The Savage Wilderness Great World stirred.
It did not move like earth, nor breathe like a land. It pulsed, slow and deep, like a buried heart refusing silence. Thunder rolled where there were no clouds. Mountains shivered beneath invisible winds. In its deepest fault, where even light forgot its shape, Hei Lou Lan stood.
She did not speak.
She had no one to speak to. The echoes that answered her were not her own. Every step in this place left a print behind—not on stone, but on memory.
Above her, high atop a broken pillar of petrified bone, a giant's shadow loomed. It had no form. It wore no face. But its rage bled into the land.
The Savage Will.
"Flesh cannot carry legacy," it rumbled.
Hei Lou Lan spat blood and rose. Her flesh was broken in three places. Her strength-path defenses torn. But her will—shaped by hunger, tempered by survival—still burned.
"I am not here to carry," she said, voice cracked like gravel. "I am here to take."
The land answered.
Fist-shaped storms formed in the distance, spiraling down from bleeding skies. Trees uprooted themselves, charging on roots like beasts. From below, a tide of wild Gu howled—a flood of bone-armored centipedes, stone-skulled apes, and memory-hardened hornets.
She stood alone.
Somewhere beyond this world, Fang Yuan sat cross-legged in his true immortal aperture. His eyes were closed. But his senses flickered across the seal. He watched.
"She enters," he murmured.
Behind him, a minor clone folded a memory map. "Do we contain it?"
Fang Yuan's reply came after a long silence. "No. Not yet. Let her bleed."
In the Savage Wilderness, Hei Lou Lan raised her broken arms. Around her, strength-path Gu flickered. A formation of force knotted itself around her shadow.
The Great World did not test. It devoured.
But so did she.