Chapter 2110: Door
"What?!" Fiery Mountain shouted. "What Cancer?! What labyrinth?! I have a force!"
"Your force died a long time ago," June explained before pointing at Noah. "If it didn"t, it probably died at his or Heaven and Earth"s hands."
"I didn"t ask for your opinion anyway," Noah calmly added. "I welcomed you in my organization, so you are part of it now. I"ll hear your complaints in a million years."
"What?!" Fiery Mountain shouted again.
"He is joking," June giggled. "He will never hear them."
Fiery Mountain didn"t know how to interact with the two. Rank 9 cultivators usually had unreasonable characters, but she didn"t like how those younger experts didn"t bother to show a tinge of respect toward her. Moreover, the various revelations were a bit too much for her to accept in mere seconds.
Fiery Mountain"s confusion slowly vanished, but pure annoyance replaced that feeling. She would have accepted collaborating with those two experts if they had treated her as a peer, but that arrogant and uncaring behavior was too disrespectful. She might be weaker than Noah and June, but she still carried the pride of a cultivator who had reached the ninth rank.
"I don"t know who you are, and I don"t care," Fiery Mountain stated. "Leave me be, or I"ll fight for my freedom. I"ve escaped Heaven and Earth. You won"t be any different."
Noah and June felt surprised. They actually liked that part of Fiery Mountain"s character. She had the demeanor of a real rank 9 cultivator, even if her power didn"t match her words.
"There might be hope for her," June admitted.
"Indeed," Noah agreed while scratching the side of his head and raising his voice. "Look, we are getting out of here. Everything else is up to you. Still, tell me if you have any intention of joining Heaven and Earth. I"d rather kill you now in that case."
"How do you even dare insinuate that?" Fiery Mountain snorted. "I won"t bend even if that means death."
"I"m starting to like her," June giggled.
"Behave," Noah scolded while caressing her head.
"You like me more when I don"t behave," June teased, and the two soon started to flirt again.
Fiery Mountain didn"t know how to react to those two, but she decided to leave when she noticed that they were starting to get too intimate. The expert reached one of the few volcanos left in the area, but the noises generated by Noah and June ended up preventing her from focusing on her cultivation.
Lightning bolts and roars thundered throughout the separate reality while Fiery Mountain tried to focus. Faint moans also resounded among those loud noises. She couldn"t understand whether Noah and June were having a romantic moment or fighting, but she soon realized that both options could be accurate. The expert didn"t know how to feel about that, especially since she had to hear everything happening outside the volcano.
It took a while for that event to end, but Fiery Mountain didn"t get the chance to rejoice since explosions started to resound throughout the whole area. Earthquakes also filled the surface and forced the magma underground to spurt out of the various cracks that opened. Noah and June were chanting a symphony of destruction, and the matter soon became too much to bear.
Fiery Mountain left the volcano angrily, with every intention to scold the two experts who kept ruining her seclusion. Yet, her rage vanished when her eyes fell on the environment that had been her home for countless years.
The surface had disappeared. Only Fiery Mountain"s volcano had remained vaguely intact, but everything else had fallen prey to the lava. Noah and June had destroyed everything except for her training area while she was away.
"You came out!" Noah shouted from a distant spot in the sky.
June was in his arms, and she immediately waved her hand to send sparks in the gaseous layers filling the sky. Her power flew until it generated a lightning bolt that fell right behind Fiery Mountain.
The attack pierced the volcano and destroyed the last intact spot in the area. Everything fell prey to the lava by then, and Fiery Mountain could only stare in disbelief at the destructive power that the two experts had shown. She could have achieved something similar on her own, but she would have taken far longer to reach those results.
Noah and June studied the sea of lava for a while, but they eventually gave up on the matter. They couldn"t find anything there. The exit had to be somewhere else.
"What have you done?" Fiery Mountain asked in a low tone.
"Searching for the exit," Noah explained, "Obviously."
"How does this even fits as searching?" Fiery Mountain questioned. "You have destroyed every possible safe area. Do you have any idea how long it will take for the lava to solidify?"
"It solidifies then," Noah whispered while his eyes darted across the area.
"What do you think?" June asked.
"Maybe this labyrinth doesn"t have an exit," Noah guessed. "It"s cursed, but we didn"t find any real threat. Maybe the creator meant that the structure lacks essential features."
"The name would be a hint in that case," June added before pointing at Fiery Mountain. "Still, she didn"t see the banners."
"Maybe she missed them while escaping from Heaven and Earth"s perfect counter," Noah wondered.
"That"s a stretch," June responded.
"It really is a stretch," Noah sighed. "Yet, what else can we do? Exploring both sea and sky would take too long, and destroying them might remove materials meant for the creation of the exit. I don"t want to wait for the area to generate more of them."
"How would you even create something for an unknown destination?" June asked.
"By letting the area create it," Noah stated before expanding the dark world and sending flares of dark matter toward various spots of the area.
The dark matter fused with the sea of lava, air, and a dense gaseous layer above. It studied the various materials in those different substances before coming up with a few conclusions.
First of all, everything seemed to belong to the same family of materials. The substances had different fabrics and textures, and they also expressed multiple laws that often didn"t match the others. However, they all featured something odd that experts could miss even with a thorough inspection.
The lava, air, and smoke didn"t carry anything special, but a few materials were peculiar. A chunk of the scorching liquid, part of the debris spewed out during the destruction, and the layer of smoke had substances that carried identical laws even if their textures and forms were different.
That was theoretically impossible since the laws dictated the form and texture of a material. Cultivators, magical beasts, and hybrids were exceptions, but they still couldn"t create two different items that carried identical true meanings.
Noah obviously put his idea into motion. The dark matter gathered those materials and dragged them back inside the dark world. The workshop began to work on them as the ethereal blackness poured potential into his mind. A giant rectangular structure soon came to life, and its empty center began to tremble when it returned inside the separate reality.
The giant door began to experience vortices once it touched the environment. It didn"t seize energy. Actually, it seemed that the world was trying to help the project by sending waves of energy toward its edges.
A proper portal appeared after the door spent a few minutes acc.u.mulating power. The areas on the other side were vague, but Noah and June could quickly confirm that Heaven and Earth didn"t affect those places.