Sam drifted in a haze of pain and misery, unable to see anything but the blackness of his own agony. His body was in ruins, parts of it strewn everywhere. It was beginning to heal over, but Granthar’s Dao still wrestled with Sam to maintain dominance, trying to stop him from escaping.

  His own Daos fought with it to expel the foul substance from his body, but he was pitting a Dao Seed against a Dao Sapling. For every inch of ground that he covered, he had to expend ten times as much energy as the other Dao lost, even without Granthar’s attention on it. It was an agonizing process, and an incredibly slow one as well, at least on E Rank timescales.

  Slowly, far too slowly for his comfort, his body’s regeneration kicked in, and new limbs began to sprout from the stumps of the old. He could faintly hear someone screaming, only to realize that it was himself. A foul sludge of semi-physical matter was expelled from his body as he viscerally forced Granthar’s power out of his beleaguered form. As he did so, he felt his body repairing itself, faster and faster. Slowly, his senses returned, his ears registering a series of mighty booms from the sky above, and his eyes gazing up at a hazy scene of fire and ruin.

  His vision cleared fully, and with a groan, he realized that a good portion of the city before him was gone, razed into a circle of ash and slag, bubbling with latent heat. Nobody save for powerful E Rankers could have survived something like that, and especially not the people he was most concerned about, Garnax and his family.

  It seemed that they were lucky today, though. With a sigh of relief, Sam spotted the apartment complex they lived in, a few miles distant from the edge of the inferno, only to grimace as a bolt of fire from the heavens lanced down into the city, shrouding it in smoke.

  In the skies above, a monstrosity large enough to blot out the sun battled two far smaller figures, while King Granthar fought to attack a large vessel hovering in the upper atmosphere, being held back by another cultivator. At least Sam had managed to achieve his goal of stalling Granthar, but his quest was not over yet, as the man still lived.

  Sam tried to rise to his feet, but his body rebelled against him, a rarity as an Enlightened Tier existence. It was as if he were a mortal once more, recovering from an intense battle. Every bit of him had been scoured by a Dao more potent than his own, leaving wounds that bit to his very soul.

  He gritted his teeth, and forced himself upright, using Girdings of the Arbiter to prop his body up. The skill he had formed months ago was coming in handy now, even though he no longer had bones to reinforce with it. In his current state, his faculties had been reduced to a level far below the norm.

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  Sam teleported jerkily towards the apartment complex that Garnax and his family lived in, praying that he wasn’t too late. Shocks of pain struck him like lightning with every movement tearing into his damaged energy channels. As an E Ranker, his body was quite literally flesh and nothing else in the physical world. As such, any damage to his more ephemeral body parts, like his core and so on were devastating.

  Smoke billowed around him as he neared the epicenter of the most recent explosion, and the searing heat of the battle far above beat down upon the remnants of his armor, which only covered a tiny fraction of his body. Pale skin protruded out from the bottom, with only a few strips of clothing mercifully concealing his nudity. As he went, he sent tiny tendrils of his Dao into the armor, gradually repairing it as he went. Even that was agonizing, but not as much as the teleportation.

  By the time he reached the crumbling buildings that marked the edge of the devastation, his body was in shambles, blood pouring from his orifices. His core felt like a dying star, burning and pulsating within him, hotter than lava. A few deep breaths calmed him, despite his lack of a need for air. Sometimes, it helped to remember the days before he had become something more than human. After all, death was universal, no matter a cultivator’s strength. There was always somebody stronger, as he had viscerally learned today.

  “Shit…” he cursed. “I came so close to dying…” A series of trivial Tower floors had inured him to the possibility of defeat that when he finally came up against a foe stronger than he was, insurmountably so, it felt like a new awakening. Perhaps that was the point.

  Stumbling a bit, Sam headed towards the ground floor, seeing one of the massive doors, engraved with stylized depictions of Granthar, lying on the ground. It was half melted, but he could still make out the king doing battle with some interstellar monstrosity the size of a small moon. Sam flipped it off and headed into the remnants of the building, even as it crumbled around him.

  The materials were, thankfully, far more durable than any on Earth, and in many places, walls were standing solely by the grace of God and a few strips of concrete. Corpses, in various states of dismemberment, were painfully visible. Children had died along with their families, and Sam had to fight to suppress his desire to rejoin the fight outside. I would be crushed in a second or less. I need to focus on saving the Marns first.

  Remembering the path to their complex, Sam teleported again, ignoring the conceptual razor blades that tore at his body and soul. Corridors flashed by, ruined stonework and charred carpets merging into one long vista of destruction. Corpses melded in his mental image along with the building itself, blurring into the background.

  He leaped over holes in the ground with ease, ascending the floors of the building when he could. In many cases, Sam had to blast his way through the ceilings, landing on the next floor. It would have been impossible to find his target, had he not been an E Ranker, and possessing perfect memory. As it was, it still took him almost thirty seconds in real time, a near eternity at his level of speed, to find himself standing before the door that he was looking for.