City in Shock — the Sky-Scraping Serpent

The shadow had not existed a moment before.

Now it loomed between a silver-gleaming bank tower and a resplendent five-star hotel.

It had been facing away from the high-rise restaurant where Mo Fan was. Now it had turned around.

A face of incomprehensible enormity confronted them — vast, and flat as a wall.

Two triangular eyes blazed with light, bright as the spotlights mounted atop commercial towers. The glow wasn't vivid so much as it was penetrating — something alien and terrible that drove straight to the core of you.

Its head and neck were nearly fused into one, the neck flared wide and puffed outward like a massive hood. Black overall, but under the wash of neon light you could just make out the texture of scales across its skin.

The rest — Mo Fan couldn't bring himself to look any further.

It was level with them now. The span of its pupils likely swallowed the entire building at once; it couldn't possibly see the people behind the floor-to-ceiling glass. Yet Mo Fan's skin prickled and his body went cold with the absolute certainty that it was staring directly at him.

That gaze made you feel small, from somewhere deep inside. Made you feel like nothing.

It stood like a sovereign, towering over the most prosperous quarter of the city. However many people walked the streets below, however tall the buildings rose, it simply *stood* — not as if it had just arrived, but as if it had been standing here for a thousand, ten thousand years.

A helicopter circled overhead, its white beams sweeping across the creature's form.

In the dim light, Mo Fan finally made out what it was.

A snake. This was a snake.

It held its body fully erect, motionless as a sculpture. If it hadn't turned its head, most people would have mistaken it for a new skyscraper.

It dwarfed the sky. Mo Fan was certain that if this creature ever swung its body, the entire district would be reduced to ruin in a single instant.

But it didn't move. After turning its head, it held that pose, utterly still. The only thing proving it wasn't carved stone was the blood-red forked tongue that slipped lazily between its lips.

"My god — what is *that*?!"

Someone in the restaurant finally registered what was outside. The scream tore out of them.

"A snake — a *snake*!"

"It's real, it's a real snake — somebody *help* us!"

The restaurant, moments ago warm with conversation and candlelight, collapsed in an instant into a wall of wailing and screaming. Every face flooded with raw, bottomless terror. And for all that terror, the Sky-Scraping Serpent didn't spare it a glance.

The floor dissolved into chaos. This wasn't just the ordinary city-dwellers, people who had never once laid eyes on a Demon-Beast — even Mo Fan, a mage, felt every hair on his body stand on end.

The Giant Lizard Pseudo-Dragon, for all its horror, had never shaken him to the soul like this.

*What is this thing?* He wanted someone to tell him. *What are we actually looking at?*

This was Hangzhou — a city carrying thousands of years of human civilization. How had something like this appeared without a single word of warning? This... Sky-Scraping Serpent.

"Xinxia — get behind me!" Mo Fan bit down hard on his own tongue.

It was the only way to claw back even a fraction of control over the terror that had swallowed him whole.

He stood at the floor-to-ceiling window and didn't run — not like the headless mob stampeding for the exits. He understood exactly what running meant against something like this. Human legs made no difference here. Fleeing or standing still, the outcome was the same.

The Sky-Scraping Serpent was slowly drawing its head toward them. On instinct, Mo Fan stepped forward and placed himself between Xinxia and the glass. Her mind had gone just as blank as everyone else's.

The serpent stretched its body further. Something had caught its attention. That vast snake's face drew nearer, closer to the commercial tower, closer to the restaurant's floor-to-ceiling windows, until those spotlight eyes were perfectly level with the seventieth floor.

A pair of human eyes, black as night — saturated with fear, yet unable to extinguish something else underneath. Something hard. Something that simply refused to go out.

The serpent's pupils held no anger. No curiosity. Nothing you could read. Perhaps it wasn't even looking at them specifically — perhaps its gaze simply had to land somewhere, and a young man and woman happened to occupy that particular patch of glass.

For the Sky-Scraping Serpent, it was nothing. An unconscious thing.

For the young man with the girl behind him, it was the most absolute threat he had ever faced in his life.

Cloud cover drifted overhead, lit orange-yellow from below by the city's glow. The things that stood closest to those clouds had always been the iconic skyscrapers — a forest of towers, testament to human prosperity and ambition. But tonight, what stood nearest to the clouds was no longer any skyscraper.

It was a serpent, slowly drawing its full body upright.

That sight was a backhanded slap across the face of everything humanity had built. The shame of being crushed — body and soul — by sheer scale was enough to shatter the worldview of every frog who had ever been content at the bottom of a well.

It hadn't moved. It hadn't destroyed a single thing. And already, for this corner of the city, it was a catastrophe.

Viewed from above, the crowds scattered like dark dust thrown to the wind. Traffic locked at every intersection. People abandoned their stalled vehicles and ran on their own two legs — stumbling, crawling, scrambling forward in any direction that led away.

A nightmare, descending without a whisper of warning.

A few minutes passed before winged figures appeared in the air — mages with wings on their backs, scattered, only a handful. Among humans, a mage who could fly commanded incomparable reverence, a pinnacle of power. And yet beside this serpent that seemed to prop up the sky, they were gnats drifting near something vast and indifferent. Not one of them dared draw an inch closer.

The good news: the serpent turned its gaze away. Something had drawn its attention.

It shifted its body slightly. The neck billowed outward, vast as a stormcloud.

Its pupils found their focus, locking gradually onto a white-robed man with long, flowing hair who came flying in from the south.

The man's hair was as long as a woman's — a perfectly ordered cascade, not a single strand out of place.

He descended onto the pointed spire atop the bank tower. Directly below him lay that rooftop pool; the handful of wealthy women who had been lounging at its edge were already crumpled there unconscious, sprawled in careless disarray.

The waterfall-haired man tilted his head back and met the serpent's gaze.

Among the tens of thousands of people below, his were the only eyes untouched by fear — sharp and unblinking, hawk-like, cutting through the dark.

"Even if the seal means nothing to you," he called out, voice carrying hard and clear, "that does not give you license to rampage through city streets!"

He was speaking *to* the Sky-Scraping Serpent.

The serpent didn't fully acknowledge him. It lifted its head slowly, turning its face upward toward the low, heavy clouds hanging just overhead, tongue sliding out in a long, unhurried flicker.

Then mist began to rise. Wisps of it appeared around the serpent, faint at first — barely enough to soften the edges of that staggering silhouette. Gradually it thickened, rolling in dense as low cloud cover, until the mist was heavy enough to swallow the serpent whole, erasing it entirely from view.