The world seemed to scream around Zi Zhen as he tore through the air at a pace he had never said before in his long life. Never had he run from a battlefield so fast.Never had he experienced such fear, even when he had last seen the body of the original tentacled Calamity.A roar escaped him as he slammed into the earth, carving a trench through the granite, dirt, and stone that ran a hundred paces before his body finally lost all momentum and came to a stop. The stone, trees, boulders, and lands erupted in his wake in large mushroom-like plumes that blotted out the afternoon sun for a few minutes before it slowly settled. The ribbons of his clothes, Qi enhanced as they were, had taken the brunt of the damage, fraying and ripping and thrashing in every direction without purpose once he had come to a full stop.Zi Zhen groaned in suffering and pain.His head was staring up into the sky, facing the wrong direction, while the rest of his body was firmly placed on the ground, chest to the floor.A deep black threatened to take his consciousness away, but Zi Zhen refused such a fate.I won’t die here! I cannot die after getting so close to ascension!Demonic Qi flooded through his system. The last bits in his core that he hadn't used to escape flowed through his body and concentrated on the single point where his neck was currently twisted from. He couldn’t his hands or any part of his body to readjust lest he cause more damage to the already nearly impossible to recover from injury. The Demonic Qi grabbed and held onto his neck, solidifying it. Yet its very essence was one of destruction and corruption. He could feel it, and the miasma that was born to it, slowly piece away at his essence.He had only a certain amount of time, two weeks by his estimation, to fully recover and expel the Demonic Qi if he had any hopes of surviving.A scream of agony (...)