The concept of "packing light" is difficult to explain to a group of hoarders, especially when one of them is a pig that eats reality and another is a drama student who owns fourteen different capes for "atmospheric brooding."
The Twilight Stable was in a state of controlled panic. Lin Fan was running around with a wrench, disconnecting the water pipes that connected the stable to the Academy's main grid. Gao Ming was tearfully saying goodbye to a particularly nice rock he couldn't fit in his bag. Princess Luo Bing was methodically freezing the perishable food supplies into blocks of ice for transport.
Su Ye stood in the center of the yard, staring at the ground. Or rather, at the massive, armored plates of the Obsidian Tortoise that made up the floor of the courtyard.
"Senior," Su Ye whispered, tapping his foot on the shell. "Wakey wakey."
Zzzzt.
"No," the Tortoise Ancestor's voice grumbled in his head, sounding like shifting tectonic plates. "I am comfortable. The mud is finally at the right viscosity. Go away."
"We have to move, Senior," Su Ye persuaded. " The landlord is evicting us. Also, there are sword cultivators coming who want to turn you into soup bowls."
"Let them come," the Tortoise yawned. "My shell is harder than their ambition."
"I installed the heated floors," Su Ye played his trump card. "But they are solar-powered. They only work if you are outside, under the sun. In the Wildlands."
There was a long silence. The ground vibrated slightly as the ancient beast considered the trade-off between napping and warmth.
"Sun... warm..." the Tortoise mused. "Fine. But I am not walking fast. I do not scurry."
"We don't need scurry," Su Ye grinned. "We need unstoppable."
Su Ye turned to his disciples. "Brace yourselves! Grab something bolted down! If you aren't holding onto something, you're going to fall off the porch!"
"Fall off?" Gao Ming blinked, clutching a velvet cushion. "Master, we are on the ground floor."
"Not for long."
Su Ye pulled the Concentration Stone from his pocket and slammed it into the central receptor slot he had installed near the feeding trough.
CLUNK.
The stable groaned. The Star-Iron walls, which had been fused to the obsidian foundation, lit up with a lattice of orange earth-magic lines. The entire structure shuddered, dust falling from the rafters.
Then, the world tilted.
"Earthquake!" Lin Fan screamed, grabbing a support beam.
"No," Su Ye shouted over the grinding noise of stone against earth. "It's lift-off!"
The ground around the stable cracked.
Massive fissures opened up in the Academy soil. From the depths, four pillars of obsidian, thick as ancient redwood trees, pushed up. They weren't pillars; they were legs.
The Obsidian Tortoise, a beast that had been dormant for so long that people thought it was a landscape feature, rose. It didn't just stand up; it ascended. The stable, the barn, the courtyard, and the Star-Iron walls rose ten, twenty, thirty feet into the air.
The mud pit fell away, revealing the true scale of the beast. It was the size of a small hill. The Twilight Stable sat upon its back like a fortress on a mountain.
"We... we are flying!" Gao Ming shrieked, looking over the wall.
"We are walking," Su Ye corrected, looking out at the shrinking Academy buildings below. "Set a course for the West Gate, Senior. Full impulse."
"Don't rush me," the Tortoise rumbled.
It took a step.
BOOM.
The impact shook the entire Myriad Beast Academy. Windows rattled in the dormitories a mile away.
Master Mo, who had been hiding in his office plotting his next lawsuit, spilled hot tea all over his lap as his desk jumped three inches off the floor. He ran to the window.
His jaw dropped.
He saw the Twilight Stable. But it wasn't where it was supposed to be. It was moving. A massive, spiked, Star-Iron fortress was lumbering across the campus, carried on the back of a black tortoise that looked like it had crawled out of the pre-historic era.
"He... he stole the land!" Mo screamed, clutching his head. "He's physically stealing the real estate!"
The journey to the West Gate was short but destructive. The Obsidian Tortoise didn't really care about paths. It walked through flower beds, crushed decorative statues, and flattened a gazebo that Su Ye had always thought looked tacky.
Students ran screaming from the path of the moving mountain.
"Make way!" Su Ye shouted from the guard tower, using a megaphone Lin Fan had built. "Wide load coming through! Mind your toes!"
They reached the West Gate. It was a massive archway of white stone, designed to be impressive and impregnable. It was currently closed.
A squad of Academy Guards stood in front of it, pikes raised. They looked at the approaching kaiju-sized tortoise. They looked at their pikes. They looked at each other.
"Halt!" the Guard Captain squeaked, his voice cracking. "You... you do not have a gate pass!"
"I have a Tortoise!" Su Ye yelled back. "Does that count?"
"I... I have to check the manual!"
"Boring," the Tortoise Ancestor groaned.
The Tortoise didn't stop. It didn't even slow down. It simply tucked its head in slightly to protect its nose and rammed the gate.
CRASH.
The impregnable white stone shattered like dry plaster. The heavy iron doors were torn from their hinges and sent tumbling into the moat. The Twilight Stable plowed through the debris, dust billowing around the Star-Iron spikes.
"Gate pass verified!" Su Ye saluted the terrified guards as they rumbled past.
They were out.
The Academy lay behind them, a cloud of dust and confusion. Ahead of them lay the vast, untamed expanse of the Grand Wildlands.
"We did it," Luo Bing whispered, looking back at the shrinking towers of her former life. She felt a strange mixture of fear and liberation. She was a rogue princess now, riding a turtle into the unknown.
"We are free!" Gao Ming shouted, striking a pose on the roof. "The world is our stage!"
"And our buffet!" Su Ye added. "Zhu Zhu, stop eating the gate debris! That's low-grade limestone, it'll give you gas."
They traveled for hours. The Tortoise's pace was slow—rhythmic and plodding—but each step covered massive distance due to the sheer length of its stride. By sunset, the Academy was just a speck on the horizon.
They set up camp. Or rather, they just stopped moving, since their camp was permanently set up on the Tortoise's back.
Su Ye sat by a fire in the courtyard, roasting a skewer of spirit-meat. The disciples gathered around.
"Master," Lin Fan asked, looking at the map. "Where are we going? The Wildlands are endless."
"We need a new base," Su Ye said, chewing thoughtfully. "Somewhere the Sword Sect can't find us, and where the Void energy is thin so Zhu Zhu doesn't accidentally eat a hole in the universe."
He pointed to a jagged mountain range in the distance, shrouded in perpetual purple mist.
"The Shattered Peaks," Su Ye said. "It's a lawless zone. No sects. No empire. Just rogue cultivators, ancient beasts, and ruins. It's perfect."
"Perfectly dangerous," Luo Bing noted.
"Exactly. The safest place for a shark is in a tornado," Su Ye said with questionable logic.
The night passed peacefully, save for the Tortoise snoring, which felt like a mild earthquake every forty minutes.
The next morning, they hit their first snag.
They were crossing a massive stone bridge that spanned a deep canyon—the only way into the Shattered Peaks region.
Blocking the bridge was a blockade. But it wasn't the Academy, and it wasn't the Sword Sect.
It was a Bandit Toll Booth.
A group of rough-looking men with mismatched armor and scars were lounging across the bridge. They had piled boulders to block the path. Behind them stood a massive Tier-4 War Elephant, its tusks tipped with steel.
The Bandit Leader, a man with an eyepatch and a very large axe, stepped forward as the Tortoise rumbled to a halt.
"Halt!" the Bandit shouted. "This is the Bridge of sorrow! To pass, you must pay the toll!"
Su Ye leaned over the wall. "Let me guess. Your weight in gold?"
"No," the Bandit grinned, revealing gold teeth. "We want the turtle. That's a lot of meat. We've been eating rats for a week."
Su Ye looked at the bandit. He looked at the Tier-4 Elephant.
"You want to eat my house?" Su Ye asked.
"If it moves, we eat it," the Bandit declared. "War Elephant! Charge! Knock that turtle over!"
The War Elephant trumpeted. It was a magnificent beast, full of rage and muscle. It lowered its head and charged toward the Tortoise's leg, intending to cripple it.
"Master!" Gao Ming panicked. "That's a heavy charger! It will destabilize us!"
"Lin Fan," Su Ye said calmly. "Did you finish the modifications on the Echo Bone?"
"Yes, Master. I integrated it into the Tortoise's vocal cords via the Concentration Stone network. But we haven't tested it."
"Test it," Su Ye ordered. "Full volume."
Lin Fan scrambled to the control panel they had built near the trough. He slammed a lever labeled [LOUD].
The Obsidian Tortoise opened its massive beak. It didn't roar. It didn't hiss.
Thanks to the Echo Bone of the Thunder-Wyrm amplifying the sound a thousand times, and thanks to the specific spiritual frequency Su Ye had dialed in...
The Tortoise let out a sound.
HONK.
It wasn't a goose honk. It was the sound of a foghorn the size of a planet. It was a sonic boom compressed into a single, devastating syllable.
HOOOOOOOOOONK.
The sound wave hit the charging War Elephant like a physical brick wall. The Elephant didn't just stop; it was lifted off its feet. It flew backward, tumbling end over end, crashing into the pile of boulders and scattering the bandits like bowling pins.
The Bandit Leader's clothes were blown off by the sheer pressure of the sound, leaving him standing there in his underwear, his axe vibrating in his hand.
The canyon echoed for ten seconds. Rocks fell from the cliffs.
Su Ye picked at his ear. "A bit sharp on the treble, Lin Fan. Tune it down."
He looked down at the half-naked Bandit Leader.
"Toll paid?" Su Ye asked.
The Bandit Leader looked at the giant tortoise. He looked at his unconscious elephant. He looked at his underwear.
"P-paid in full!" the Bandit squeaked. He ran. He didn't look back.
"Move on, Senior," Su Ye patted the shell.
"I'm hungry," the Tortoise rumbled. "That elephant looked like a peanut."
"No eating the traffic," Su Ye scolded. "We have a schedule."
As they crossed the bridge, entering the misty domain of the Shattered Peaks, Su Ye felt a vibration in his pocket.
It was the Egg of the Dawn Crow—or rather, the shell fragments he had kept. They were warm.
And in the sky above the peaks, the purple mist swirled.
Zzzzt.
"You have entered the playground of the broken," a new voice whispered in Su Ye's mind. It wasn't an Ancestor. It was the System itself.
[WARNING: High Concentration of Ancient Bloodlines Detected.]
[WARNING: The Shattered Peaks contain the Tomb of the Sky-Eater.]
[Mission Generated: Claim a Mountain. Survive the Night.]
Su Ye smiled, looking at the ominous, lightning-wreathed mountains ahead.
"Claim a mountain," Su Ye muttered.
"Sounds like fun. I've always wanted a room with a view."
He turned to his team.
"Get ready, kids. The tutorial is over. Welcome to the server."