A mage? A spell engineer!

Chapter 430 The Biological Chain of the Air Elemental Dimension

"Tuntun" is the indigenous name for the language, and because it is primitive, it sounds rather cute.

But it is by no means cute, or rather, very few people have ever seen its full appearance. Little is known about the "Kronos Sky Beast". In the information circulating in the Prime Material Plane, its image is mostly hidden in a thick cloud of gas, and the only prominent and memorable features are its large mouth and its thunderous belly.

Such a colossal beast would be unimaginably large and almost mythical in the prime material plane, but in the sparse and vast air elemental plane, its living space is not necessarily cramped. Whether this creature is a flesh-and-blood being or an elemental life form is a topic of ongoing debate among scholars.

Its body is primarily composed of a massive digestive cavity large enough to contain a city, which drives the gases within to rub against each other, generating enormous amounts of electrical charge. In other words, its interior is constantly filled with lightning and thunder; the ever-flowing lightning replaces the function of stomach acid, and is even more effective at it.

On one hand, it can use lightning to convert nitrogen into usable nitrogen oxides. On the other hand, it constantly devours living things in the lower plane. These foods, which are like plankton and shrimp to "Tuntun", are killed, carbonized and vaporized by the constantly striking lightning. Then, the organic matter and inorganic salts in the remains are utilized by the sky behemoth.

The appearance of the "Kronos Sky Beast" was no accident, and absolutely not due to Rorschach's unlucky streak. In fact, the entire process was traceable:

The small blue tribes in the shallower planes have established fixed "gas wells," and their food supplies are gradually increasing. Inevitably, some of this food will fall, attracting pterosaur populations from the lower planes to scavenge for it.

The tribes' nomadic lifestyle of "following the air" originally didn't cause any problems, but after settling down, more and more debris was left behind, and the pterosaur population that lived permanently in the lower plane grew larger and larger. Although it is unknown whether there are seasons in the gaseous plane, life in the entire material world seems to have a strange synchronicity. The gradually expanding pterosaurs began to communicate with each other and breed the next generation after spring arrived in the prime plane.

The process of these flying beasts mating and exchanging genetic material was extremely noisy; Rorschach had already experienced their annoying screams. The cacophony of the group finally attracted the attention of the nearby wandering Tuntun.

"How can this guy be so big and fast?!" After traveling for so long, Luo Xia suddenly wanted to shout: This is not scientific!

No, this isn't magic either. Caroline's astonished expression revealed this. In an instant, the outline of the mouth disappeared, leaving only the abyss beneath the gaping maw. Gas churned within the esophagus behind that mouth, now emitting a burning orange-red glow.

Rorschach and Caroline were unaware of the behemoth's method of attacking prey. Normally, its skin and esophageal sieves would prevent oxygen from entering its stomach, but when it needed to move quickly, it would rapidly release and absorb oxygen from the atmosphere, igniting the flammable gas inside its stomach.

As the gas inside its belly expands rapidly, it compresses its giant stomach. Under the combined effect of these two forces, the gas, now under extremely high pressure, bursts out from the excretion chamber and the ventilation vent on its rear side, giving "Swallow" a rocket-like thrust.

Once it sprints close to its prey, its stomach expands again, and the resulting negative pressure will suck the small creature into its pouch, leaving it no chance to resist.

We're now in the acceleration phase. The behemoth can't stay away from the high-density gas cloud in the lower plane for too long, which means it's about to start frantically inhaling gas and food.

"Prepare to teleport?" Caroline began preparations, gripping Rorschach's hand tightly. She was going to bring Rorschach back to the Prime Material Plane and immediately shut down all the drains and teleportation arrays.

The spellcasters, swallowed by such a colossal beast, shouldn't die immediately, but she worried that the magical environment inside the beast's belly would change, hindering their subsequent spellcasting and teleportation. For a being almost mythical, it wasn't impossible for it to alter the magical environment itself.

But Luo Xia withdrew his hand, deciding to have a friendly exchange with Tun Tun: "If something happens here, our entire factory on the other end will be finished. For a behemoth that excels at devouring, we'll use 'devouring' to deal with it."

Caroline had no choice but to deploy a shield to protect herself and Rorschach, who was in a spellcasting state, from the pterosaur's attack. Rorschach, meanwhile, rapidly absorbed the magic power of the air elemental plane, replicating the last major spell he had cast in Istani.

With the surge of massive magical power, the material world and the symbolic world began to intersect artificially, which in turn caused spatial tremors. Under Rorschach's manipulation, the distortion and fluctuation of space condensed into two opposing yet mutually attractive entities. They spun rapidly, and Rorschach barely managed to prevent them from getting closer to each other.

Speed ​​equals mass, and mass warps space. Spacetime begins to tremble as the relative speed of the two spherical entities surges, threatening the exhaust vents and Caroline's barrier.

Just as the teleportation portal was on the verge of collapse and Caroline's barrier could no longer hold and shattered from the inside, Rorschach used the ether membrane he had learned to create in the [Compression] technique to encapsulate the two spatial fluctuations into physical entities.

After being encased in the ether membrane, it took on a spherical shape. The light path inside was distorted and dimmed after being shielded by the membrane, transforming into an extremely simple yet extremely dangerous black sphere. Two of the pseudo-celestial bodies were still moving at high speed. Even with Rorschach's restraint, the ether membrane encasing them was constantly deforming and would collapse soon.

From creating this sphere to restraining the danger within, both steps consumed a huge amount of Rorschach's magic power. The amount absorbed could not make up for the output, and he felt the exhaustion after a long time.

That's enough. Even if you can devour an entire city, my spell has already overturned one!

The pure black sphere fell and was naturally swallowed by the giant beast.

In the midst of thunder and lightning, the etheric membrane was attacked from both inside and outside, collapsing instantly and releasing a terrifying and distorted entity.

Compression, inhalation. Because it distorted and confined light, an ominous black hole appeared in the giant mouth. It was so small that from Caroline's perspective, it was merely an indistinct black dot. But it was powerful enough that the colored gas clouds inside the behemoth clearly showed their trajectory toward the black dot, and then it was the behemoth's body's turn.

Its body structure was subjected to irresistible twisting and deformation, intertwined with the airflow, pulling out abnormal patches of color and lines. The scene was like a mischievous child reaching out a finger onto a painting with wet paint, smearing it bit by bit toward a central point.

However, the entangled body created by Rorschach was still far from a true black hole, reaching saturation instantly and becoming unable to absorb any more energy and matter. Having overeaten, it had to vomit, and jets of energy and flesh blasted out from the behemoth's body, ejecting the energy and flesh trapped within the black sphere, and even propelling the remaining body of "Kronos" into the shallow atmosphere and through the entire atmosphere.

After the clouds dispersed and the jets ceased, a "hole" was pierced through the entire gaseous plane from the bottom to the top. Through the hole, one could see a pale blue starry sky, with a beautiful silver ring running across it.

The little blue creatures, who hadn't managed to run far, witnessed everything. They looked up and gazed at Rorschach, the spellcaster who had killed the giant beast with a single blow. These natives had always lived in the "sky," and this was the first time they had ever seen the "sky."

(End of this chapter)