Spit Them Out!

The demon element experiments had run through over a thousand living subjects. Yet Jiang Yi had never seen anything like Mo Fan.

The vast majority of demonized mages would be rendered unrecognizable — their very bones mutating and growing in grotesque formations. One test subject had sprouted bone blades all over his body, jagged as swords, covering him from head to toe. Completely indistinguishable from a Demon-Beast.

The young man before her was different. His demonization had left most of his appearance intact — and yet that, to Jiang Yi's mind, made him far more terrifying than any grotesquely mutated specimen she had ever studied.

Suddenly, the demonized youth turned his head. A pair of eyes that cycled through endless, swirling colors fixed themselves on Jiang Yi.

Her entire body locked up. She couldn't move so much as a finger. She couldn't even understand why she felt such overwhelming fear — such an absolute, irresistible compulsion to submit.

"Forgot to mention something…" the demonized youth said. His words were perfectly human. His voice was not.

Jiang Yi could barely believe it. Across all the demon experiments, this was the first and only time a demonized mage had retained the ability to speak. Full demonization was supposed to strip them of everything — to make them no different from parasitized hosts, from Demon-Beasts themselves.

*Forgot to mention something?*

*What did he forget to tell me?* She stared at this young man — so utterly unlike every other test subject — stared at this demon who seemed like a completely different person from the Mo Fan she had known. What could he possibly have to say to her? What had he forgotten to tell her?

"I'm not a three-element mage." Mo Fan's voice carried a contemptuous amusement — he wasn't smiling, yet laughter seemed to coil through the air like some demonic resonance.

Jiang Yi froze again. She couldn't tell whether this person had retained Mo Fan's original consciousness.

*Not a three-element mage?*

*Could it mean…*

Something clicked. Ice shot down her spine as she stared at the wolf spirit shadow looming behind the demonized Mo Fan — that haunting, bone-chilling presence.

*The spirit shadow…*

*What was the source of its power?*

Before she could think any further, the demonized youth suddenly dropped into a deep crouch. His entire body coiled like a human longbow drawing to full tension.

**Creak… creak… creak…**

The ground beneath his feet fractured and spread as he sank lower, cracks spiderwebbing outward — a silent declaration of the force being compressed into that stance.

**Crack!**

In an instant, the demonized Mo Fan launched himself skyward. He became a human arrow shot straight toward the heavens, vanishing from Jiang Yi's sight — and from the sight of every officer around her — in the blink of an eye.

She looked up. There he was — trailing sweeping curtains of shadow — standing atop a signal tower not far away. The tower was over a hundred meters tall. He had cleared it with nothing but brute force.

Below, the point where he had launched from had shattered into a vast web of cracks. One push-off had done all of that. This was a body more explosive than any Demon-Beast.

"Not three elements… not three elements…"

Jiang Yi stared at the sky, murmuring to herself in a daze.

A naturally born Dual Elements mage was already the most ideal candidate for demonization they had ever found. But if this person had four elements…?

High above the Peak Lair, the massive Giant Lizard Pseudo-Dragon had already locked onto the Celestial Eagle flying toward it.

A beat of its fleshy wings sent it surging out of its Nest, lunging straight at the eagle and the hide-net hanging beneath. Its jaws gaped wide — it intended to swallow the eagle and every person in the net in a single gulp.

A bedtime snack this small wasn't even worth chewing. Just swallow them whole and let the stomach acid do the work.

That enormous maw closed over them, thick with viscous saliva. Bai Tingting, Zhao Manyan, Mu Nujiao, and Mu Ningxue were swallowed into its mouth all at once. The jaws were just wide enough to accommodate all four. If the creature had simply bitten down, they would have been torn to shreds on the spot.

But sliding down its tongue into the esophagus — to be crushed by muscular stomach walls and dissolved in acid — that death was no less brutal.

Bai Tingting and Mu Nujiao had already squeezed their eyes shut. Not that it mattered. Inside that maw, there was nothing to see but darkness.

"You filthy lizard — **spit them out!!**"

A voice drenched in dark fury erupted like a thunderclap from a clear sky.

From the spire of the tallest signal tower in Jinlin City, a figure shrouded in wolf-shadow launched himself skyward like an arrow loosed from below.

His fist tore through the air with violent friction, and flames ignited from the sheer force of the collision. As the figure reached the Giant Lizard Pseudo-Dragon, a blazing fist — magnified many times over in size — came crashing down onto the creature's throat.

The Giant Lizard Pseudo-Dragon was still savoring its meal when the blow landed. Its massive head snapped backward as though the neck had nearly been severed.

The prey it had been about to swallow was wrenched back out, and the creature's enormous body went flying more than a hundred meters from the Heavenstrike blow, slamming into the Peak Lair and punching a massive crater into the rock.

Flames erupted in his wake, billowing like a cloud and half-catching the demonized Mo Fan as he continued his arc through the sky.

As if the fury inside him still had nowhere to go, he fixed his gaze on the crater where the beast had crashed. Then he spun in midair — a single sweeping kick — and sent a breathtaking crescent of razor light slicing outward.

The crescent arc howled through the air, streaking after the Giant Lizard Pseudo-Dragon at blinding speed.

Narrow and lethally sharp, it swept silently across a section of the Peak Lair — and then stillness returned.

The tip of the mountain peak shifted. Slowly. A clean, perfectly even cross-section was revealed as the severed portion tilted free — and then a colossal slab of stone plummeted from over three hundred meters, straight toward the heart of Jinlin City.

On the ground, Jiang Yi and the officers had their eyes stretched as wide as they would go, jaws hanging.

One punch had sent a Commander-class Giant Lizard Pseudo-Dragon flying.

A single sweeping crescent had cleaved the Giant Lizard Pseudo-Dragon's towering Nest in two.

Even with the Blood Catalyst's demonization, it should have been utterly impossible for any person to possess this kind of terrifying power.

*Four elements!! He's a four-element mage!!* Tidal waves crashed through Jiang Yi's chest.

She finally understood why the demonized Mo Fan could still speak — and why the power he commanded dwarfed every other demon subject. The Blood Catalyst's demonization grew more devastating the more elemental energy it drew from its host. If this young man possessed a full four elements, then his demonized form would exceed their projections by at least fourfold.

Perfect demonization.

So this was the answer. Only a mage who already possessed four elements at the intermediate tier could achieve this kind of perfect demonic transformation.

His mind.

Right — he had also retained some portion of his own consciousness. Every other demonized subject became just like a Demon-Beast: bloodthirsty, maddened, beyond reason. But even after his transformation, he still remembered what he needed to do. His mind was still intact.

*It worked.*

*Their demon element experiment had succeeded.*

*It had finally succeeded!!*

Jiang Yi knew the weight of her crimes was too great to escape judgment. And yet — to witness the true power of the demon element with her own eyes, in these final moments…

No. No. What she had just seen was only the tip of the iceberg for this perfect demon.

He was a demon host with four elements.