand human speech.

The sight jolted something loose in Mo Fan's memory. Chenying had mentioned something once — that when his mother was caught in the fire of the Heavenly Calamity, it was a flame creature with a human-like form that had saved her.