September 8, 2023.

The earth was shaking.

The tremors grew heavier and heavier, until it felt as though the land had become an open sea and a man sat in a little skiff, tossed and battered by wind and waves.

The whole dense forest broke into an uproar in an instant, leaves rustling.

Birds and beasts of every kind fled.

The Activity in the air fell into disorder, the Activity waves were disrupted with it, and the Super-Thunder Wave cut out entirely. Yellow Great-Immortal and the four-legged dragon were already scared witless and darting about—one trying to get up a tree, the other busy digging a hole.

Shen Cong frowned but didn't move from the roof of the Vajra Fortress. The shaking of the earth couldn't affect his control over his own balance. In fact tremors on this scale posed no threat to him whatsoever; even if the ground split open, so long as it didn't split directly beneath the Vajra Fortress's chassis there was nothing to worry about.

"An earthquake? Wonder what magnitude it is."

Unconcerned, Shen Cong simply waited for the quake to subside—but this time it lasted far longer than he had expected. It went on for a full day, the shaking leaving the Tianjin oasis's forest tilting and toppling every which way, and the ground looking as though it had been put through a sieve, broken stone everywhere.

None of that was enough to command Shen Cong's attention. But alongside the earthquake, the Activity of the Tianjin oasis grew disordered—and then its concentration began to surge.

In the space of a few hours, it had shot up more than threefold.

A high wind began to howl, yet the sky was cloudless for ten thousand li, the sun blazing down.

All these changes put Shen Cong in mind of that gale out of the ocean half a year ago. The Eastern Theater Command's laboratory had concluded it came from activity in the ocean's mid-ocean ridge seismic belt: as the metal beneath the crustal plates corroded, it released vast amounts of Activity, throwing the ocean into upheaval and…