Chapter 1210: Falling Suns The disheveled Ascendant Verana who had lost close to eighty percent of his Core Aura slapped back dozens of massive tentacles with a wheel of light conjured from deep within his Core, nothing else would work here and squeeze through their grasping hold, he had to shrink his body or he would not have passed this lock of flesh, this was not the closest shave with death he had experienced in this place. His mind, as if seeking to escape the hell they had entered, returned to the moment they entered into this hell. After days of planning outside the crater filled with Calamity gods, a strategy was created, and at the moment the Ascendant Sun took over the heavens, the sixteen Ascendant watched as the thousands of tentacles of the Calamity gods reaching for the heavens quickly shrank from the light and were covered with a dome of darkness. Without any prompting they all descended into the dome with great speed, all covered by a green halo created by Ascendant Verana to shield and hide their presence during the descent. They plunged into the dome of darkness and it was a bit jarring to move from light into total darkness, and this darkness was not one born from the sheer absence of light, but from corruption of the very concept of light itself. Even the eyes of an Ascendant that was skewed towards perceiving Aura instead of light found this place to be incredibly dark, it was because the Aura running inside the body of the Calamity gods were black instead of the normal red Calamity beasts carried, and so in the darkness, the Ascendants had to perceive the flow of Aura in the body of the Calamity gods than see them, and so they were moving blind, using only their senses. This was what enlightened them to the grimness of their situation and also became their doom. When the Ascendants had seen the walking tentacles of the Calamity gods from the outside, they were in their thousands, and with the knowledge of how the bodies of Calamity gods were structured, they had hypothesized that there would barely be a dozen or more Calamity gods below, also the corruption they had spread out indicated as much. Descending into the darkness and spreading their Aura Sight made them aware that the number they had chosen was far off, there were not dozens of Calamity gods, but thousands! The range of a million miles may seem extremely vast, but a Calamity god were massive entities that had a rather fluid property when it came to size as they could grow as large as they wanted if there were enough food for them to eat. So a million miles was not an extremely large area for a dozen Calamity gods, and the conclusion was drawn that they had fallen into a trap, and no matter how much disbelief was in the hearts of the Ascendants, when the tentacles that were in the thousands became hundreds of thousands and then began to move in a mystical manner that made no meaning, their sense of direction became lost. Impossible to know up from down, or how to escape the darkness that they had found themselves in, the tentacles of the Calamity gods, the smallest of them being thousands of feet long and the biggest measured in miles, descended on the Ascendants, all of them holding a foul hunger for the lights of their soul. This was a matter of life and death, and Ascendant Verana gave the order to fight back. At this time they could not care about the retaliation of the World's Will when a Calamity god was slaughtered, because if they did not act, they would still perish. This was no longer a journey to cleanse the land of its wound, but one of survival. Every Ascendant unleashed enough power to destroy universes, and for a while, this power turned the darkness bright, and Calamity gods fell in their hundreds. Their massive bodies filled with pure darkness were reduced to nothingness. The Ascendants waited a beat for the retaliation from the World's Will and after getting nothing, their eyes changed, and greed took the place of fear. Fear of the World's Will was the only reason why Calamity gods below the earth were not slaughtered en masse by the Ascendant to harvest Aura, but if sometimes in the past this rule had been abolished then they might just be the first sets of Ascendants to enjoy this benefit. However, the ways of the world were not that simple. Led by Ascendant Verana, the power they unleashed to butcher the Calamity gods twisted space and bent time, and the shrieks of pain from the Calamity gods became a constant symphony. It did not take long for the Ascendant to realize that they had killed nearly a thousand Calamity gods in a short wave of furious action, but they had yet to receive a single iota of Aura imbuements from the World. As if that was not enough, to add salt to an open wound, there was a loud groan deep in the earth that signified the beginning of a flood of Calamity gods. As if this area was a pipe to the realm of Calamity gods, thousands of them surged from the earth, their number seeming without end. The Ascendants were battle-hardened, all of them had lived lives of countless tribulations, and they were all supreme geniuses, they faced the unending horde of Calamity gods, and they did not break... at least for the first two months, and slowly but surely, they began to fall. Their deaths came bitterly, each Ascendant that fell not leaving their bodies behind, as they unearthed every single iota of Core Aura they had left and ignited their Natal Treasures, as they fell, they took with them thousands, but it was not enough, the Calamity gods kept coming, their hunger unending. The darkness was flashing with lights that could rival any star in existence, but those stars were getting fewer, as their owners fell, one by one. R Verana and the three last Ascendants all at the First Dan weaved through massive tentacles all of which spotted glowing yellow eyes that were ironically the only source of light in the darkness that had seemingly engulfed all of reality. They had discovered that their acts of sensing the Aura flowing in the bodies of the Calamity gods also led to them being detected and so they had stopped using their Aura Sense and began to maneuver through the fields of tentacles as they sought to escape this hell. Ascendant Verana Core Aura was linked to trees and flowers, so his Ascendant body, unlike the norm, was almost pinkish red, and every time he moved or made a gesture, he left a trail of flowers behind that slowly faded into the wind. His nature made him the perfect candidate to heal the earth and force the Calamity gods underground. Even if he wanted, no physical manifestation could follow his presence, he had become extremely weakened, and he nearly killed one of his subordinates who tapped him on the side and quietly informed him that they may have seen the passage out of this place. Apparently, the cycle of the Ascendant Sun overhead caused the darkness to change its structure and if they timed it right, they might be able to escape.