Poison God's Heritage

Everyone hesitated, bracing to face the monstrous form of the Liberator as it emerged, but there was no sense in standing our ground here. "TAO YANG!" I shouted, and my voice jolted her out of her stunned silence. Seeing her uncle, her supposed protector, morphed into the grotesque creature before us had shaken her to the core, her thoughts unraveling in turmoil. But my shout snapped her back, and without a word, she turned and shot toward me.

"Why are we running?" Blue Sun asked as she flexed her fingers, the last fractures in her bones knitting back together. Her regenerative powers were remarkable, nearly as fast as mine, and her hand was already back to fighting form.

"We got what we needed. Staying here is pointless. This isn't a battle we can win." I reminded her, casting a quick glance at the rest of the group, who caught on immediately. We veered away, fleeing from the monstrosity at our backs.

"TAO'ER!" The Liberator wailed, his voice haunting as it echoed through the collapsing cavern and from the tentacles themselves. The way he screamed her name was like the pained cries of a lost soul. Grief, longing, and something darker tainted his words, each syllable twisted with malice. He sounded like a wounded beast, a creature abandoned by its last tie to humanity. But the moment that pitiful wail faded, his voice changed. A dark edge crept in, and his next words were more than enough to freeze the blood in our veins. "JOIN ME!" he squealed.

The ground itself began to quake. From hundreds of miles around, the earth split open with terrifying force. Hundreds of tentacles erupted from the ground, bursting through rock and dirt with devastating power. Mountains crumbled, valleys split open, and the very foundation of the planet seemed to heave as if alive. The tentacles didn't just rise—they towered, reaching toward the sky like towering pillars of twisted flesh, and with one synchronized movement, they started their descent.

In that instant, it felt like we were trapped in a massive collapsing cage.

"Follow me!" I shouted, guiding the group toward one of the incoming appendages. We weaved through the falling limbs, each one crashing into the ground with enough force to pulverize anything beneath it. As the tentacles struck, the impact sent fissures tearing across the ground, magma bubbling up from the newly opened chasms, turning the earth around us into a river of molten rock. The cacophony was overwhelming, a sound that could have deafened any mortal.

This was the Broodmother fused with the Liberator, the creature that birthed the rakshasa, a being of unimaginable size and strength, with a presence that loomed like death itself. And from the size of this thing, it was almost big enough that you could compare it to the Primordial Serpent God.

Though the Serpent God was large and massive enough that it could consume planets, the size difference between planets in the Vast Expanse and the one we're in - Solarous- is immensely different. We can't fight this thing, it won't even feel us, and trying to penetrate into its internal organs to exhaust it from the inside is impossible, it is impervious to Qi, so I'll die if I try that.

Even in the Beyond, I had only encountered a handful of creatures capable of this level of devastation. It was an embodiment of destruction, too large for us to defeat, too impervious to Qi for us to honestly fight, If we lingered, it would crush us without ever truly noticing we were there.

With incredible skill, the group split apart to avoid the falling limbs, each one the size of a small mountain. We dodged left and right, barely keeping ahead of the crashing tentacles as they tore apart the land around us.

"We can't stay here!" I shouted over the deafening roars of the tentacles colliding with the earth.

"Let's take the ship and get off this rock," Blue Sun yelled, her voice straining over the relentless rumble. "If we stay, this thing will rip the entire planet apart!"

"I agree!" I shouted back. "Keep moving! I've already called for the ship!" I sent a message to X, who had been stationed on the vessel. He was guiding it toward us, but we still had a ways to go.

"TAO'ER!" The Liberator's voice rang out again, echoing with twisted devotion as it pursued us. The tentacles writhed and slithered across the broken terrain, as if he were swimming through the molten, broken ground itself. "JOIN US! EMBRACE THE TRUE DAO!" His voice was a manic blend of invitation and command, his words crackling with heretical fervor as he denounced the Heavenly Dao. "ABOLISH THE HEAVENS! AND BECOME ONE WITH ME!"

Every word made Tao Yang's face contort with rage and disgust. His defiance of the heavens, his promise of power, his twisted sense of family—they were blasphemous. Each shout that reverberated from his corrupted form gnawed at her, fueling her fury.

But as I watched the sky, an unsettling question twisted in my mind. The Heavens themselves had once struck me down for a mere glimpse into a heavenly secret, and yet here was this creature, mocking and scorning the Heavenly Dao without even the faintest sign of divine retribution. Where was the heavenly lightning? Where was the divine fury?

Then, almost as if in response, the sky above us shifted. Thunderheads began to form, thick clouds gathering in ominous layers. But instead of roaring to life, they wavered, seeming to lose coherence and scatter in wisps, as if the very force that once drove them had faded.

"The heavens… the Heavenly Law is broken?" the Jade Dragon said, looking up in disbelief as we continued to fly.

"What do you mean?" I asked, straining to make sense of what was unfolding.

He glanced at me with a grim look. "Can't you feel it? The Qi in this world… it's fractured, missing something. It's as though it's tainted, twisted into something incomplete. I can't absorb it; instead, my body rejects it. We're growing weaker the longer we stay here."

I was spared from this effect, though I can now use the Heavenly Qi, through the Primordial Serpent God, I'm still using Poison QI which I could easily replenish with my poison pills. But as I glanced at the others, I saw their faces contorted in exhaustion, their Qi reserves diminishing with every passing moment.

"He's right," Blue Sun added, her face tense as she flew beside me. "Even I can't absorb it. We'll burn through our reserves in no time if we stay here. Let's leave the area. We're leaving the planet for now! at least to work a new strategy, this frontal assault isn't working!"

"That was my plan all along, the ship is close," I said, glancing ahead and spotting it on the horizon, heading our way. The ship glinted against the fiery landscape, a beacon in the storm of chaos around us. Experience tales with empire

"He who fights and runs today," I shouted, my voice ringing out in defiance against the Liberator's mocking wails, "may live to fight another day. But he who is battle slain, can never rise to fight again! We retreat!"