More than thirty meters of the affected area around the attack collapsed in on itself.
The ground was covered in mud and it had been raining for several hours so it was pretty unstable already. Hao Xuan's feet touched the ground for an instant before it turned to mush and he fell further into the quagmire.
Hao Xuan tried to grab onto something for support to try and climb out but the energy from the last strike was still rippling through the ground, turning it upside down.
It looked like the earth was trying to swallow him whole, along with anything else caught within its radius.
Hao Xuan gasped for breath, powerless in the face of such intense energy. Before he realized only his hand was still out while the rest of him was buried under mounds of sludge, sinking deeper by the second.
But at the very last moment before his hand was about to disappear into the freshly dug soil, a hand reached out and gripped him firmly.