"Do you think they went willingly?" Lin Mu asked.
"I don't know," Elyon admitted. "There were no signs of struggle at the rim. No other scents—just theirs. They either went in on their own… or whatever took them left no trace."
Meng Bai looked at the pits and scratched his head. "Can't we just… fly over and go in when we see something?"
"Won't work," Elyon said. "The Earth Flame rises in waves even when the pits drain. One wrong move and even immortals get incinerated."
Lin Mu studied the shifting, seething flow of the pits. His Omnicore Ascendancy Technique made him unusually attuned to elemental energies, and he could already tell this wasn't ordinary fire or earth energy. This was elemental chaos—a concentrated essence of primal Earth and Flame, churned by centuries of geological instability.
Daoist Chu looked thoughtful. "And you weren't able to enter last time?"
"No. I got close, but the tide turned before I could descend. I barely made it out before the pit rose again."
