103: Chapter 103 The Great Changes in the World

September 11th, 10:17 AM.

The sky was unbelievably gloomy, with clouds hanging so low it felt as if the entire Blue Star knew something was coming.

The flocks of birds had already disappeared the day before.

They sensed the impending disaster earlier than humans.

At this moment, across the entire Blue Star, there was no other sound save for the occasional rumble of thunder rolling through the clouds.

That silence made one's heart jump to their throat.

The next second, a vibration came from beneath their feet.

A tremor spanning the entire planet surged directly up from deep beneath their feet.

The earth was moving, as if something were expanding beneath them.

The ground was pushing upward, rising inch by inch with an extremely slow but unstoppable force.

Immediately after, the sound came.

It came from deep within the earth.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

A continuous, incessant low-frequency rumbling echoed repeatedly, as if the entire interior of the planet were letting out some kind of heavy breath.

This sound penetrated everything—walls, bunkers, the concrete of air-raid shelters, the human chest cavity—reaching straight into the depths of their bones.

The next second, global seismic belts erupted simultaneously.

The Ring of Fire, the Alpide belt, and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

All seismic fault zones released simultaneously in an instant.

All magnitudes exceeded level eight.

The continental plates of the entire Blue Star were tearing apart in synchronization.

Countless lines cracked open on the planet's surface.

Those fissures, initially a few meters wide, expanded to tens of meters wide in the blink of an eye, their edges jagged and irregular.

A faint, dark red glow emanated from deep within the fissures—the reflection of magma from the deep crust.

Driven by the earthquakes, volcanoes began to react.

The first plume of smoke rose from the direction of the Indonesian archipelago, black and gray, piercing straight into the clouds before spreading out in the high altitude like a giant, exploded mushroom.

Immediately following were the second and third; along the Pacific Ring of Fire, plumes of smoke emerged one after another, visible from a thousand kilometers away.

Beneath the crust, the compression between plates was triggering more magma chambers.

At this moment, Han City.

In the underground bunker, a dense crowd of people stood.

No one spoke.

Through the screens, they saw the world outside tearing apart right where it stood.

Their former homes no longer existed after the first wave of earth-shaking impact.

Rows of buildings were razed like blocks, and mountain ranges shattered.

The earth itself was deforming; flat plains transformed into wavy landscapes, with fold after fold extending across the surface.

Someone covered their mouth tightly.

Someone hugged the child in their arms tightly.

No one cried.

At that same moment, rain poured down in torrents.

A rainstorm covering the entire planet, as if the sky wanted to pour out all its water.

Visibility plummeted to less than three meters in seconds.

Raindrops smashed onto the ground, shattering into a misty white fog that rose up, only to be crushed back down by a new wave of rain.

Yunmeng Province, Qian Province, and Xiang Province—the three major core settlement areas in central Xia Country—simultaneously felt the full wrath of nature.

The entire world was covered by heavy rain.

Countless creatures perished in the great upheaval.

Fledglings that couldn't fly, fish that couldn't escape to the deep sea, herds scattered by floods.

Their carcasses sank to the bottom of the water, buried in mud, becoming sacrifices of life on the very first day of the disaster.

But because of the existence of Spiritual Qi, countless specks of green bloomed in the fissures of the razed earth, on the severed cross-sections of mountains, and beneath the black earth covered in volcanic ash.

The root systems of those plants actually found new living space amidst the disaster.

The fissures formed by the splitting earth provided more rooting points; the volcanic ash was rich in minerals, and the earth, soaked by water, had just the right humidity.

Amidst vast stretches of gray-black ruins, a glimmer of new green was emerging.

Slow.

Silent.

But unstoppable.

By this time, the concentration of Spiritual Qi had rapidly surged to its peak, reaching 100 times its initial state.

Above Han City.

Chen Mo stood in the sky.

A pale golden light of Source Power radiated from his body.

Like liquid sunlight seeping out from within, it formed a complete, luminous outline around him.

The texture of this light was constant and stable, without a trace of superfluous fluctuation in brightness.

The Force Field covered everything within a radius of thirty kilometers.

Inside the Force Field, it was calm and tranquil.

The torrential rain falling over Han City vanished the instant it touched the boundary of the Force Field, directly annihilated, without even a mist rising.

The earth stopped trembling under the suppression of the Force Field; the cracks on the surface ceased expanding, and the distant mountains stopped shaking.

The buildings of Han City, which had been swaying slightly, stabilized the moment the Force Field expanded.

When people looked outside through the boundary of the Force Field, they could clearly see the scene beyond.

The rain was like a waterfall, the earth was churning, and the distant volcanic ash was rampaging through the air.

Less than ten meters outside the boundary of the Force Field, a utility pole was snapped in half by the earthquake, its wires emitting final sparks before being swallowed by the rain.

But inside the Force Field, not even a trace of an aftershock could be felt.

Tens of millions of people stood on the ground of Han City.

They had walked out of the underground bunkers; the coverage of Chen Mo's Force Field meant they no longer needed to hide inside.

They looked up to see that pale golden figure in the sky, and also the apocalyptic scene outside the Force Field.

That pale golden barrier was but a thin layer, yet it completely isolated the entire Han City from the first wave of the Blue Star's evolution disaster, like a reef in raging waves, never moving.

People were filled with awe and gratitude.

Some slowly knelt, while more silently looked up.

Some were weeping silently.

Because seeing the scene outside, they knew clearly that if not for the person standing in the sky, the ground beneath their feet would certainly not be stable right now.

As time passed, the disaster continued to intensify.

Driven by the earthquakes, more volcanoes began to erupt.

Over a dozen dark red pillars of light lit up simultaneously on the horizon, illuminating the entire sky with an eerie red hue.

From afar, it looked as if a dozen red-hot giant nails had been driven into the horizon.

The Yellowstone Volcano in the United States began to erupt, and the body of Mount Fuji in Japan split from the middle, with lava flows covering everything around it.

Within fifty kilometers, all living creatures were vaporized and carbonized.

The shockwave swept across hundreds of kilometers, leaving only scorched earth in its wake.

The seabed was also tearing apart.

The fissures of the mid-ocean ridges opened like wounds, magma surging from the mantle, and the moment it touched seawater, it exploded into a steam blast capable of capsizing ten-thousand-ton ships.

The seawater was heated frantically, its surface temperature soaring in a very short time, and massive amounts of water vapor rose into the sky, condensing into even more violent rainstorms that crashed back down.

The rainstorms converged into flash floods.

Rivers lost their original channels within an hour, and muddy floodwaters mixed with gravel and mud flowed wantonly across the land.

The safe zones built by humans were washed away like paper in the face of the floods.

Those survivors who had initially completed their evolution tried desperately to escape, but nature did not care.

A wave crashed over, submerging everything, and the death toll climbed every second.

On the sea surface, walls of waves were gathering.

Tsunamis tens of meters high crossed the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, impacting all the eastern coasts of the continents.

Seawater, carrying fish, coral fragments, and shipwreck debris, slammed into the coastline, dragging more things back into the seabed as it receded.

Schools of fish struggled to escape amidst the tsunamis, while also having to dodge the magma and sulfurous gases erupted by underwater volcanoes.

The planet was growing larger.

In this process, the atmosphere was churned into a mess.

Pressure gradients changed drastically in a short time, and super-cyclones generated one after another.

The scale of typhoons, hurricanes, and polar storms far exceeded historical records, with eye diameters exceeding hundreds of kilometers; they rotated over the ocean, sucking seawater into the high altitude and then casting it onto the inland in the form of torrential rain.

Volcanic ash began to spread.

Gray powder surged from one eruption vent after another, entering the stratosphere and spreading out like a blanket.

The sun was obscured.

At noon, the sky was as dark as midnight, with only a circle of dark red light shining through on the horizon—the reflection of the magma still erupting in the distance.