"Keep still, keep still, little land
How I wonder if you're my friend
Up above the sea so high
Like an island in the sky."
Han Xuhan was spitting out the improved verses under his breath to ward off the fear coursing through his body.
He wasn't a particularly good climber. So it did feel rather unnerving when he took a look above and below his current position, hanging off an overgrown node of the bamboo spearing the floating island.
He was approximately a hundred meters above the seawater. The island above was more than 200 meters away. From the experiments he had done so far, this seemed to be the border of the safe zone, free from the invisible spatial cracks that could transfer him to another sect.
Taking out the last pebble from his pocket, he closed one eye and focused on a spot just a dozen meters below. He would not have had the dexterity or strength to accurately throw a pebble at that distance had his cultivation been a couple of realms lower. To the current him, it wasn't much of a challenge.
Strengthening the grip his toes had on the grooves of the node, he loosened both hands to rotate his body into a more suitable position for the throw. His fluid movements were the result of repeating this exact procedure on every node he had passed on his way down here.
Han Xuhan carefully pulled his right arm back and threw the pebble at his targetted spot. He wasn't surprised by how accurate the trajectory of the pebble was, almost exactly how he had pictured it to go.
Due to the frequent, dangerous stunts he was being forced to take on, he had discovered roughly how much his body had improved. His ability to calculate data, exert physical force, control his newfound strength and handle the effects of adrenaline pumping through his veins had improved by a significant margin.
Having practiced throwing these pebbles at nearby targets for so long, he was inhumanely good at it. It was as if his very learning capacity had undergone a qualitative upgrade after cultivating for so long.
Due to his excitement, he almost slipped, three of his toes losing their grip from the groove they had dug in.
A flood had just struck the island fifteen minutes ago. The bamboo's body was slippery, its grooves and nodes especially so. But Han Xuhan had gone through his own plan anyway as soon as the second flood had ended.
He had discovered the hard way that there wasn't an obvious pattern to the floods striking the island; no specific period of time in between, no particular behavior of the seawater that suggested a flood was coming.
The cracks in the sky simply opened up suddenly and unleashed numerous fountains over the floating islands. The only information he had managed to gather was that the flood was the most common type of trial in this round.
Wang Three had led him to two different tunnels in the last two hours, both times with the excuse that he had to guard the tunnels against something. Both times, the 'something' had turned out to be a flood. It was enough to clue him in that there was a way to predict when a flood is going to hit. He just didn't know how to figure out what the method was.
Regardless, he was grateful enough to Wang Three and his martial siblings for their indirect guidance.
"Well, there goes the last pebble. Tun Shi Tian,
Zhanxian, prepare yourselves," he ordered as soon as the pebble disappeared into thin air right at the spot he had thrown it at.
From the beginning of his descent down the colossal bamboo, he had tested his route by throwing these pebbles collected from the island. A majority of the pebbles had disappeared exactly around this area.
The phenomenon gave birth to several problems in his mind.
If this region, nearly a hundred meters above the seawater, was where the spatial cracks were, what about the sky? Where did those spatial cracks come from? And why was there so much seawater on the other side of the cracks?
Maybe the entire floating island was surrounded by spatial cracks. After all, back in the Sunrider Sect, the Elder had indeed managed to throw him into a crack in the sky. That was how he had ended up reaching this place.
So what relationship do the airborne cracks have with the sea below?
He had no idea.
For now, he had to continue forging his own path.
"Zhanxian, are you ready?"
"....Yeeeeahhh," the skeleton effortlessly hanging on to the node drew out its answer quite unenthusiastically.
"Excellent. You'll follow the trajectory of the pebbles I threw in that direction," he said while pointing the spot out.
"And Tun Shi Tian, you'll follow the trajectory of the last pebble. Any questions?"
"Nope!" Tun Shi Tian answered a bit too cheerfully, flapping its wings right above his head.
"Okay. On my count – THREE, TWO, ONE, GO!"
Han Xuhan finished his countdown in a rush. Zhanxian and Tun Shi Tian exchanged a deliberately slow look and sighed.
The first to leap was Zhanxian. Tun Shi Tian followed his fall closely, in case his trajectory went awry.
The extra caution turned out to be unnecessary. Zhanxian's cultivation came in handy as the skeleton was able to exert the required amount of force to traverse the horizontal distance. Gravity did the rest.
Without a sound, Zhanxian disappeared at just the spot where the pebbles had. Tun Shi Tian dived away a second before that and hurtled toward the spot fixed for him.
Half a second later, Tun Shi Tian too, disappeared into the void.
The dim moonlight did not help his tense mental condition. In all four directions, vast emptiness greeted him. The knowledge that he could move in none of these directions made it harder to keep his thoughts calm and collected.
Sticking his body close to the bamboo, Han Xuhan counted the passing seconds.
One.
Two.
Three.
.....
Fourteen.
Fifteen.
Immediately, he canceled the summoning cycle of the skeletal monarch technique. Then he restarted it after another five-second delay.
Tun Shi Tian flew out from his back, followed by Zhanxian who grabbed Han Xuhan's shoulders tightly upon being summoned.
"Recount what you saw, down to every detail- no wait, let's return first," Han Xuhan said, remembering a certain useful technique he had used to suppress his minions' rebellion.
"Yeah, let's go inside our dao tower," Zhanxian said fearfully.
Han Xuhan narrowed his eyes at the skeleton's usage of 'our' instead of 'your'. But he refrained from addressing the issue, canceling their summon once more.
He couldn't obviously sink into meditation at his current position. So he started climbing back up at a rapid pace, using a chainhook he had found lying beside the burnt remains of the Void-hammer sect's chariot.
To ensure that his footing wouldn't slip, Han Xuhan had smeared a handful of soil every few feet on his way down.
Like a spider, he almost walked up on his way, his body in a horizontal position. Throwing the chainhook from node to node, he crossed the nearly two-hundred-meter distance in two minutes.
With a heave, he emerged from Wang Three's hole and landed on the ground in the superman pose.
"Uwaaah, my hand! Ughhh!"
The landing pose, as badass as it had looked, turned out to be injurious to his health.
Cursing silently and massaging his throbbing knuckle, Han Xuhan gave a stiff chuckle while facing the crowd that had been observing him from the mouth of the tunnel.
"That was a neat pose, Big Brother! Do you need some herbs for your fist-"
"We can't do that, Wang Six. That would be counted as breaking the rules."
Coughing loudly, Han Xuhan waved off their concern.
"Guys, I'm a cultivator too, remember? Injuries like this are too minor."
"Well, master said it's often the minor injuries that accumulate over the years and destroy your body. So you should probably not assume that mindset, brother," Wang Six said while the rest of the Wangs and Lings nodded like chickens.
"That was very enlightening, Brother Six," Han Xuhan said gratefully.
"Wait, did that fall under helping you too?" Ling Nine suddenly exclaimed.
All of them shiftily looked around, trying to prepare themselves for the appearance of their counselor.
After half a minute of silence, everyone's expression returned to normal.
"Man, these rules are way too ambiguous to follow. Where is your rulebook anyway?" Han Xuhan asked.
"There is none." Wang Three shrugged.
Han Xuhan rubbed his forehead and excused himself from the gathering, distancing himself from the hubbub. All of them wisely avoided bringing up the fact that Han Xuhan had just descended down the giant bamboo using their loot, the chainhook, just in case that notified the counselor that Han Xuhan had taken advantage of a loophole by 'stealing it while the others were pretending to look away'.
Sitting down, he entered deep meditation, his consciousness appearing in front of his dao tower soon. Inside, Zhanxian and Tun Shi Tian awaited him in their own rooms.
First, Han Xuhan entered Zhanxian's room and mentally touched the skeleton's avatar.
A few seconds later, his vision was replaced by the familiar, abyssal darkness that occupied the route between sects, inside the spatial cracks.
It lasted less than a second this time, light appearing once more around him as his skeletal body fell toward the ground slowly.
Zhanxian was screaming his head off and flailing his limbs in a panic the whole time, making it hard for Han Xuhan to properly observe the sect below him. Once Zhanxian fell, he did his best to memorize everything he could see around him.
Sandy area, houses made of rocks, at least a couple hundred disciples, two old men walking over toward him lazily. One of the old men made a strange gesture in the air suddenly. Han Xuhan felt his limbs and body snap into a ramrod-straight posture.
But before the old men could reach him, his sight was replaced by the familiar walls of his dao tower, indicating that Han Xuhan had canceled his summoning cycle from the other side.
"Not our target," Han Xuhan muttered as he left Zhanxian's room to enter Tun Shi Tian's abode.
Zhanxian hadn't taught the bird how to cast the memory-sharing technique yet. So he merely let it recount its experience.
From Tun Shi Tian's descriptions, the sect it had traveled to turned out to be the Void-Hammer sect. The owl's enhanced vision had noticed the name stitched on a flag in tiny letters.
Han Xuhan suddenly recalled a problem. When he had first met the Wangs and Lings, they had appeared from a direction almost opposite to the spot where Tun Shi Tian had entered. It was very far away from the bamboo and unless the bulls drawing the chariot could fly, their leap onto the island had to be from an area just below that edge of the island.
How could both cracks lead to the same sect? Or...
The clues all suddenly connected inside his mind one after one, finally revealing to him the true picture of the twisted space of Titanfall Archipelago.
"Keep still, keep still, little land
How I wonder if you're my friend
Up above the sea so high
Like an island in the sky."
Han Xuhan was spitting out the improved verses under his breath to ward off the fear coursing through his body.
He wasn't a particularly good climber. So it did feel rather unnerving when he took a look above and below his current position, hanging off an overgrown node of the bamboo spearing the floating island.
He was approximately a hundred meters above the seawater. The island above was more than 200 meters away. From the experiments he had done so far, this seemed to be the border of the safe zone, free from the invisible spatial cracks that could transfer him to another sect.
Taking out the last pebble from his pocket, he closed one eye and focused on a spot just a dozen meters below. He would not have had the dexterity or strength to accurately throw a pebble at that distance had his cultivation been a couple of realms lower. To the current him, it wasn't much of a challenge.
Strengthening the grip his toes had on the grooves of the node, he loosened both hands to rotate his body into a more suitable position for the throw. His fluid movements were the result of repeating this exact procedure on every node he had passed on his way down here.
Han Xuhan carefully pulled his right arm back and threw the pebble at his targetted spot. He wasn't surprised by how accurate the trajectory of the pebble was, almost exactly how he had pictured it to go.
Due to the frequent, dangerous stunts he was being forced to take on, he had discovered roughly how much his body had improved. His ability to calculate data, exert physical force, control his newfound strength and handle the effects of adrenaline pumping through his veins had improved by a significant margin.
Having practiced throwing these pebbles at nearby targets for so long, he was inhumanely good at it. It was as if his very learning capacity had undergone a qualitative upgrade after cultivating for so long.
Due to his excitement, he almost slipped, three of his toes losing their grip from the groove they had dug in.
A flood had just struck the island fifteen minutes ago. The bamboo's body was slippery, its grooves and nodes especially so. But Han Xuhan had gone through his own plan anyway as soon as the second flood had ended.
He had discovered the hard way that there wasn't an obvious pattern to the floods striking the island; no specific period of time in between, no particular behavior of the seawater that suggested a flood was coming.
The cracks in the sky simply opened up suddenly and unleashed numerous fountains over the floating islands. The only information he had managed to gather was that the flood was the most common type of trial in this round.
Wang Three had led him to two different tunnels in the last two hours, both times with the excuse that he had to guard the tunnels against something. Both times, the 'something' had turned out to be a flood. It was enough to clue him in that there was a way to predict when a flood is going to hit. He just didn't know how to figure out what the method was.
Regardless, he was grateful enough to Wang Three and his martial siblings for their indirect guidance.
"Well, there goes the last pebble. Tun Shi Tian,
Zhanxian, prepare yourselves," he ordered as soon as the pebble disappeared into thin air right at the spot he had thrown it at.
From the beginning of his descent down the colossal bamboo, he had tested his route by throwing these pebbles collected from the island. A majority of the pebbles had disappeared exactly around this area.
The phenomenon gave birth to several problems in his mind.
If this region, nearly a hundred meters above the seawater, was where the spatial cracks were, what about the sky? Where did those spatial cracks come from? And why was there so much seawater on the other side of the cracks?
Maybe the entire floating island was surrounded by spatial cracks. After all, back in the Sunrider Sect, the Elder had indeed managed to throw him into a crack in the sky. That was how he had ended up reaching this place.
So what relationship do the airborne cracks have with the sea below?
He had no idea.
For now, he had to continue forging his own path.
"Zhanxian, are you ready?"
"....Yeeeeahhh," the skeleton effortlessly hanging on to the node drew out its answer quite unenthusiastically.
"Excellent. You'll follow the trajectory of the pebbles I threw in that direction," he said while pointing the spot out.
"And Tun Shi Tian, you'll follow the trajectory of the last pebble. Any questions?"
"Nope!" Tun Shi Tian answered a bit too cheerfully, flapping its wings right above his head.
"Okay. On my count – THREE, TWO, ONE, GO!"
Han Xuhan finished his countdown in a rush. Zhanxian and Tun Shi Tian exchanged a deliberately slow look and sighed.
The first to leap was Zhanxian. Tun Shi Tian followed his fall closely, in case his trajectory went awry.
The extra caution turned out to be unnecessary. Zhanxian's cultivation came in handy as the skeleton was able to exert the required amount of force to traverse the horizontal distance. Gravity did the rest.
Without a sound, Zhanxian disappeared at just the spot where the pebbles had. Tun Shi Tian dived away a second before that and hurtled toward the spot fixed for him.
Half a second later, Tun Shi Tian too, disappeared into the void.
The dim moonlight did not help his tense mental condition. In all four directions, vast emptiness greeted him. The knowledge that he could move in none of these directions made it harder to keep his thoughts calm and collected.
Sticking his body close to the bamboo, Han Xuhan counted the passing seconds.
One.
Two.
Three.
.....
Fourteen.
Fifteen.
Immediately, he canceled the summoning cycle of the skeletal monarch technique. Then he restarted it after another five-second delay.
Tun Shi Tian flew out from his back, followed by Zhanxian who grabbed Han Xuhan's shoulders tightly upon being summoned.
"Recount what you saw, down to every detail- no wait, let's return first," Han Xuhan said, remembering a certain useful technique he had used to suppress his minions' rebellion.
"Yeah, let's go inside our dao tower," Zhanxian said fearfully.
Han Xuhan narrowed his eyes at the skeleton's usage of 'our' instead of 'your'. But he refrained from addressing the issue, canceling their summon once more.
He couldn't obviously sink into meditation at his current position. So he started climbing back up at a rapid pace, using a chainhook he had found lying beside the burnt remains of the Void-hammer sect's chariot.
To ensure that his footing wouldn't slip, Han Xuhan had smeared a handful of soil every few feet on his way down.
Like a spider, he almost walked up on his way, his body in a horizontal position. Throwing the chainhook from node to node, he crossed the nearly two-hundred-meter distance in two minutes.
With a heave, he emerged from Wang Three's hole and landed on the ground in the superman pose.
"Uwaaah, my hand! Ughhh!"
The landing pose, as badass as it had looked, turned out to be injurious to his health.
Cursing silently and massaging his throbbing knuckle, Han Xuhan gave a stiff chuckle while facing the crowd that had been observing him from the mouth of the tunnel.
"That was a neat pose, Big Brother! Do you need some herbs for your fist-"
"We can't do that, Wang Six. That would be counted as breaking the rules."
Coughing loudly, Han Xuhan waved off their concern.
"Guys, I'm a cultivator too, remember? Injuries like this are too minor."
"Well, master said it's often the minor injuries that accumulate over the years and destroy your body. So you should probably not assume that mindset, brother," Wang Six said while the rest of the Wangs and Lings nodded like chickens.
"That was very enlightening, Brother Six," Han Xuhan said gratefully.
"Wait, did that fall under helping you too?" Ling Nine suddenly exclaimed.
All of them shiftily looked around, trying to prepare themselves for the appearance of their counselor.
After half a minute of silence, everyone's expression returned to normal.
"Man, these rules are way too ambiguous to follow. Where is your rulebook anyway?" Han Xuhan asked.
"There is none." Wang Three shrugged.
Han Xuhan rubbed his forehead and excused himself from the gathering, distancing himself from the hubbub. All of them wisely avoided bringing up the fact that Han Xuhan had just descended down the giant bamboo using their loot, the chainhook, just in case that notified the counselor that Han Xuhan had taken advantage of a loophole by 'stealing it while the others were pretending to look away'.
Sitting down, he entered deep meditation, his consciousness appearing in front of his dao tower soon. Inside, Zhanxian and Tun Shi Tian awaited him in their own rooms.
First, Han Xuhan entered Zhanxian's room and mentally touched the skeleton's avatar.
A few seconds later, his vision was replaced by the familiar, abyssal darkness that occupied the route between sects, inside the spatial cracks.
It lasted less than a second this time, light appearing once more around him as his skeletal body fell toward the ground slowly.
Zhanxian was screaming his head off and flailing his limbs in a panic the whole time, making it hard for Han Xuhan to properly observe the sect below him. Once Zhanxian fell, he did his best to memorize everything he could see around him.
Sandy area, houses made of rocks, at least a couple hundred disciples, two old men walking over toward him lazily. One of the old men made a strange gesture in the air suddenly. Han Xuhan felt his limbs and body snap into a ramrod-straight posture.
But before the old men could reach him, his sight was replaced by the familiar walls of his dao tower, indicating that Han Xuhan had canceled his summoning cycle from the other side.
"Not our target," Han Xuhan muttered as he left Zhanxian's room to enter Tun Shi Tian's abode.
Zhanxian hadn't taught the bird how to cast the memory-sharing technique yet. So he merely let it recount its experience.
From Tun Shi Tian's descriptions, the sect it had traveled to turned out to be the Void-Hammer sect. The owl's enhanced vision had noticed the name stitched on a flag in tiny letters.
Han Xuhan suddenly recalled a problem. When he had first met the Wangs and Lings, they had appeared from a direction almost opposite to the spot where Tun Shi Tian had entered. It was very far away from the bamboo and unless the bulls drawing the chariot could fly, their leap onto the island had to be from an area just below that edge of the island.
How could both cracks lead to the same sect? Or...
The clues all suddenly connected inside his mind one after one, finally revealing to him the true picture of the twisted space of Titanfall Archipelago.
