The next cavern in their delve was bigger both horizontally and vertically, and finally, voidfiends other than the murder bunnies showed their flying faces.

In the dark of the cave, the putrid monstrosities stirred, their tomb-sized shapes vaguely resembling stingray corpses, concealed beneath too many wings reminiscent of bats. Half of which were deteriorating and hung limp, plagued by decay and perforations. Distorted countenances, disfigured by grotesque maws that covered two-thirds of their bodies obscured their tiny little eyes, of which there were hundreds. Horns twisted out from the positions where ears should rightfully reside, and each horn was oozing with purple fluid that dripped down with acid sizzles. And from the base of these horns, a sickly circuit of green and purple threaded through their body, pulsing periodically with uncanny void qi.

"Wretched chiropterans." The grizzly-haired elder whispered as the group prepared for the next phase of the assault.

The seconds seemed to pass with the sluggishness of years, and a peculiar stillness enshrouded the chamber, intermittently shattered by the fluttering of wings from the dark.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The first fiend noticed the intruders, and they screeched in unison; the otherworldly treble reverberated with a bone-chilling resonance, their wings producing a cacophony of skeletal vibrations as the flying horde dove at them with kamikaze-like madness.

As Su Nanya covered Yung's ears with her tail, the ringing stopped, and he went into empathic isolation. With expert coordination, the foundation building elders raised their blades up in the air, and a tsunami of dim gold silk zipped with an equal desire to kill!

The unstoppable missiles of flesh and bones met the unbreakable threads of gold, and the chiropterans fell in a rain of gore.

“… Uhh.” Yung muttered, “They’re pretty stupid.”

The battle didn’t last long, and the group moved on. Yung felt a strange sense of disconnect from the fiend’s nightmarish appearance and their utterly moronic tactics.

“Doesn’t it feel a bit easy?” Yung asked when Youjin Chao walked to him.

"The clan cleans these tunnels regularly, and has set methods to deal with each kind of fiend native to the region, Youjin Chao said, "I hear it was only yesterday that they pinpointed where the voidrift appeared. There was never a danger, since rogue voidrifts are quite common. But it is tedious, with most of the manpower and time spent on searching.”

“These voidfiends are stragglers then?”

“Possibly, yes.” Youjin Chao said, “Are you not going to fight?”

“I am a tourist.” Yung replied proudly.

The older boy left confused after Su Nanya started glaring at him.

They went down cavern after cavern.

More fiends flooded their way, and as they got into the groove of the battle, the elders were content to let the younger generation handle the threats.

“Careful, this group has a general.” The grizzly-haired elder shouted.

Among the flood of zombie bats and murder rabbits was a larger specimen, a bunny as big as a horse. It stayed at the back, eyes glowing a sickly pink.

Youjin Chao rushed towards it, carving a path of mangled blood, but the hornbeast general hopped away, using its brethren as a meat shield. Youjin Chao threw his sword, yet the wall of flesh blocked the projectile.

"This one's a bit smarter," Yung commented.

The next second, as the Wretched hornbeast general dodged Youjin Chao’s attack again, it fell straight into Youjin Chun’s web of blades. It screamed, struggling like a fly trapped within a spider’s snare.

“Ah, nope.” Yung corrected his mistake.

Ziyou Ling yelled, “Meteor Spear!” and a large hole the size of a fist burst apart on the fiend’s head, the spear flying out from the other side.

“This is my fight!” Youjin Chao yelled.

"Eat shit, bastard!" Ziyou Ling shouted back.

Youjin Chun glared at Yung.

Again, why me!?

The slight altercation for stealing the last hit continued, but then the grizzly-haired elder threatened violence, and the group moved on.

The caverns went deeper. While it did, the mossy wall turned into unsaturated grey rocks, replaced by rust-brown fungus.

The air grew heavy, and the humid smell was of minerals and metal.

“We’re near.” The grizzly-haired elder said.

"Could you have not gotten the Dark Star mercenaries to help out?" Yung asked the Youjin woman walking behind him.

“This is a clan matter.” She observed as Ziyou Ling quibbled with her heiress with a tired sigh. “The mercenaries were only paid for the foxmoth hunt.”

“We’re not actually going to ‘hunt’ foxmoths though. We’ll recover them.”

The woman nodded. “The danger doesn’t warrant paying houtian 3rd realmers. The clan takes care of two or three of these random voidrifts every year. Unless it goes unnoticed for, say, decades, the fiends it can spawn are mostly houtian 1st order. Although, in case the voidrift was summoned by a stray xiantian voidfiend, that would be… unfortunate.”

“Summoned?” Hey, woman! Can you not see Youjin Chao standing there with his ominous protagonist aura!? Stop jinxing us! Yung screamed inside, while Su Nanya stirred, looking at him strangely.

As did the Youjin woman, “I figure you don’t go to clan school?”

“The previous patriarch was a bitch about it.”

The woman stumbled, then laughed. There was rage hidden in it. “He was a sorry bastard, that’s for sure. Clinging onto power like mad, spending all clan coins just to extend his pitiful skeleton of a life by a few extra years.”

"Careful what you say." A middle-aged Youjin man spoke with a grim face.

"Oh, shut it. You know it's true! And what did that cost us? The whole dim gold silk trade, and my pet foxmoth. Poor Little Moonpaws, who knows what she's facing out there."

“… You really need to get married soon. Taking care of foxmoths won’t make you a true mother.”

“What do you know!”

“All I know is that it’s a slippery slope to go down, especially when you dress them up in toddler robes.”

The two quibbled for a while longer, and the woman spat. She picked up her pace as the Chao-Ling-Chun trio mowed down more small fry nightmares, then turned to Yung again, finally remembering to answer the question. "When a strong voidfiend, xiantian 1st order at the minimum, nests in a particular place long enough, the land's qi vein gets corrupted."

"They don't usually do that, do they?" Yung recalled what he had read in the scrolls.

"No." The woman said, "Typically, voidfiends spend their time hunting renyao or chaosfiends. That's their nature, which makes them the worst at stealth. They can't hide, nor do they want to, a noisy bunch of creeps. This lets us notice a rogue voidrift pretty early on. But very rarely, they hunker down. No one really knows why, but some say it's when they go to a kind of 'closed door cultivation' to break through."

“Don’t the smell give them away?”

“Funny boy.” The woman said, “No. The corruption of the land makes the space flimsy, as they say, and their stench gets masked. This is also easier for the void to reach out and tear open a voidrift. Hmm, you afraid? Haha. Relax. This time it’s pretty safe, as safe as a voidrift can get, yeah. The clan scouted it out and the rift is pretty small with only one houtian 2nd order Wretched hornbeast guarding it.”

A loud roar echoed down the tunnel like a sonic boom.

“Speak of the devil.” The woman clicked out her dagger again and spun it.

The group entered another large space. Yung tried to calculate how the earth could possibly support such large spaces without crashing down to no avail. They had been delving for hours now, and this new cavern itself looked to be bigger than a mile in all directions.

Yung blamed it on qi.

The cavern was filled to the brim with Wretched hornbeasts and chiropterans. Tens of thousands, maybe more than that. An apocalyptic horde swarming the ‘sky’ and the ‘land’.

On the other end of the cavern was a deep hollow, dark and ominous. Yung couldn’t see what was there, but with the steady stream of voidfiends rushing out, he guessed it was the mysterious voidrift.

And this lady says it’s safe! Yung immediately went into stealth.

“Such an unheroic man you are.”

“Kii.”

“Silky is right. Safety first!”

“Woof! Woof wuff.”

As the one teen and three foxes discussed important matters, Youjin Chao approached him again, sheathing his rusty sword.

“You aren’t gonna fight?” Yung asked the taller boy, who had sat down on a rock, thick-skinning through Su Nanya’s scowl and applying a healing paste to his cuts and bruises. Ziyou Ling squatted beside him, being scowled at by Youjin Chun and scowling at Su Nanya in return.

Amazing! Women are such mysterious creatures…

The vixen princess turned her mean cute scowl at Yung.

“I enjoy a good fight,” Youjin Chao said. “But I am not foolish.”

The Youjin woman moved to the front with the middle-aged man and joined the other elders at the mouth of the cavern.

They got into a formation, weapons drawn in specific manners, and the lingqi and yuanqi dancing like aggressive partners in a tango.

Yung saw the magical formation elder, Wang Lihou's master, take the middle spot. On his left and right were two houtian 2nd order elder's each, including Elder Gangkai and the sharp-tongued middle-aged man. The dozen-odd houtian 1st order cultivators took their positions a step behind, including Youjin Chun and the talkative woman.

The magical formation elder chanted, his hands racing into various mystical mudras. Soon, the mudras became so fast that they appeared just a blur, and the mere essence of the movement seemed to 'snatch' the surrounding qi under the elder's control. Progressively, the rest of the Youjin cultivators also brought their own powers to the front, a cacophony of golden lingqi-formed threads rising like loose spools in a whirlwind. And the threads swirled around in patterns unknown, creating a large magical circle with each cultivator at a set position.

A battle formation, Yung realized, and it created a semi-spherical dome of murderous dim gold silk around the Youjin cultivators. A grinder blender of millions of razor-sharp wires, it emitted a chainsaw-like hum but at a much higher pitch.

"The Dim gold severance 9th form needs at least three cultivators at the same level," Youjin Chao explained, "But with five foundation building, two meridian building, and thirteen qi and body refining cultivators? This battle formation is strong enough to take on the Dusk Valley lion king easily."

The floor under the magical formation elder's feet shifted to make room for the dim gold silk, as if they were ground to fine dust with industrial machinery.

The voidfiends noticed the disturbance. They perked up like the zombies they were and raised ghastly echoes. The floor thumbed, and dust rose into the air despite the damp environment.

Yung took a step back. No matter how much he knew in his head that he was safe, the sheer number of voidfiends raised a primal fear in his bones. The fear of being outnumbered. The fear of the stench of the dead.

"The Youjin clan has perfected this formation for centuries. Despite currently not even having one houtian 3rd realm cultivator stationed in the city like all other great clans in the Westmoon kingdom have, not even the Xiyue royal family dares to strike at them directly. If all the Youjin clan cultivators formation up, then even a xiantian 1st realm powerhouse will have trouble breaking through. In fact, there was once a time some two hundred years ago that the clan had felled a xiantian 1st order chaosfiend without many sacrifices. With this very formation."

“Sounds scary.” Yung was impressed.

"Hmph. A trifling trinket." Su Nanya said, "Stolen from The Multitudinous athenaeum valley, no doubt."

Yung swore he saw a couple of the elders flinch; the spherical murder dome shook for a second.

“H-Hey Nyanya! Don’t agitate them!” Yung whispered his scream.

“How is our nose?” Su Nanya ignored it and wanted her vanity validated.

“Cute like a button.” Yung gave in.

Su Nanya preened.

The voidfiend horde descended in a blur of chaotic motion. There were wretched hornbeasts, leaping and jumping, and wretched chiropterans, diving and swooping. The fiends came in all sizes, both small and large, from foot soldiers to fat generals, all with a savage thirst for blood in their ravenous eyes. They snarled, filling the air in the cavern with uncanny vibrations that shook the bone. They advanced, their wings and claws aimed straight at their prey.

The murderous dome of razor wires.

“Well, numbers didn’t make them smart I see.” Yung lamented. The fight was over.

The moment the voidfiends touched the dome, they were shredded like minced pork, splattering gore all over the place like dirty water balloons. Then even the blood and gore were ground to fine pollutants in seconds, creating a vapour of putrid mist.

Su Nanya covered Yung’s nose again with her tail, and he reapplied the scented napkin on her snout.