The Wrath of the Totem (Part II)

Across the small plain, a dark shadow drifted silently through the tall grass — swift and soundless. It was Councillor Luo Mian, who had just killed Wang Xiaojun. His command of the Dark Element was effortless; with each movement, he skipped through layer after layer of shadow without the slightest sound.

"Councillor Luo Mian, your subordinates have been waiting." A rough-looking man stood among a cluster of green shrubs, flanked by several others. The magical aura radiating from each of them put them firmly at the High-Level Mage threshold.

Luo Mian stepped slowly out of the darkness. With his neat goatee and easy smile, he had the look of a gentle, agreeable elder — yet almost no one alive knew that he had just murdered a young man who had been on the verge of becoming Hangzhou's greatest hero.

"I've got what we came for," he said, smiling. "You should all be pleased. Serve under me, and in time you'll have riches beyond imagining and power enough to shake the world."

The rough-looking man and the other High-Level Mages broke into laughter, and one of them said, "Then allow us to escort you back to Hangzhou's main quarantine zone."

"Escort?" A thin, contemptuous smile crossed Luo Mian's lips. The last man who had offered him an escort had become a hollow, soulless shell.

The rough-looking man spoke up: "Zhang Heng, there aren't many people in this city who get to say they're escorting Councillor Luo Mian. He holds the Tribunal's record for the most Commander-class Demon-Beasts slain. That record is inscribed on a stone stele in the Tribunal's highest hall — and no one at the same rank has broken it to this day."

"Enough," Luo Mian said with a wave of his hand. "Don't forget that Hangzhou is still in danger, and it needs me to save it. Once I do, my supporters will grow beyond counting. After that, no one will dare threaten my position, and the Council Presidency will be within reach. Ha — hahahaha!"

His subordinates rushed to agree, the air thick with flattery.

With his men gathered around him, Luo Mian turned and began moving toward Hangzhou's main quarantine zone.

He had taken only a few steps when something tore the night sky apart.

A colossal column of spiraling violet-black energy came **crashing** down from above, slamming into the earth with apocalyptic force. Grass was ripped free at the roots and shredded to pieces, the fragments spinning upward into a churning, murky vortex that swallowed the entire plain.

Dense fog rolled outward from the base of the column, thickening into a wall of mist that sealed off the path ahead.

Within the fog, something massive shifted — a body gleaming with cold, blue-black light, thick and broad as a mountain ridge.

It was enormous, coiling endlessly back and forth through the mist, as though a hundred sky-shaking serpents were writhing together inside it. But as the fog slowly receded, what emerged stopped everyone cold: a single serpent, so immense that when it reared upright, its head vanished into the night clouds above.

The great serpent held itself high. Then, slowly, it lowered its gaze — looking down at the handful of humans below with the cold authority of a sovereign passing judgment. The piercing light in its eyes landed like twin blades, driving into the chest of every person there and rooting them to the spot, utterly unable to move.

Atop that enormous head, consumed by fury, stood Mo Fan and Lingling. They had come for Wang Xiaojun — for vengeance.

Mo Fan glared down at Councillor Luo Mian, and then something caught his eye: the rough-looking man standing at Luo Mian's side was someone he recognized.

*When Tang Yue and I first arrived at Mid-Lake Island, this man — Dasheng — was the one standing guard there.* Now, standing side by side with Luo Mian, he confirmed everything. He was the traitor within the Guardian Clan.

Dasheng's body had gone rigid. He had never imagined — not in his worst nightmare — that the divine Totem Xuan Serpent would appear here, of all places. He couldn't bring himself to raise his head. The terror that gripped him was exactly what Mo Fan had felt the very first time he encountered the serpent: an absolute helplessness, every thought of resistance snuffed out before it could form.

Luo Mian, a Transcendent Tier Mage, managed to hold himself together — just. He tilted his head back and sneered. "Do you really think you're still the Totem you once were? Without completing your molt, I could destroy you on my own."

The Totem Xuan Serpent opened its vast jaws and exhaled a billowing cloud of black, fog-like energy directly at the ground. The instant it struck, a massive shockwave of dark force erupted outward, tearing across the earth.

The shockwave shattered the ground. Space itself shuddered. Every one of Luo Mian's subordinates was hurled skyward.

They were High-Level Mages — not weaklings. They threw up high-level defensive spells and brought out their Enchanted Gear, throwing everything they had at it. Against the Totem Xuan Serpent, it all amounted to nothing.

Every defense shattered along with the earth beneath it. They tumbled through the air like scraps of paper, and then the tearing force found them — ripping at their bodies from within.

One of them, the weakest of the group, was blasted fifty meters into the sky. His body simply came apart: arms, head, and legs separated cleanly from his torso. Blood sprayed from every torn edge, vivid and unmistakable against the blackness of the night.

The others lasted only seconds longer. It was as if they had been fed into a grinding millstone — first torn to pieces, then reduced to a red mist that scattered across the sky in every direction.

All four died in an instant. A single casual breath from the Totem Xuan Serpent had been enough. Nothing of them was worth describing.

The only one still breathing was the traitor, Dasheng. As a member of the Guardian Clan, he understood the Totem Xuan Serpent's power intimately. He had thrown every last ounce of his strength into his defenses from the very first moment, and that desperate gambit had just barely kept him alive. Even so, he was soaked in blood from head to toe. When he fell from the sky and hit the ground, he was more dead than alive.

Standing atop the serpent's head, Mo Fan stared at the scene below, barely able to process what he had just witnessed.

*They were High-Level Mages. Every single one of them.* And the Totem Xuan Serpent had killed them all with a single technique. *Just how powerful is this creature?*

The fog-like energy dispersed. What it left behind was a landscape beyond recognition. Countless cracks ran through the earth, spreading toward the horizon as far as the eye could see — as if some divine giant had stamped its foot into the ground with full force, leaving behind a crater like an abyss and fissures as wide and deep as canyons spreading outward in every direction.

In that shattered, broken wasteland, only one figure remained completely unharmed: Councillor Luo Mian. His face was ashen. He stared at the Totem Xuan Serpent with hard, furious eyes and roared: "You still need more than half a month to complete the molt — and yet you're burning through your own life force during the Molting Season to unleash power like this. Are you trying to take me down with you?!"

No matter what he saw before him, he refused to believe it. This serpent could not have returned to its full strength. It simply could not have.