Free Web NovelChapter 432: Chapter 429: The Food Chain of the Air Elemental Plane
"Tun Tun." That was the natives’ name for it. Due to their primitive language, it sounded almost cute.
But its appearance was anything but cute. In fact, few had ever seen its entire body. Information about the Chronos Sky Beast was scarce. In the records circulating on the Prime Material Plane, it was mostly depicted as being hidden within dense clouds of gas. The only prominent features people remembered were its massive mouth and its thunderous, lightning-filled belly.
On the Prime Material Plane, the size of this Giant Beast would be unbelievable, worthy of the title Divine Beast. But in the rarefied, expansive Air Elemental Plane, its living space was hardly constricted. Whether this creature was a being of flesh and blood or a form of Elemental Life was a topic of endless debate among scholars.
Its body was dominated by a colossal digestive cavity large enough to contain a city. It could drive the gases within to rub against each other, generating immense electrical charges. In other words, its belly was in a perpetual state of thunder and lightning. The constantly arcing bolts served the role of stomach acid—and did it even better.
For one, it could use lightning to convert nitrogen into usable nitrogen oxides. For another, it constantly devoured the living creatures in the plane’s lower strata. To "Tun Tun," these morsels were like plankton or tiny shrimp. The relentless lightning strikes would kill, carbonize, and vaporize them, allowing the Sky Beast to absorb the organic matter and inorganic salts from their remains.
The appearance of the Chronos Sky Beast was no accident. It absolutely, positively was not a case of Rorschach being cursed with terrible luck. In fact, the entire process could be traced back.
The Little Blue People Tribe in the plane’s upper layers had established permanent Gas Collection Wells, leading to a growing abundance of food. Inevitably, scraps would fall, attracting populations of Winged Dragons from the lower layers to scavenge.
The tribe’s original nomadic lifestyle, following the gas currents, wouldn’t have caused any problems. But once they settled, more and more scraps fell, and the resident Winged Dragon population in the lower layers grew larger. It was unknown if the Gaseous Plane even had seasons, but life throughout the Material Realm seemed to share a strange synchronicity. As spring arrived on the Main Plane, the expanding Winged Dragon population began their courtship rituals to create the next generation.
The mating rituals of these flying beasts were incredibly noisy; Rorschach had already had a taste of their annoying screeches. And the cacophony of the flock finally attracted a wandering Tun Tun...
’How is this thing so big and so fast?!’ After all his time since coming to this world, Rorschach suddenly had the urge to scream: ’This is so unscientific!’
’No, this isn’t Magic, either...’ That much was clear from the astonishment on Caroline’s face. In a single instant, the outline of its mouth had vanished, leaving only the abyss beneath its giant maw. The esophagus behind that mouth was also roiling with gas, now emitting a burning, orange-red glow.
Rorschach and Caroline were unaware of how this Giant Beast moved when lunging to hunt. Normally, its skin and esophageal sieve plates prevented oxygen from entering its gut. Only when it needed to move quickly would it rapidly release and absorb atmospheric oxygen to detonate the flammable gases inside its belly.
As the gas inside its belly expanded violently, it would simultaneously compress its massive gastric sac. The two opposing forces would cause extremely high-pressure gas to blast out from its excretory cavity and the vents on its rear flanks, giving "Tun Tun" an immense, rocket-like thrust.
Once it charged close to its prey, its stomach would rapidly expand again, creating a vacuum that would irresistibly suck the helpless creatures into its gut.
This was the acceleration phase. The Giant Beast couldn’t stay away from the dense gas clouds of the lower plane for long, which meant it was about to begin frantically inhaling gas—and its dinner.
"Should we get ready to teleport?" Caroline began her preparations, gripping Rorschach’s hand tightly. She was going to pull Rorschach back to the Prime Material Plane and immediately shut down all the waste vents and Teleportation Arrays.
A Caster swallowed by a Giant Beast like this probably wouldn’t die immediately. However, she worried that the Magic Power environment inside the beast’s stomach could shift, preventing them from Casting or teleporting later. For a creature that was practically mythological, altering the ambient Magic Power with its own body was not out of the question.
But Rorschach pulled his hand free, deciding to have a "friendly exchange" with Tun Tun. "If something goes wrong here, all our factories on the other side are done for. A Giant Beast that excels at devouring... well, we’ll just have to use ’devouring’ against it."
Caroline had no choice but to raise a Shield, protecting both herself and Rorschach as he entered a state of Casting. Rorschach, meanwhile, drew in a massive amount of Magic Power from the Air Elemental Plane, replicating the last great piece of Magic he had performed in Istani.
With the massive influx of Magic Power, the Material Realm and the Symbolic Realm began to artificially converge, triggering spatial tremors. Under Rorschach’s control, the distorted fluctuations of space coalesced into two opposing yet mutually attracting entities. They spun rapidly, and Rorschach struggled to restrain them from drawing closer to one another.
Speed is mass, and mass warps space. Spacetime itself began to tremble as the relative velocity of the two spherical entities skyrocketed. The teleportation portal and Caroline’s barrier were both on the verge of collapse.
Just as the teleportation portal neared collapse and Caroline’s barrier shattered from the inside, unable to hold, Rorschach used an Ethereal Membrane—a technique learned from his Compression Skill—to envelop the two entities born of spatial fluctuations.
The Ethereal Membrane formed a sphere around them. The paths of light within were twisted, dimming as the membrane shielded them, creating an utterly simple yet supremely dangerous black sphere. The two quasi-celestial bodies inside continued to move at high speed. Even with Rorschach’s restraint, the encapsulating Ethereal Membrane was constantly deforming and wouldn’t hold for long.
The two steps—birthing the sphere and then restraining the dangerous forces within—consumed an enormous amount of Rorschach’s Magic Power. The amount he was absorbing couldn’t keep up with his expenditure, and for the first time in a long while, he felt the strain of exhaustion.
’This is enough... You might be able to swallow a whole city, but this Magic of mine has toppled one before!’
The pure Black Ball plummeted and was naturally swallowed into the Giant Beast’s belly.
In the thunderous, lightning-filled environment, the Ethereal Membrane was assaulted from both within and without. It collapsed in an instant, unleashing the terrifying, distorted entities.
Compression, inhalation... Because it warped and trapped even light, an ominous black hole appeared within the beast’s giant maw. It was so small that from Caroline’s vantage point above, it was merely an indistinguishable black speck. But it was powerful. The colored gas clouds inside the Giant Beast clearly traced paths surging toward the speck. Then, it was the Giant Beast’s body’s turn.
Its physical structure suffered an irresistible, twisting deformation. It intertwined with the gas flows, pulling it into unnatural patches of color and distorted lines. The scene was like a naughty child dragging a finger through a wet painting, smearing everything toward a single, central point.
However, the singularity Rorschach had created was a far cry from a true black hole. It reached saturation in an instant, unable to absorb any more energy or matter. And when one overeats, one must vomit. A jetstream erupted from within the Giant Beast, blasting out all the energy and flesh that had been drawn into the Black Ball. It also launched the remaining carcass of "Chronos" up into the higher strata, punching straight through the entire atmosphere.
The clouds parted and the mists dispersed. After the jetstream faded, a "hole" had been punched through the entire Gaseous Plane, from its lowest stratum to its highest. Through this hole, a pale blue, starry sky was visible, with a beautiful silver ring stretching across it.
The Little Blue People who hadn’t fled far enough witnessed it all. They stared upward, then turned their gaze to Rorschach—the Caster who had killed the Giant Beast in a single blow. These natives had always lived in the "void"; this was the first time they had ever seen the "sky."
