Great Demon Lord
The students stood in stunned silence, every last one of them.
The Swift Star Wolf's combat power could only be described in two words: brutally savage.
Liu Qian, ranked 111th, was a formidable mage in his own right — he wielded his Dual Spirit Seeds with even greater finesse than Ah Li Yujie. Yet for the entire window his Shield Enchanted Gear held, he had failed to land a single spell on the Swift Star Wolf.
The wolf seemed to be toying with him. It deliberately waited until the Blazing Fist was already streaking through the air before it even began to move. With its explosive burst of speed, it could afford to wait until the fist was mid-flight before dodging out of the way.
"HOWL—!!!"
The Swift Star Wolf threw back its head and unleashed a ferocious gale from the depths of its throat.
The wind raged with wild fury, kicking up clouds of dust and sand that rapidly smothered the entire arena.
The sandstorm swept through with crushing force — its raw power surpassed even the intermediate Wind Element spell, Wind Disk, by a clear margin. Stripped of his defensive gear, Liu Qian could only barely hold on; his Armor Enchanted Gear, nothing particularly formidable to begin with, did little more than spare him the worst of the beating.
The Swift Star Wolf gave him no room to breathe. While the dust still hung thick in the air, the creature's speed erupted once more, and it became a lethal, blurring shadow slicing through the murk—
The wolf-shadow swelled outward, cloaking the Gloom Wolf Beast's entire frame. The raw, savage aura rolling off it was enough to make the students sheltering beyond the protective Barrier draw a collective sharp breath.
Wreathed in that bestial shadow, the Swift Star Wolf crashed into Liu Qian with full force. He had no time to trace the pattern for his next intermediate spell — the armored beast-shadow hit him like a truck, and he went flying.
**Boom—!!** Liu Qian slammed into the protective Barrier with bone-jarring force. His body shuddered on impact, and blood erupted from his mouth.
He crumpled to the ground. His meticulously styled hair was a disaster, his face gone sallow.
His mind stayed clear throughout — but that collision had felt like every organ in his body had been knocked out of place. Without the Armor Enchanted Gear shielding him, surviving at all would have been an open question.
Around the arena, the girls who had been gazing adoringly at Liu Qian now felt their hearts shatter, one by one. This was perhaps the last sight any of them had ever wanted to see.
But reality was what it was. Being devastatingly handsome and sweeping countless girls off their feet said nothing about strength. To say nothing of standing against Mo Fan at full power — even with his Fire Element and Lightning Element nearly spent, Liu Qian couldn't overcome even a single one of Mo Fan's elements. In fact, he had been utterly demolished.
Liu Qian had no will left to fight. He stormed off the arena in silent fury.
Huang Xingli saw what had happened and rushed over, reaching out to support the badly injured Liu Qian.
His mood was as black as it could get. He shook off her concern with undisguised annoyance and disappeared from sight, refusing even the White-browed Teacher's offer of healing treatment.
"His pride took the hit, so his true temperament came out." The White-browed Teacher watched him storm away and shook his head with a helpless sigh.
Huang Xingli stood rooted to the spot. The flash of near-contempt in Liu Qian's eyes had struck her like a bolt of lightning, and a long moment passed before she came back to herself.
She drifted back to her seat in a daze. A single look of disgust from the person she admired most had drained all the color from her world.
Ding Yumian sat beside her, at a loss for what to say.
Girls like Huang Xingli had a habit of judging people by their looks alone. But the truth was that everyone had their own character — how could a perfect face guarantee a perfect person?
In this world, there was nothing wrong with appreciating a pretty face. Just don't expect too much beyond it.
Below the arena, Zheng Jiahui had long since been struck speechless.
Even the renowned Liu Qian had been taken down. Counting this one, the madman on stage had cut down eighty people in a row.
Could anyone in the top fifty of the rankings even manage that?
On the arena, Mo Fan simply sat down cross-legged on the spot and dropped into Meditation.
There were still more than half the challengers left, and without recovering some Magical Energy he had no hope of handling what was coming. It wasn't that he'd actually go around apologizing to every member of Fire Hall if he lost — but pulling something this shameless the moment he returned to campus felt genuinely bad for his image.
The title of Great Demon Lord. He had to reclaim it.
"Next challenger — Yu Zhenchao!"
"Teacher... do I have to go up?" The student named Yu Zhenchao was already regretting his life choices.
Mage versus mage, Yu Zhenchao might have gone up just to show his face — participation was the point. But now that Mo Fan had summoned a creature like *that*, his nerve had completely deserted him.
A summoned creature was still under its Summoner's control, sure. But a Demon-Beast was still a Demon-Beast — who could say for certain how hard it would pull its blows? One wrong move and he'd be gutted open, and even if it didn't kill him, the agony would be more than he could stand.
"Get up there, or I'm throwing you out of Fire Hall. Pathetic wretch!" Wei Rong snarled.
Truth be told, by this point Wei Rong had gradually come to realize that Fire Hall was absolutely overflowing with dead weight. Eighty challengers in, and they still hadn't brought Mo Fan down — even if the man was born with Dual Elements, there was no excuse for things to have reached this sorry state.
The challengers' rankings were scattered all over the place. It had come down to the top two hundred still having any real fighting chance — after all, mages with Dual Spirit Seeds could at least go a round against a Battle-General-class creature.
Go a round, of course, being a very different thing from winning.
And the wolf-type creature's greatest strength was its stamina. Continuous battle showed no signs of wearing it down — if anything, it seemed to be recovering as it fought.
So the defeated count climbed faster and faster. The battle stretched from daylight deep into night. Some people who had slipped out for dinner returned to find they couldn't even squeeze back into the arena hall.
*"Dual Elements takes on Fire Hall — 139 consecutive victories!"*
*"Swift Star Wolf virtually invincible — students outside the top 100, keep your distance!"*
*"Element-transfer madman completes the impossible — Fire Hall's face ground into the dirt!"*
All manner of headlines were blazing across people's phones. What had started as a battle known only within a handful of departments had spread well beyond campus — it wouldn't be long before students at other universities heard about it too.
Many of the freshmen had long since heard of the Great Demon Lord Mo Fan. They went and dug up every scrap of his past they could find, and understanding dawned: this wasn't some new legend rising from nowhere. It was the return of a deeply notorious Great Demon Lord — one whose infamy had been thoroughly burned into the school's memory — roaring back to life with all his old arrogance, to set foot once more on Pearl Main Campus.