Chương 39: Chapter 19 Part 2

Meanwhile, miles beneath the surface of the earth, the Grand Abyss was about to violently regurgitate a demon. Ming Xuan Ji stood in the center of Floor 20, surrounded by the glittering, shattered remains of the unkillable Abyssal Frost Wyrm. The prized Abyssal Frost Marrow and SS-rank Ice core were safely secured within the spatial void of her storage ring, but the victorious warmth that should have accompanied the legendary kill had instantly evaporated into a hollow void.

Burned directly into her retinas, overriding her physical vision through the violently activated [Divine Eye of Veritas], was a spiritual coordinate. A singular, bright crimson beacon was flashing wildly in the darkness of the world above, cutting through miles of solid stone, bedrock, and magical jamming. The black jade charm. It was broken. The catastrophic bloodlust erupting from Xuan Ji's Dantian crushed the ambient mana of Floor 20 entirely.

The air pressure dropped so violently that the frozen ocean beneath her boots spider-webbed and cracked in a mile-wide radius. She had no time for maps. She had no time for carefully navigating smuggling tunnels, winding staircases, or clever rogue bypasses. Xuan Ji went out of floor twenty and reached out and grabbed the shivering, terrified halfling by the thick leather scruff of his neck. She lifted Lynx off the ice effortlessly and looked straight up.

The Grand Abyss was, at its core, a colossal, plunging sinkhole. It was a massive, twenty-mile vertical chimney that connected all twenty subterranean strata directly to the surface of Elyndria.

"L-Lady Ming, what are you doing?" Lynx stammered, his teeth chattering uncontrollably as he looked up into the seemingly infinite, dark, vertical chasm towering above them.

"The stairwell is back across the, ""Going up," Xuan Ji stated, her voice a terrifying, vibrating frequency that shattered the remaining ice pillars around her into fine dust. Her Dantian violently compressed. She did not draw upon a trickle of power; she opened the floodgates of the Heavenly Demon Scripture to their absolute maximum capacity. The sheer volume of Yin and Yang Qi she gathered warped the very air around her, creating a localized gravity distortion that caused the surroundings to shatter.

"Hold your breath," she ordered. Lynx barely had time to clamp his small hands over his mouth. BOOM. Xuan Ji bent her knees and launched herself vertically. The sonic boom of her takeoff was cataclysmic. The sheer force completely shattered the bedrock of Floor 19, sending tons of rocks crashing down into the dark waters below. She didn't just jump; she flew.

Using the absolute pinnacle of her [Qinggong], she channeled her Qi into the soles of her boots, treating the vertical, empty air as if it were solid, unyielding ground. The G-force hit Lynx like a falling anvil. The halfling was instantly paralyzed by the pressure, his lips peeling back from his teeth, his consciousness violently flickering as they ascended at a speed that threatened to rip the flesh directly from his bones.

He was entirely protected only by the aerodynamic, teardrop-shaped Yin Qi shield Xuan Ji had ruthlessly maintained around his small body. When gravity finally began to reassert its dominance, threatening to drag her down after thousands of vertical feet, Xuan Ji did not stall. She simply aimed her right, open palm directly downward. She fired a massively concentrated shockwave of vibrational energy directly into the empty air beneath her.

The concussive recoil of the violent blast propelled her upward like a multi-stage rocket. CRACK. Another deafening explosion echoed through the cavernous chimney, shooting her thousands of feet higher. CRACK. CRACK. She blasted through the icy, runic threshold of Floor 18, shattering the thick layer of black wall that separated the Twilight Zone from the upper Abyss. She blurred past the massive, bewildered Water Hydra on Floor 17.

The multi-headed leviathan barely had time to register the hypersonic distortion tearing through its domain before the wind shear of her passing violently snapped three of its towering necks. The vertical chasm of the Abyss was not empty airspace. It was fiercely populated by the dungeon's apex aerial predators. Flocks of heavily armored gargoyles, giant venomous bats, and toxic subterranean wyverns constantly patrolled the open drop.

Whenever a flying monster dared to intercept her path in the central chasm, drawn by the roaring, unnatural sonic booms of her ascent, Xuan Ji didn't bother to evade. She simply drove her knees upward and kicked off their massive skulls. A diving, armored gargoyle sought to impale her with its spear-like talons. Xuan Ji's boot met its descending forehead.

The gargoyle's skull imploded into dust, and Xuan Ji used the crushing death of the beast as a physical stepping stone, converting its downward momentum into a fresh, explosive burst of vertical velocity. Wyverns were pulverized into bloody mist as she tore completely through their leathery wings, leaving a trail of dissolving, mana-born carcasses tumbling down into the dark abyss behind her. Floor 14. Floor 10. Floor 7. The descent that had taken an entire week downward was being violently, impossibly reversed.

But the Abyss was unfathomably deep. Even launching herself like a guided missile, chaining [Demonic Echo Palms] and utilizing the falling bodies of mythic beasts as footholds, it required a brutal, non-stop exertion of physical endurance and continuous Qi circulation to conquer gravity itself. Her meridians burned. Her muscles ached with the sheer, unrelenting strain of defying the earth's pull. But the burning beacon in her mind, the silent scream of her disciple, fueled her. She didn't care about the pain.

Ming Xuan Ji had become a localized natural disaster, a black-and-crimson meteor rocketing upward from the darkest depths of hell. She was completely consumed by a terrifying, unadulterated rage, rocketing straight toward the heart of the Royal Capital. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. She was coming. And she would slaughter any god, man, or kingdom that stood in her way.

High above the subterranean horrors of the Grand Abyss, the Astral Chamber of the Royal Palace was suffocating under a thick, oppressive blanket of terrified silence. It was nearing dawn, though the thick dwarven-lead shielding of the circular room offered no view of the rising sun. Chief Spymaster Elias Veyne had not slept in days. The dark circles under his eyes rivaled the deep bruises of a tavern brawler, and his immaculate, silver-threaded inner-council robes were heavily wrinkled.

He stood rigidly at the edge of the Zenith Array, his bloodshot eyes entirely fixated on the cracked, glowing scrying crystal that magically mapped the dungeon below. Crown Prince Theron sat in a heavy, velvet-lined chair near the chamber doors, mechanically swirling a glass of highly potent dwarven spirits he hadn't actually tasted. He was a man meticulously groomed to rule a kingdom, educated by the finest military tacticians and grand-mages the Zareth Kingdom had to offer.

But before the tension in the room could mount further, the heavy mahogany doors of the Astral Chamber suddenly swung open. A man clad in the gleaming, heavy silver plate armor of a Royal Knight Captain strode hastily into the room, snapping a crisp, urgent salute. He carried a sealed scroll tube bearing the wax crest of a border lord.

"Forgive the intrusion, Your Highness," the Knight Captain said, his face flush with heavy exertion from sprinting up the spire's endless stairs.

"You ordered high-priority intelligence regarding any anomalies reported from the outer provinces. A courier hawk just arrived from General Commander Eldora from Theloca." Theron snatched the leather scroll tube directly from the Captain's hand.

"Theloca? Marquess Vael's territory? The same Vael whose estate in the capital the anomaly currently resides in?"

"Yes, Your Highness," the Captain replied, his expression incredibly grave.

"The report details a troll invasion that occurred a few weeks ago. Theloca was attacked by a horde of over two hundred deep-forest trolls, led by an evolved Warlord. The outer walls were on the verge of collapsing." Theron unrolled the parchment, his eyes scanning the hasty, frantic handwriting of the seasoned border general.

"But the city did not fall," the Captain continued, his voice laced with an undeniable awe.

"General Eldora reports that a single wandering martial artist intervened. She did not use a sword. She did not cast a spell. She stepped onto the battlefield and used a martial arts technique to fire an explosion." Theron stopped reading. He looked up slowly, staring intensely at the Knight Captain.

"An explosion?" Theron echoed, his voice hollowing out.

"It leveled the battlefield, Your Highness," the Captain confirmed, swallowing hard.

"The Warlord and half the horde were pulverized instantly into mist by the sheer force of a single technique. She introduced herself to the Adventurer's Guild there. Her name is Ming Xuan Ji." Crown Prince Theron stared at the parchment. The geopolitical reality of the continent crashed down upon him. If a single entity possessed enough raw, concentrated power to atomize an army barehanded, strategic numbers no longer mattered.

Suddenly, a high-pitched, harmonic whine emanated from the very center of the scrying crystal, violently interrupting his thoughts. Elias flinched, leaning closer to the dwarven glass. Down at the bottom of the array, in the quadrant explicitly dedicated to Floor 20, a massive, pulsing blue light, the unmistakable signature of the mythic Abyssal Frost Wyrm, began to violently flicker.

"Your Highness," Elias breathed, his voice barely a raspy, terrified whisper. Theron dropped the scroll and walked swiftly to the heavy stone table. The pulsing blue light flared brilliantly for a fraction of a second... and then, permanently, completely extinguished. The bottom of the Grand Abyss went completely dark. Crown Prince Theron stood entirely paralyzed.

The Abyssal Frost Wyrm wasn't just a powerful monster; it was an apex aberration that royal cartographers and Archmages had mathematically proven to be unkillable by mortal hands.

"She killed it," Theron muttered, the horrific words tasting like dry ash in his mouth.

"A lone woman went to the bottom of the world, and she killed a myth."

"Your Highness..." Elias interrupted, his voice pitching an octave higher in raw, unadulterated panic.

"It isn't over. Look at the void signature. She isn't heading back to the transition stairwells." Theron looked down. The tiny, dark void had suddenly, impossibly moved to the exact geographic center of the map. And then, it began to rise. It wasn't moving laterally. It was moving perfectly, precisely vertically.

"She's in the central chasm," Theron realized, his eyes widening in profound horror.

"Elias, she's ascending the main shaft."

"That's impossible!" the Spymaster practically shrieked.

"She would be fighting terminal velocity and the crushing atmospheric pressure of the Abyss itself! At this velocity... she is clearing a floor every hour. She will breach the surface before the sun sets today." Before Theron could fully process the impossibility of those physics, a magical communication rune on Elias's wrist flared with a frantic, blood-red warning. The Spymaster tapped it, listening for a second before his face drained of whatever color remained.

"Your Highness," Elias stammered.

"We have just received an urgent distress signal. The Vael estate in the noble district, Lady Ming's residence, has just been attacked by a massive force of the Blood God Cult." Theron's heart plummeted. If the estate where this transcendent martial artist lived were destroyed, her wrath would fall on Elyndria.

"Move, Captain! Now!" Theron roared, his princely composure finally shattering.

"Take half of the two thousand heavy infantry stationed at the dungeon entrance! Mobilize a cavalry unit of the Silver Order! Send them to the Vael estate immediately!"

"And the remaining troops at the Abyss?" the Knight Captain asked frantically, already turning toward the door.

"Withdraw the shields. Sheath the swords. Tell every single remaining man in that formation to drop to their knees and bow their heads once she appears on the surface," Theron ordered, his voice rising in barely suppressed panic.

"If a single soldier draws a blade, or if a single mage channels a spell when she breaches the surface, she will think we are aligned with the cult." As the Knight Captain bolted from the room, Theron turned to his pale Spymaster.

"Elias," Theron commanded.

"Activate the emergency tether. Summon my uncle. I need the Archmage here. Now."