True Form — The Armored-Shell Giant Lizard

"Monkey, is that thing still following us?"

"I... I don't know. From the sounds of it, yes." Zhang Xiaohou really had no desire to speak.

"Take a look!"

"I..." Zhang Xiaohou turned his head back with great difficulty, all while still running.

The moment he looked, his entire field of vision was nearly swallowed by the giant centipede — especially that hideous, grotesque head, so sickeningly vivid that even a second's glance set his skin crawling.

Then he noticed something important.

The giant centipede was ferocious, and it moved at terrifying speed, but when its body leaped into the air to clear a stretch of flat ground ahead, its entire hundred-meter length hung fully exposed—

The front half had fourteen legs. The rear half had none at all.

This was no natural feature. Zhang Xiaohou could see clear cuts and fractures along the creature's rear section. More than half of the centipede's legs had been severed.

A centipede with over half its legs missing.

No wonder he hadn't been eaten already. With half its legs gone, the creature had lost all balance — it kept lurching and stumbling, sometimes gouging a long trench through the flat ground ahead, sometimes flipping upside down and crashing into the mud. Its speed swung wildly between lightning-fast and slower than a plodding ox.

"Brother Fan, the centipede is badly wounded too!" Zhang Xiaohou called out in delighted surprise.

*He wasn't lying after all!*

"Right, be careful — it doesn't have any ranged attacks, but if it charges you directly, your life is still in danger. Oh, and I forgot to mention something. That antidote 'fruit' I had you eat wasn't actually a fruit. It was an egg laid by this centipede. It can probably smell its unrotted offspring on your breath, so just keep running. Don't worry about it giving up the chase." Mo Fan's voice came through the communicator, breathless.

Zhang Xiaohou went blank for a moment.

*Don't worry?! Like hell!*

A wave of nausea swept through him from head to toe. He never could have imagined Mo Fan would throw a teammate under the bus this thoroughly — apart from the part about curing his poisoning, not a single word of the plan had been true.

But there was no time to dwell on it. There was no solid ground ahead.

He'd been sprinting flat out, and now a vast expanse of mud pit stretched across his path — at least two hundred meters before solid ground reappeared.

He glanced back. The centipede was barely a hundred meters behind. One centipede-length away.

Stopping wasn't an option. All Zhang Xiaohou could do was pray the mud was dense enough, saturated enough with Earth Element — because if he sank in, it was over.

He gritted his teeth and threw himself forward at full speed. Facing the vast mudflats ahead, he activated both Wind Track and Earth Wave at once.

Wind Track carved a long channel of airflow that shimmered ghostlike across the full two-hundred-meter width of the mud lake.

Earth Wave surged, paving the path with silt. Zhang Xiaohou guided the submerged mud, forcing it to gather and compress into a narrow track along the surface of the swamp.

Zhankong had once said that a Wind Element mage moving fast enough could run straight across the surface of water.

Mud was far denser than water. At sufficient speed, why couldn't you run across mud?

Zhang Xiaohou was genuinely gambling with his life on this. Starlight flickered around his legs — he'd pulled out his last trump card and activated the Footwear Enchanted Gear, terrified the mud would drag him under.

"**Aaaaaahhhh—!**"

Screaming his lungs out, Zhang Xiaohou sprinted across the silt. A clear parting line split the mud lake in his wake, waves of mud dividing to either side. Had it not been for the visually staggering sight of the centipede crashing and barreling along behind him, he might almost have looked like a master gliding weightless across the water's surface.

"Bro— Bro— Brother Fan, I'm almost there— oh my god!!"

He was almost at the designated spot when a black mountain appeared ahead of him — one that was moving.

That night had been too dark; he'd only glimpsed the silhouette of the colossal thing in the center of the lake. Now, with the last light of the setting sun still lingering in the west, the full sight of the black fleshy mountain of a lizard hit him like a blow to the chest. Small and insignificant as he was, his heart felt ready to shatter.

The Armored-Shell Giant Lizard.

On its back sat a massive curved shell, its arc not especially steep — the very shell the Big Hammer Hunting Party had once mistaken for flat ground and walked across.

The Armored-Shell Giant Lizard was enormous beyond reckoning. Every step it took sent the entire mud lake heaving and trembling. Zhang Xiaohou was still a fair distance away, yet somehow it already felt as if the creature were right in front of him.

*This thing is even more terrifying than the centipede.*

"Brother Fan, are you sure they'll actually fight each other??" Zhang Xiaohou swallowed hard, his eyes wide with disbelief.

"I fed the lizard the centipede's legs. They'll definitely fight." Mo Fan said with complete certainty.

"...Brother Fan, what exactly have you been doing out here?!" Zhang Xiaohou was utterly floored.

"Both of them are badly wounded. I neutralized the centipede's venom, so it's less of a threat to us. The Armored-Shell Giant Lizard took heavy injuries too — its speed is way down. Under normal circumstances, we'd be dead the moment we laid eyes on either of them." Mo Fan said.

The two mages were drawing closer together, and the two colossal beasts — each capable of turning the mud lake inside out — were almost upon one another.

But first, both creatures clearly intended to destroy the humans who had dared provoke them before settling their mutual grievance. The two beasts moved to cut off every escape route, intent on crushing these two audacious little mice before dealing with anything else.

"Ah Li Man! Ah Li Man! The vortex — blast open the rock layer at the bottom, now!" Seeing the moment had arrived, Mo Fan spoke urgently into his communicator.

Zhang Xiaohou had reached the small sandbar. All that remained was to pray the vortex appeared in time.

Directly beneath the sandbar where Mo Fan and Zhang Xiaohou stood, Ah Li Man set her luminescent watch on the damp rock beside her and tilted her gaze upward toward the vaulted stone ceiling towering far above.

She had reasoned that blowing it open too early would flood the cavern with mud. She had to wait until both of them were in position.

"Light Falls Boundless Zhang!"

A resplendent golden Constellation spiraled gloriously around Ah Li Man. Without holding back a single drop of her Magical Energy, she unleashed her high-tier spell in full.

She needed to punch through the rock in one burst. Any delay, and both of them would be devoured.

Light Falls Boundless Zhang was a high-tier Light Element technique. Once the Constellation manifested, hundreds upon hundreds of shafts of radiance would pour down like rainfall. Shaped into bladed weapons, they became razor-edged lances of light capable of devastating destruction.

Under Ah Li Man's Mental Intent, the brilliance of the spell transformed into a blizzard of luminous arrows. Dense as a monsoon downpour, they converged and hammered upward without pause against the stone ceiling overhead—

The rock vaulting crumbled rapidly, blasted by the relentless storm of light arrows into a gap nearly ten meters wide.

Ten meters was just right — enough that mud wouldn't clog the passage, narrow enough that neither creature could reach inside and tear the cavern apart.

"Hm? What's this?" Ah Li Man's brow drew sharply together.

She had used a high-tier spell precisely because she feared the ceiling might be too thick. What she hadn't expected was that her light arrows were suddenly struggling midway through the rock layer — as though something were resisting them, leaving them unable to break through.

There was no reason this rock should be this hard.

She was using high-tier magic.

"Come on, you're killing us here! Where's the vortex you promised?! We're dead!" Zhang Xiaohou's wailing voice crackled through the communicator, accompanied by the piercing roars of both creatures.

"There's something strange about this rock layer..." Then it clicked. "I know — it's an Earth Element Spirit Seed. That Earth Element Spirit Seed — the Flowing Marsh... it's right here, inside this rock layer!"

"Really?!"

"Don't get excited about it!!" Mo Fan's voice tore through the communicator, raw and frantic. "Spirit Seed or not — use everything you've got and blast through it!"