The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 30: Chapter 30

Read chapter 30 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The man who seeks the truth often finds the grave; the man who seeks the grave usually finds something far worse." The partial vacuum hit the center of the hollow, and the air was violently sucked from my lungs, collapsing my chest. The pressure dropped so low, so fast, that the natural moisture coating my tongue and the surface of my eyes instantaneously reached its boiling point. It flashed into vapor in a brief, agonizing sensation of boiling cold. I squeezed my eyes shut, a soundless scream tearing at my throat. I knew it was going to be challenging, but I did not have the background to understand the physics at this level, even with a few days to work on the problem and the internet. I had neither the time nor resources to understand how bad I was fucked, so I settled with these famous last words. “I should have stayed in the fucking cave!” The Void-Stalker did not explode outward. No, it was a star reaching critical mass, and out was not what they did. Too much density in a single location had only one destiny: collapse. The heavy, obsidian flesh folded inward upon itself, crushed by its own localized gravity into a point of infinite density. An impossible localized anomaly, a miniature black hole. The filaments tore out of my arm, dragged back into the singularity. For a microsecond, the space in front of me was totally empty. Even in the frozen moment, I felt the hexagonal graft I had gained from my folly in grabbing the jade tablet react and cover my body. Then, in the next instant. The surrounding atmosphere rushed back into the void to fill the vacuum. The shockwave hit me like a wall of solid concrete moving at the speed of a bullet train. My face and body were disfigured in slow motion as the hexagonal lines now covering my entire form absorbed the initial blast, only to eject me even harder out of the zone. I was thrown backward like a broken kite, launched across the gap of the hollow in a blur of motion. I hit the far wall of the cave back-first, making my eyes feel like they were about to burst out of my head. The impact shattered at least three ribs, but that was the least of my problems. The back of my skull cracked against the stone, and my eardrums ruptured with a wet, agonizing tear. It was all I could do to keep conscious. With no fanfare, I fell face-first into the dirt, entirely paralyzed by the shock. My vision swam in a sea of grey static. The world went completely, terrifyingly silent. I couldn't hear the wind, nor could I hear my own ragged, wet breathing. But that was okay. I needed a break anyway. As I lay, my mind drifted. The edges of my consciousness were frayed and bleeding into the dark. It was pretty nice after the last few days of my new life. I wanted to stay here. It was quiet, and the pain in my shoulder and chest was starting to numb into a cold, distant ache. But like all great dreams, the silence was broken by a physical sensation. A heavy, rhythmic tapping against my cheek, and the pain flooded back. I opened my eyes, feeling the wetness soak my broken body. Everything was blurred, washed out in shades of mud and shadow. Water was falling. It wasn't a light drizzle. Heavy, torrential precipitation was pouring through the broken canopy above the hollow, washing away the stagnant air. The sudden, violent pressure drop from the atmospheric snap had forced the saturated air above the forest to instantly condense. The universe was correcting the barometric imbalance, and the sky was bleeding rain to fix it. The cold water hit my back, shocking my nervous system just enough to force a weak gasp into my crushed lungs. I tasted copper and mud. “Oh, fuck. This sucks,” I moaned in a tone that could have been easily challenged by a mouse. The rain hit the center of the hollow where the Void-Stalker had detonated. The creature was gone, entirely vaporized by whatever in all the realms' name that was. Nothing was left. Its hyper-dense blood and spiritual marrow had been atomized, coating the di