The annual tournament of the five local jade sects had concluded in a manner which left an already emotionally exhausted crowd speechless. A strange young boy who was lacking in manners and regularly interacted with mundane workers had revealed that he was immune to Yin’s thunder clap technique, known to be undefeated in the region, before picking the reigning champion like a small child in his arms and dropping him out of bounds.

  The audience even seemed to have forgotten about the recent revelation that a pixie had been officially recognized as both a disciple of one of the weaker sects and a participant in the tournament. As Micro stood victorious at the edge of the stage pointing up at the sky, the majority of the cultivators in the audience simply continued to stare. Whispers and gossip gradually began to emerge, but it was Tohan who first followed Micro’s finger up to the sky, and what he saw caused him to drop all the gold in his hand.

  “The moon…!” Tohan screamed with such terror that the entire arena froze. “It’s green!”

  Every cultivator suddenly jumped out of their seats as the tension of the tournament’s strange end was swept away by a wave of panic. The announcer and several of his colleagues immediately left their booth and ran to one of the exits, just as many others scrambled to do the same. Of the contestants, only Kel and Tae ran toward the stage rather than away from it. Some cultivators even jumped into the air to try and escape the arena.

  “Is that a sign that the tournament is over?” Micro asked Kel. “I was expecting a trophy or something…”

  “We must run!” Kel shouted back.

  “So the moon turning green isn’t normal on this world either?” Micro asked. “As far as signs go, green lights are actually—”

  “The only reason the moon could look green is magic!” Kel explained in a panic, grabbing Micro by the shoulder to lead him away. “Run!”

  “What?” Micro said as he tilted his head back to look at it again, this time noticing that even the stars looked vaguely green.

  “I’ve heard of this happening before!” Tae added. “A small town vanished…!”

  “We’re trapped!” the panicked voice of a spectator called out from the gate where dozens of cultivators were trying to push through, but nobody was able to leave through the seemingly open door.

  “It goes all the way around!” another screamed from across the arena.

  “Agh!” A cry suddenly rang out from above the arena as a woman tried to jump straight over the arena wall, but she ricocheted off a nearly invisible barrier with an impact that sent odd-coloured sparks in every direction.

  When Micro looked down again, he found himself between Lena and Azar. There was no sign of the patience they’d been practicing throughout the tournament, and Azar already looked ready to attack.

  “Did you plan this, boy?” Azar asked with fury in his eyes. He began to reach for Micro’s throat, but Lena stopped him.

  “Was this your doing?” Lena asked, her own eyes much more intimidating.

  “What’s happening?” Micro asked. “I thought green was a good sign. Green means go, you know?”

  “Micro—” Lena stared at him for a moment before sighing and shaking her head solemnly. “He knows nothing, as usual.”

  “Are we under attack?” Kel asked Lena anxiously.

  “Under attack? No, we are already captured,” Lena replied with despair. “This barrier wreaks of chaos energy. Even the Silver Magistrate would never break through, but where are the magicians?”

  “I sense no chaos in any of the people here,” Azar replied, looking around at the panicking spectators. “Only jade and amber core cultivators…”

  As Azar and Lena continued to scan the crowd for any sign of the magicians, every surface of the arena suddenly began to sparkle.

  “Oh no…” Lena gasped.

  “Oh wow, that’s pretty,” Micro remarked. “I wonder what kind of paint they used.”

  “This many sigils—It can’t be…” Lena gasped.

  “Oh, it’s the pictures they were drawing,” Micro said with a smile, looking down as a symbol drawn on the stone he was standing on began to glow intensely. “That’s really nice.”

  “What!? You know who prepared this trap?!” Lena shrieked, taking hold of both of Micro’s shoulders.

  “Of course I do,” Micro frowned. “Wait, what trap? All the workers put a lot of effort into these—Oh…”

  “The workers…” Lena took a step back as she gasped. “They were hidden among the workers? Which ones? Where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” Micro replied. “They went home a while ago.”

  “It’s true,” Azar added with a scowl. “I can’t sense a single mundane soul, much less one tainted by chaos…”

  “To be trapped so easily,” Lena mumbled with a hoarse voice. “A shameful death awaits—”

  “Wait, this one looks familiar,” Micro said as he noticed a particular symbol on the ground nearby. He walked over and knelt down next to it, and nodded upon taking a closer look.

  “What is it?” Azar asked as he ran over to where Micro now knelt. His face was more full of fear than anger for the first time since Micro had met him. “Tell me what you know! Please, boy!”

  “I’m pretty sure this one was near me when I arrived on this world… Those look familiar too!” Micro pointed at several other symbols on the ground as he explained. “Nora told me to go help some magicians, then I woke up in a cave, and there were some symbols like this.”

  “Are you certain?” Azar shouted, his face pale. “Why did you remain silent until now?!”

  “If you recognized the symbols, why did you say nothing?” Lena also asked.

  “They’re just pictures,” Micro shrugged. “You didn’t see them painting?”

  “Who? The mundane?” Lena frowned. “Why would I be minding what they—”

  Lena suddenly stopped talking and placed her hand on her head.

  “I’ll rip you to pieces if you don’t let us out of here!” Azar screamed at Micro, but Lena held her hand in front of his face with a look of exasperation.

  “Enough…” Lena eventually whispered. “Just tell me what you know. Is this a summoning ritual of some kind?”

  “It could be. It does smell similar, and the symbols I saw before were carved into the walls of the cave.” Micro nodded, beginning to share in their anxieties. He turned to Kel and Tae, hoping they might offer some advice or reassurance, but they were locked in an embrace and didn’t seem interested in conversing with him, so he continued. “I can feel it a lot more clearly now. It’s not like the other elements…”

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  “You’re sensing chaos energy. It isn’t an energy that normally exists in this realm,” Lena replied. “It’s a chaotic force which destroys all it touches before removing itself from existence…”

  “That sounds bad,” Micro added awkwardly.

  “If what you say is true, and the magicians have prepared an array this size…” Lena looked around in fear at the uncountable number of glowing sigils around the arena.

  Micro’s pocket suddenly rustled, and Blue’s sleepy head poked out to greet the situation.

  “Why do I feel like I’m being sacrificed again?” She said with a yawn. Opening her eyes, she let out an unhappy sigh. “Oh.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Lena replied slowly. “We are witnessing a summoning ritual of unprecedented scale. They managed to transform the entire building into a sacrificial altar of some kind.”

  “Then do something about it. Getting sacrificed isn’t much fun,” Blue said, now fully awake. “Trust me.

  “I don’t know where to begin…” Lena mumbled in despair.

  “Sacrificed?!” Azar cried out. “This is my fate?”

  “You’re the super fantasy guards of the imperial something or whatever…” Blue mumbled to Lena with a sarcastic glare. “Do some guarding. Save me.”

  Lena shook her head, ignoring the remarks of the pixie, then coated her hand in energy, the same way Micro had witnessed Azar do in the cave where they found the Mycelial Art dungeon. With her ethereal tiger claws, she swiped at a glowing sigil with a shout more like a roar. But the moment her claw came near the sigil, the armour around her hand instantly evaporated. She withdrew her hand with a yelp as sparks engulfed the finger which came closest to the strange symbol.

  “Surrounded on all sides by chaos, we are powerless…” Lena whispered sorrowfully. “We can only wait for death…”

  “What should we—” Micro began to ask, but a sharp, familiar pain in his chest suddenly brought him to his knees. He then noticed every single one of the hundreds of other cultivators in the arena was doing the same thing, filling the air with terrible screams of pain.

  “My core…!” Azar coughed as he rolled over onto his back, clutching his chest with his hand helplessly. “Curse you!”

  Micro lay beside Blue as they experienced the same painful sensation of their cores being drained of energy at an alarming rate. He could feel the same happening to Trill, who had been napping in his other pocket.

  “Well, it was fun while it lasted…!” Blue managed to mumble through the pain.

  “Thanks—” Micro smiled. “But I still need to go… home…”

  He watched with watery eyes as the energy leaving his core mingled with the energy of a thousand cultivators in a ball above the stage where he had been fighting only a short time before. It swirled around like a small sun, increasing in brightness with each bit of energy it absorbed. Gradually it began to mold itself into the shape of a human. Micro could only lay there on the stage and accept that not even the strength of a thousand cultivators could stand against the mysterious force that now drained him of his power, and the familiar sensation of drawing nearer to death washed over him like a cold, heavy rain. He closed his eyes and looked inward as he grew weaker, wondering if it might be his last chance to walk through the garage door of his core before it was destroyed forever.

  He slipped into that state between consciousness and unconsciousness and looked around at the storm of energy swirling around him. He could clearly see the energy of a thousand cultivators being drawn into the monstrous being forming in the air. Micro turned away from the chaos and found himself next to his core, within the nostalgic confines of his reconstructed home. He was relieved to see it once again, but his heart ached as the storm reached the walls of the garage.

  Sure enough, the dense energy which made up every brick of his core was drifting away, beginning to expose his soul to the chaos outside. He could feel the pressure of his soul against the walls of the core as it weakened. Even the rings of fire and water the dungeon guardians had placed around his core couldn’t prevent the energy from dissipating. Micro wished there was some way to fight for his life, but he could feel from the beginning that he was powerless to stop his energy from drifting away. He tried to catch some of the energy in the air, but his effort proved futile as it slipped through his fingers.

  “Wait a minute—” Micro frowned as a slight tingling sensation in the palm of his hand caught his attention. He didn’t sense any energy there, but when he looked more closely, he noticed that something had remained, something strange and unsettling. Micro brought his hand closer to his face to inspect its contents. In the palm of his hand he observed several tiny specs of energy that felt nothing like the elemental forces of the world around him, and yet they felt familiar. The closer he moved his face toward them, the more familiar it felt, until he realized what he held in his hand. “Chaos energy…?”

  He could vividly recall the strange feeling of the mysterious force which had pulled him through the stars into a new world. The tingling in his hand soon grew uncomfortable, and he instinctively let them go. He waved his hand around to try and catch more, and he was surprised to find he’d collected a large handful of the ethereal dust. The chaos energy didn’t glow like any of the other energies he had learned to harness. Instead, it felt like it was sucking the light out of the world around it. He used his other hand to collect another small handful from the air and packed it together as if he were making a snowball, and he was mesmerized by the result.

  He could now see faint lights in the little ball of chaos energy no bigger than a marble, as if he were looking through a small window into the night sky, though the strangely coloured lights he saw only partially resembled the stars he knew. He tried to get an even closer look at what lay beyond the small window he held in his hand, bringing it closer to his eye, but he suddenly felt a terrible pain in his left eye that caused him to drop the ball into the abyss. Reeling from the discomfort that lingered in his left eye, he walked through a hole that had formed in his garage door, and looked around at the dissolving garage.

  “At least the real one is still standing…” he mumbled, rubbing his sore eye. Micro walked back around the truck at the centre of his core again after growing tired. He placed his hand on the passenger side mirror, noticing it had shifted slightly in the current of energy, and he could feel the truck itself beginning to vibrate and shake as the garage continued to weaken.

  “Huh?” Micro suddenly blurted out as he realized his hand was stuck to the mirror. He managed to pry his hand off with some effort, but noticed something even stranger. Some of the chaos energy which he’d tried to throw away had stuck to hand, and now it was stuck to the passenger mirror of his soul like a chunk of tar.“ What the—”

  Micro began angrily wiping the black stain on the mirror furiously, but it only served to spread the stain in every direction. Before long, the entire passenger door was covered in the substance. He stepped back with his hands on his head as he looked at the stain with disgust, despairing that he’d spend his last moments watching his soul explode through his core while covered in something similar to glittering tar. However, as the feeling of disgust settled into his heart, he noticed another feeling.

  “That actually feels really warm…” he muttered softly. The feeling of unease that his dissolving core had caused him lessened the moment he coated the door of his truck-shaped soul with chaos energy. After coating the left side of the truck with a thin layer of chaos energy, his left arm had begun to feel warm and protected. “I wonder…”

  Without dwelling on the thought for too long, he rushed outside his core to collect another handful of the chaos energy which was abundant in the air, then ran back in to wipe it all over the glowing white truck inside. It made him feel sick to deliberately cover himself in the strange substance, but he repeated the process until every part of the truck was coated from top to bottom.

  “So that’s what I’d look like with black paint,” Micro thought to himself as he stepped back to inspect his handwork. “That’s actually not bad…”

  As he admired the new paint job of his soul, what little remained of the garage he’d replicated continued to fade away, along with much of the internal energy he’d been storing there. He felt weak and tired as his core dissolved, but he also felt calm.

  “So you can make a core out of this stuff too…” he confirmed as he tapped the surface of the black coating with his knuckles. He’d had to spread the chaos energy over the top of the core cards in the bed, so he worried that he may not be able to master any more until he’d restored his core, but there was no time to dwell on Core Cards at the moment.

  “Ouch!” Micro grunted as he woke up in the arena, much to Blue’s surprise, with some of his vitality restored. He stood up slowly and took a moment to collect himself. He looked around to see the barrier made of energy still standing, and the air was still filled with the pained screams of everyone trapped within. It was difficult to breathe in the midst of so much energy without being able to use any of it to shield himself, but he was relieved to have a stable core again, even if it was only enough to keep him alive.

  “How…” Lena groaned as she looked up at him.

  “I made a new core…” Micro replied, already out of breath. “The chaos energy… was really sticky…”

  She looked up at him in disbelief, but she had no strength to question him. Micro looked up to see that the humanoid figure being formed from the stolen energy of a thousand cultivators’ cores was no longer just a glowing mass of energy. As it rotated slowly above the arena, he noticed a face similar to his own had grown out of the mass of energy.

  “A hero…” Azar gasped, still laying on the ground in pain. “With an… emerald core…?!”

  Micro looked down at Blue with a confused expression.

  “Jade, amber, sapphire, emerald—” Blue grunted at him as she writhed in pain. “How is your memory so much worse than mine…?”

  “Thanks, Blue,” Micro replied anxiously. He then looked at Kel, Tae, and the hundreds of other jade and amber level cultivators throughout the arena, their writhing figures illuminated by the magicians’ glowing sigils. He then looked back at Lena and Azar, the only sapphire level cultivators trapped with him in the arena, and both of whom were equally immobilized by the core-consuming trap laid by the magicians.

  “Huh…” Micro weakly sighed. “Now what?”