The Portal of Wonderland

Somewhere in the East Sea, the waves were always violent and untamed. Underneath those waves was a large swathe of ocean in a much darker shade of blue, making it stand out a little from the waters around it.

If one were to look at it from afar, they could probably see a gargantuan blue eggshell in the middle of that part of the ocean, but upon closer inspection it would reveal that it was actually a translucent dome of light.

Around that single area, thick gusts of blackish cyclones goaded tidal waves, each more violent than the last, crashing onto the translucent dome relentlessly, yet they seemed to inflict nothing.

Through the dome, one could easily make out a single silhouette of an island covered with a shroud of black mist. Occasionally, sparks of different colors would shimmer, one after another.

The island was about twenty or thirty yards above the water, but its bottom reached all the way into the deepest bottom of the sea about a few hundred yards deep. The entire island was black in color, looking similar to a single gigantic mountain composed entirely out of black basalt.

Around this island were a few hundred humanoids with scales covering their bodies. Each surfaced out of the ocean in different locations, their bodies radiating a blue aura as strands of blue light about as thick as an average adult’s thumb shot out of their backs toward the black peak.

The peak on the black island reflected rings in a blue, wave-like pattern. Receiving a few hundred sources of blue lights, the peak scintillated.

Suspended in midair above the sea and the few hundred humanoids was a beautiful maiden with the most delicate of features. She was waving her aqua-blue sleeves as beams of crystalline blue light emanated from her body parallel to the hundred streams of blue light from below.

Had Shi Mu been around, he would have quickly recognized this ravishing maiden as the one whose fate was inexplicably intertwined with his own—Xiang Zhu, the Saint of the Sea Race.

As her lips moved, she belted out verses of indecipherable incantations in her mellifluous voice. The lights radiating from her body increased in intensity as she did, and through a diamond shape crystal resting on her palm, they broke off into scattering lights shining onto the black peak before them.

On the dome of light cupped around them, quaint characters written in ancient calligraphy surfaced one by one, while even finer characters rose before them—in total, there were thousands of words. It was like a great scroll of ancient literature being unfurled.

On the first sentence of the scroll was a line written in ancient calligraphy: Grand Ultimate Soul Spell.

A lady donning a dress befitting a palace event stepped in from outside of the dome, slowly trudging towards the bottom of the mountain and looked up quietly at the ravishing maiden in midair.

After a while, the beautiful woman asked, “How are you doing, Little Zhu?”

The blue aura around Xiang Zhu faded gradually as her hands stopped. Then, slowly descending from where she was, she landed gracefully beside the woman and replied in a feathery voice, “Glad tidings, Master. It is about eighty percent done.”

The beautiful woman nodded. “You’ve truly done so much over these few years.”

“It’s alright for Little Zhu here, Master. The spiritual energy around this area is pure and saturated, which had been an immense help for my cultivation. With our current effort, all we need may be about three to five years before the regalia could be ours,” Xiang Zhu shook her head reassuringly and replied with a smile.

The beautiful woman in the palace court dress looked up at the scroll-like dome of light above the black mountain. There was very little empty space left at the end of the scroll.

She turned to Xiang Zhu and flashed a smile of happy relief.

It was then when the unexpected abruptly happened!

It started with an ear-pounding rumble. The entire black mountain was rocking violently on its own, causing the blue beam on top of it to shudder intensely. Then, the dome of light—the Grand Ultimate Soul Spell—started to blur.

“What’s… what’s happening?”

A look of alarm crossed Xiang Zhu’s face as soon as she noticed the changes. With her sleeves flapping and billowing in the wind she flew into the sky, her hands quickly launching into a series of hand signs in an effort to stabilize the formation.

As she spoke the incantation, blue light flared out of her body. Through the diamond crystal, every single mote of that light was projected toward the dome.

“People of the Sea, attend to the Saint! Lend her all of your strength!” the beautiful woman commanded.

“Yes!”

The crowd below answered in unison, their own blue aura amplifying in a second. The thumb-sized blue light swelled to the size of a child’s arm, all beaming toward the peak at a singular point.

As the lights shone onto the dome, the latter seemed to slowly stabilize once more, the fine calligraphic characters were once again as clear as carved.

However, in the next few seconds, a stream of unmistakable clasps rang out from the black peak. A crack about the size of a child’s arm had appeared!

At first, there was only one—then there were three, and then five… the cracks were spreading out like a cobweb!

Black boulders chipped off of the mountain, a few of them even tumbling so far to its side that they were going to crush some of the individuals below. None of them moved from their spots, but they used their own technique to destroy the boulders before they could hit them.

Roarrrr!

A single bellow—partially apoplectic and partially frustrated—tore through the din like a painful pound on everyone’s eardrums.

As the one closest to the mountain, Xiang Zhu took most of the resulting shockwave. Her body limped—and she almost fell from the air.

The beautiful woman, alarmed, sprung a blue sash from her sleeve. It twirled around Xiang Zhu protectively and deflected every single black boulder heading towards her.

With that single bellow, beams of golden light were shooting out of the cracks on the peak, causing rings of ripples to smash through the blue light beams on the gigantic peak and knocking the scroll of Grand Ultimate Soul Spell close to complete obliteration.

Banggg!

The entire peak finally burst open by that single explosion of golden rays. An avalanche of black boulders stampeded down from the slope and revealed the item sealed within the mountain—a soaring, hundred-yard tall golden staff, with half of its body hidden below the surface.

The crowd backed away in panic as the boulders rained down like a storm. Saint Xiang Zhu too had to retreat while under the protection of the sash.

To everyone’s shock, the hundred-yard long golden staff rose upward on its own, barring the part hidden in the water through a terrible racket!

The motion caused a myriad of tidal waves as the staff’s action stirred the sea. As the tides thrashed, they started to form a vortex with the staff as its center before slowly turning into a whirlpool!

While the staff rose, it also shrank at a speed visible to the naked eye. In a blink, it shrank to about a tenth of its original size, its width about the diameter of a bowl, its length about thirty yards long. It hung above the surface of the ocean, dazzling gold.

“It’s…” The beautiful woman mumbled. Standing next to her, Xiang Zhu’s face was seized by a look of incredulous shock.

A few concealed runes appeared on the surface of the gigantic staff blazing in gold. Then, apparently being pulled by some unknown force, the staff soared into the sky.

Boom! The blue egg-shell dome was pierced by the staff. In a flash, the spiritual energy from outside—previously sealed out of the area by the barrier—flooded in from the opening in a whoosh, forming their own cyclone of spiritual energy.

Amidst the gales, the golden staff zipped southwest like a golden shooting star. In the blink of an eye, it was gone.

…

Close to where the Black Demon Sect was, several sky-scraping mountains had already been reduced to large piles of rubble as boulders of all sizes scattered in a mess.

In midair, the gigantic white ape and the golden Jiao dragon were still locked in a deadly struggle. The white ape looked even more skinny and dehydrated than before, the white flames on its body close to being snuffed out. It spent most of the fight having to use defensive and evasive maneuvers—a sure sign that it was losing.

Phew—!

The golden Jiao dragon swiped its tail horizontally in a blur, accompanied by whooshing gales, as it lashed at the large white ape.

Boom!

Unable to dodge, the white ape crossed its arm before its chest—and still the whip-like attack had sent it about ten yards away from where it was before finally stopping its own fall.

It panted as it bared its fangs.

From within the ape’s body, Shi Mu could feel that the ape’s aura and breath were getting weaker by the second. The blood essence in his body—not much to begin with—had been almost exhausted.

Shi Mu panicked.

Before the white ape could even catch a breath, the golden Jiao dragon lunged towards it, opening its mouth and exhaling a gust of crimson-gold inferno.

With no time to think, the white ape pushed its two feet against the earth and leaped out of the way reflexively.

Tcchh-largh!

The flames missed its shoulder by a hairbreadth. The white ape may have dodged out of the way at the critical moment, but a big patch of its fur had been singed. Slower by half a beat, the white ape may could have been incinerated right then and there!

“Come, let me see how much of this you can take!”

The golden Jiao dragon hovered in the air in a circular motion, its eyes shimmering in gold. Every single word of its last sentence was oozing with sadistic pleasure.

From the far side of the sky came a piercing sound. The clouds from that direction suddenly furled and unfurled intensely, and from within them, a single glint of gold cruised through the sky.

Every cloud in its path started to spin quickly into a single tornado. In the center, the sky looked like a brand new hole had been forcefully jabbed open as shades of golden rays broke through.

The single glint of light was so fast, it was as if it could reach a hundred miles in a millisecond!

Shi Mu’s heart throbbed—and a surge of indescribable sentiment flooded his mind.

At the same time, the white ape sensed it too. Its dimming eyes suddenly lit up.

The golden Jiao dragon itself paused, as it raised its head in the direction of that rumble, toward that big drove of flame-gold nimbus. Yet, the moment it recognized the golden glint, its pupils instantly constricted in anger. Balled within the anger, however, were embers of fear.

The golden Jiao dragon turned to the white ape, lividity shooting out of its eyes as it opened its mouth wide and exhaled a thick stream of crimson-gold flames towards the ape’s head—it was going for a lethal strike!

A crack of thunder boomed above Shi Mu’s head!

High in the stratosphere, the clouds parted, revealing a spray of golden beams. A single gigantic staff about the diameter of a bowl wide, thirty-odd yards long plummeted from the sky like a strike of golden lightning from an aurora, its entire body blazing with flames.

The golden Jiao dragon’s inferno attack was very fast. It had swarmed toward the white ape’s head and seemed very close to hitting.

Bang!

A loud racket echoed through the skyline, but it wasn’t the sound of the flames hitting the white ape.

Instead, it was the golden staff, striking right at the earth in an upward manner before Shi Mu. Its arrival had brought on so many gales and forces that they blew everything within a few square-miles away along with some debris and rocks, as well as deflecting the dragon’s crimson-gold flames.

The dragon’s body was shimmering in gold as it summoned an armor of golden light to brace against the gales. Yet, at that moment, it could hardly budge an inch forward.