The Earth Colossal Death Lizard

It had all come too suddenly, and too strangely.

As Mo Fan ran, he forced himself to calm down and retraced the entire sequence of events from beginning to end.

First: these people were not from the Black Church. They had sought him out for one reason alone — his innate Dual Elements talent.

They were running experiments toward something they called a New Magic System, and everything they did had to be kept hidden from the light of day. That meant this so-called New Magic System was almost certainly nothing more than one man's wishful delusion — Lu Nian's, and Lu Nian's alone.

As far as Mo Fan knew, the birth of a genuine New Magic System required years of painstaking exploration, and more critically, it needed to earn recognition from the entire magical world — above all, from the Magic Association.

The Magic Association had never announced any research into a New Magic System. That told him this was very likely some cruel and monstrous practice that fed on human lives — something akin to the Black Church's terrifying curses, the kind that turned living people into Black-Beast Demon monsters.

Any experiment that used living people as its currency was classified as dark sorcery, and the most perfected form of that sorcery was the Black Church's method of creating Black-Beast Demons.

The devil Lu Nian had mentioned that the experiment's breakthrough came from a mutated parasitic organism. This so-called New Magic System most likely came down to one thing: turning people into monsters.

*And honestly — if it worked like the Scale-Skin Mother Demon, infecting others through blood, converting living humans into Scalehide Demon-Soldiers — humanity's overall combat strength really would shoot up dramatically...* provided those transformed people could still retain their sanity and remain themselves in every other way.

Putting it all together, this New Magic System had to be tied to the living transformation of humans into demons. It was even possible that the Scale-Skin Mother Demon — that mutated parasitic creature that had appeared so suddenly — had escaped from some clandestine magical laboratory deep in Magic City.

Mo Fan had no intention of becoming a test subject. Even if he could loosely be called an alien, that didn't mean he was obligated to offer himself up for humanity's benefit. Besides, everything had come straight from Lu Nian's mouth alone — who knew whether this was just another flavor of the same dark sorcery the Black Church practiced?

*I wonder how Mu Ningxue is doing. She can't be dead... right? I hope Bai Tingting can keep her alive.* The thought nagged at him, and Mo Fan couldn't shake the worry.

While under the influence of the bewitchment, he had let slip to Mu Ningxue some words he'd kept locked deep in his heart.

Like the confessions of a drunk, they might have been the truth — or they might have been nothing more than raw emotion speaking.

Whether it had been feeling running high or genuine longing he couldn't let go of, she had saved them all from certain death, pouring everything she had into that bow at the cost of her own life. That was a debt Mo Fan could not simply walk away from.

That devil, Lu Nian — no matter what it took, Mo Fan would kill him with his own two hands. The man was utterly devoid of humanity.

And then there was that bastard Lu Zhenghe. He'd been leaving markers all along, and it had dragged this murderous devil straight to them. *Did Mu Ningxue's Ice Crystal Slay Bow freeze him solid?* Mo Fan could only hope — because if it hadn't, he'd carve out Lu Zhenghe's heart and liver himself. Absolute garbage.

Mo Fan fled into the Desolate City. He could feel the devils closing in behind him.

Fortunately, the presence of the city's native inhabitants kept Lu Nian's group from flying openly through the streets. It gave Mo Fan a slim window to slip away.

He was heading straight for wherever the danger was greatest.

Alone, he could move far more nimbly than Lu Nian's entire entourage — but playing hide-and-seek with a group that size would only delay the inevitable. He needed to borrow the dangerous creatures of the Desolate City to thin their numbers.

"Should be this direction. I just hope that Lizard-Skull Giant Demon does its part," Mo Fan muttered to himself.

When he'd gone scouting alone earlier, he had accidentally wandered into the Lizard-Skull Giant Demons' territory — a landscape that was half arid, half swamp. The Jinlin district, once the beating heart of the city, had sunk into a vast expanse of muddy water, most of its buildings submerged to the halfway mark.

Jinlin Desolate City was home to a staggering variety of Demon-Beasts, but this particular stretch — dotted at every turn with strange, murky pools — was forbidden ground for most of them. It belonged to the Lizard-Skull Giant Demons: rulers of the entire Dongting Lake plain and Dongting Lake itself.

This human city had been seized by the Lizard-Skull Giant Demon Tribe. The school's intelligence had clearly been off — the Lizard-Skull Giant Demons hadn't fully abandoned the city. At least one group of them was still very much at home here.

And right now, Mo Fan was running straight into their territory. It was the most dangerous place in all of Jinlin Desolate City — and his only hope.

Ahead, a vast reed-covered swamp lake stretched into view. The mud pools lay so still they could have passed for any ordinary stretch of wasteland — save for the occasional rooftop barely half a meter above the waterline, scattered here and there like strange, half-buried ruins.

The silence was total. Not a single insect or bird called out from the miles of reeds. Only the strange bubbles rising through the mud proved this place was not as dead as it appeared.

**Fwooo—!**

The Swift Star Wolf exhaled sharply, its keen eyes locked on a lump of dried mud at the edge of a nearby pool.

"What's so interesting about—" Mo Fan started, then froze. That lump of dried mud had moved. A massive, fang-lined maw lunged straight at him — its gullet deep enough to swallow a grown man whole.

*Camouflage.* This creature actually knew how to camouflage itself.

Its skin was the exact same color as the mud, blending so seamlessly with the dried earth that when it lay still, Mo Fan had genuinely seen nothing there at all. The illusion was flawless.

Fortunately, the Swift Star Wolf's instincts were razor-sharp. It sprang sideways with agile precision, leaving the Lizard-Skull Giant Demon's lunge snapping at empty air. Had it connected, that bite force — a match for any giant crocodile's — would have split a person clean in two.

The Lizard-Skull Giant Demons were divided into several tiers.

Those at the Servant-class were known collectively as Lizard-Skull Giant Demons. Their bodies were roughly the size of a large adult crocodile: lizard-like skulls, cheek frills that could splay open like an umbrella, and tails accounting for about a third of their total length.

The Battle-General-class Lizard-Skull Giant Demons bore an entirely different name: Colossal Death Lizards.

Colossal Death Lizards manifested different elemental affinities — fire, poison, ice, earth, and more...

The one Mo Fan had stumbled upon was clearly an earth-type — an Earth Colossal Death Lizard. It could render its body nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings, and without truly exceptional eyesight, you would never spot it. Anything that wandered past would simply be swallowed whole, left to perish without ever understanding how a patch of earth had managed to kill it.

The Earth Colossal Death Lizard clacked its pale, gleaming fangs. Its eyes, previously sealed shut, snapped open — each one as wide as a fist, bulging outward, utterly devoid of any spark of awareness.

It crawled fast despite its bulk. The massive, heavy body pressed low against the ground and glided forward with alarming speed.

The Earth Colossal Death Lizard was cunning. It feinted another lunge, and the instant the Swift Star Wolf leaped sideways to dodge, the creature whipped its body around. Its tail — solid and dense as a swung iron hammer — came crashing down exactly where the wolf had jumped.

The Swift Star Wolf was caught mid-leap, swatted clean off course and sent flying more than ten meters away.

Mo Fan was swept along with it, hurled through the air and thrown hard into a clump of reeds.

Several of the Swift Star Wolf's ribs had likely snapped — Mo Fan had heard the sharp, brittle crack of it.

**"GROARR—! GROARR—!!!"**

The Swift Star Wolf's furious, rolling growl cut through the reeds. As it rose to its feet, it gave no sign of caring about its broken bones. Its eyes blazed with cold, unwavering light.

"Don't get drawn into a fight," Mo Fan told it. "We've got those devils on our tail. Let's push deeper — see if there are more of these Earth Colossal Death Lizards. If there are, we can use them to pick off a few of our pursuers."