Su Ming set down the teacup in his hand, which had grown somewhat hot to the touch, watching the last spark of spiritual light on the formation plate extinguish.

"Almost done."

He took a piece of velvet cloth from his storage pouch, gently wiping away the residual ink stains on the formation plate. "Master, this batch of Source Substance seems to have flowed more smoothly than before. It looks like the final..."

Before his words could finish.

Lin Yu suddenly let out a sharp, distorted roar within the Consciousness Sea.

"RUN!!!"

Before this single word could fully explode in Su Ming's mind, the calamity had already begun.

There was no precursor of earth shaking and mountains quaking.

No roars heralding the attack of demonic beasts.

Not even the slightest alarm was triggered by the "Spirit Response Spider Web" Su Ming had arranged around the stone house, which covered over a dozen defense zones.

Su Ming only felt the ground beneath his feet, in that instant, become like a bedsheet violently shaken by a mischievous child.

No.

It was the entire land of the Bing Battalion area, arching upward in the same instant!

That sensation was as if some colossal entity beneath the earth's crust had turned over, or like a volcano suppressed for ten thousand years had finally found a vent.

"Crack!"

The stone stool beneath Su Ming's buttocks shattered instantly.

He didn't even have time for any thought; his body reacted on pure instinct—not to resist, but to curl up like a fallen leaf, riding that irresistible, immense force. The protective shield from the "Like Water Art," which constantly circulated over his body, instantly flared to its maximum.

BOOM—!

The entire stone house, along with the foundation beneath Su Ming's feet, was violently flipped up from the bottom by a force of extreme brutality.

The hard basalt walls disintegrated into countless rubble mid-air.

Su Ming, airborne, felt a piercing pain as if his internal organs had been displaced. Gritting his teeth against the coppery sweetness rising in his throat, he forced his eyes open and looked down.

That one glance nearly froze the blood in his veins.

From the fissures that had torn open the ground, streams of dark golden torrents gushed forth from the earth's wounds!

They were dark golden beetles, numbering in the billions, densely packed together!

Under the moonlight, this dark golden fountain refracted a cold and cruel metallic sheen.

The beetles at the crest of the fountain, their kinetic energy spent, opened their sharp elytra, transforming into a downpour of death that rained down upon the entire pass.

Pitter-patter—!

This was the sound of insect carapaces striking buildings, formation light barriers, and even human bodies.

Su Ming was blasted over a dozen zhang away by the shockwave, crashing heavily into a pile of ruins.

"Cough... cough, cough!"

He rolled over and vomited a mouthful of blood mixed with fragments of internal organs. A ringing filled his ears, golden sparks danced before his eyes, and the entire world seemed to spin.

But he couldn't afford to care about any of that.

The identity formation plate at his waist was vibrating frantically, its frequency so fast it had become extreme, to the point the surface of the plate was scorching hot.

Even without looking, Su Ming could sense the torrent of information flowing from it—overload alarms from countless defense zones triggered simultaneously, and the final, desperate screams of countless comrades.

"Su Ming! Don't just stand there! To your right! That's a dead end! Roll left!"

Lin Yu's voice exploded in his mind, carrying an unprecedented urgency and severity. "Forget about formations! That stuff can't block this at all! Quickly, take out that Earth Escape Talisman!"

Su Ming fiercely bit the tip of his tongue, using the sharp pain to forcibly dispel the dizziness in his head.

Struggling to lift his head, the scene that met his eyes was already hell.

The once orderly Bing Battalion area had now vanished.

In its place were at least a dozen dark golden fountains erupting simultaneously.

Flames, explosions, the thunderous roar of collapsing buildings, and that nerve-grating, rasping sound of hundreds of millions of insects simultaneously gnawing on rock and bone—all converged within a few breaths into a symphony of hell.

Not far from him, in the Bing-6 Defense Zone, Captain Zhang Meng, who had once thumped his chest and declared, "With the spiderweb, we can rest easy," was now clamped by the lower half of his body in the maw of a giant demonic earthworm that had emerged from the ground.

The heavy shield in his hand, even enhanced by the "Flexible Water Force-Dispersing Formation," twisted and deformed instantly like a sheet of thin paper in the face of absolute force.

"Ah—!"

The scream lasted only half a breath before it was abruptly cut off.

The demonic earthworm didn't even bother to chew, swallowing his entire body whole. Then, with a swing of its head, it smashed the nearby watchtower.

Su Ming's fingers trembled violently as he reached into his sleeve, tightly gripping the expensive "Earth Escape Talisman" he had bought at great cost.

He did not go to rescue anyone.

Before an assault of this scale and magnitude, an individual's power was as insignificant as a speck of dust.

His "Spirit Response Spider Web" had failed.

Not because it was broken, but because the enemy had come too fast!

"Damn it... damn it!"

Su Ming's eyes were bloodshot, fixed unwaveringly on the dark golden insect rain falling from the sky.

He finally understood how laughably absurd Wu Miao's claim of "a century without worry" was.

He finally understood the terror of that thing beneath the ground.

"Master... we're in serious trouble this time."

Su Ming squeezed these words out through gritted teeth, his body abruptly rolling to the left to avoid a dark golden beetle falling from the sky, one capable of piercing through metal and stone.

The beetle landed, instantly smashing a deep crater into the hard frozen soil. Its six blade-like long legs scraped across the ground, leaving a trail of sparks. Its compound eyes flickered with a cold red light, locking directly onto Su Ming.

"Stop the chatter! Activate the talisman! Now!"

Lin Yu was practically roaring.

Su Ming hesitated no longer. Spiritual energy surged wildly in his palm as he slapped it fiercely against the talisman on his chest.

However.

At the very instant that faint, earthy-yellow halo began to glow.

An obscure, vast, and peculiarly rhythmic fluctuation suddenly emanated from the extreme depths underground.

This fluctuation swept over the talisman in Su Ming's hand.

The originally vibrant "Earth Escape Talisman," its patterns suddenly distorted and fractured as if interfered with by some invisible force.

Pfft.

The talisman's light died, transforming into a useless pile of paper ash that slipped through Su Ming's fingers.

Su Ming froze.

"The earth veins have congealed. All earth-escape techniques have failed. It's as if the earth itself has birthed malice, rejecting all methods of passage."

For the first time, Lin Yu's voice carried a tremor of despair. "It's not a divine ability. It's the interwoven auras of hundreds of millions of insects disrupting the flow of earth energy within a hundred-mile radius... Such a method is akin to a naturally formed trap formation!!"

Su Ming did not reply.

He slowly raised his head, looking toward the sky that had been completely submerged in dark gold.

The wind and snow had stopped.

Because even the wind and snow had been devoured by this surging tide of insects.