Chapter 104: Dragon and Serpent, One Fury

Although he couldn't get in, what he had here was already enough.

Baichuan could already smell that pungent stench of blood — the blood of humans.

Because over the past few years on the other continents, the human blood he had come into contact with was no rare thing.

After all, he had not always been in a peaceful phase where he never saw humans; he had long since fought against human armies.

For someone with such an extraordinarily keen sense of smell, once he had smelled a blood, he could tell exactly what creature it belonged to.

"Hah — hah —"

At that moment, an extremely faint sound came from within — a sound like something was blocking the windpipe, squeezed out through ragged gasps; just hearing it, one could feel the agony in it.

The sound was so faint that, had Baichuan's hearing not been so sharp, he wouldn't have caught it at all — it was simply too weak!

The moment that sound rang out, Baichuan already knew what had made it.

He didn't need that transparent perception ability to render it in his mind; his eyes, peering through that small opening, saw it clearly and truly.

It seemed to be a man in tattered clothes, soaked through with blood to the point of blackening, who had made the sound — he didn't know if it was coincidence or what.

At this moment, the man just happened to be lying right where the opening offered a direct line of sight, allowing Baichuan, who had come here, to discover him.

His whole body lay quietly beneath the slope of piled flesh and blood, completely soaked in that fresh-red, almost blackened blood.

His limbs seemed to have been severed by something, leaving only an incomplete torso.

On a face caked with blood-filth, its specific features impossible to make out, a pair of dim, lifeless eyes stared blankly toward the opening — toward Baichuan's gaze peering in through it.

In that instant, the two — one Flood Dragon, one human — stared at each other like that, cold, sharp, beastly eyes meeting dim human ones.

A long while.

Baichuan withdrew his gaze — not out of fear.

Rather, he knew the man was already dead; the man's pupils had long since completely dilated.

What had come before was merely his final struggle.

Looking at this gory, somewhat nauseating scene, although Baichuan considered himself a rather indifferent person, and was no longer human himself, none of this had anything to do with him.

But, for some unknown reason, at this moment his heart felt heavy, with a very oppressive sensation.

Although when he hunted, he might have produced scenes even more bloody than the one before him.

He had never taken pleasure in torturing life to death, even when he was intoxicated by the thrill violence brought.

He would only pin those animals down so they couldn't get up and bully them a bit, and when it came time to feed, he killed them straight off.

Unless some special circumstance left him no time to finish the prey in an instant.

He always believed that life was the most precious thing in this world; no matter how strong he became, he had to learn to revere life — to revere life was to revere himself.

He just stood there silently, gazing at the situation inside the hollow.

For no reason, he now very much wanted to destroy something.

Perhaps it was the last trace of humanity left in him.

He extended a razor-sharp claw, and, as easily as digging into tofu, began to scrape the edges of the opening wider, bit by bit.

As chunks of stone, large and small, were pulled out, the opening finally grew large enough for Baichuan to stick his head in.

But it still wasn't enough — he needed more space.

Thinking of this, his pair of hind claws below pressed down hard, anchoring themselves beneath the opening, while his two front claws reached in simultaneously and began working both sides, picking up speed.

One after another, loud sounds of falling stone rang out, and the commotion of objects dropping from above drew the attention of others.

But did Baichuan care?

He didn't!

In his eyes, they were already dead men — why would the dead warrant any attention?

After he sped up his movements, he quickly dug out a large hole big enough for his entire body to enter.

Without hesitation, Baichuan went straight in.

What met his eyes was a scene more vivid and lifelike than the world he had constructed in his mind.

It was a picture made striking by the stimulation of color — far more concrete than a dull, lifeless transparent model.

Blood! Blood! Blood everywhere!!

Centered on the entire hollow, a small mountain built of limbless torsuses of every description was piled up in that pool of blood.

Baichuan could even see some limbless humans still clinging to life — he didn't know whether the mastermind behind this scene had done it on purpose or by accident.

And in the blood pool below, countless fragments of bodies and limbs were mixed together with scattered medicinal herbs — human, and animal too, though whether they were truly animals, that was anyone's guess.

Beneath the blood pool was an opening, from which dark-red blood flowed continuously, guided by grooves to slowly gather into a vessel.

Before Baichuan could make any move, an angry shout, accompanied by the sound of wings beating the air, came from the direction of the opening, far off in the distance.

But before the newcomer could get close, Baichuan suddenly whipped his head around, his sharp eyes brimming with killing intent, his neck swelling high, and an electric arc spark jumping.

In an instant, a massive surge of poisonous fire blasted out of the cave, transforming into a ball of fierce flame that sealed off the opening.

The poisonous fire erupted so suddenly that the fastest arrival was instantly engulfed in flames, accompanied by a wretched scream of agony, "Ah — my eyes!"

And then the sound cut off as he fell.

However, the wretched state of this arrival also made those who came after him halt their forward momentum, warily staring into the opening.

And some of them — whose wings were not attached to their arms but grew from their backs — began one after another to pick up the bows and arrows that had always been set beside them, drawing them back to unleash a volley.

At this moment, the flames also slowly faded.

It was because Baichuan had stopped spewing fire.

Right now, an inexplicable fury had inexplicably risen in his heart.

He didn't consider himself some avatar of justice, nor did he want to play the savior who punished evil and rewarded good; he simply found these scums, who looked more like demons than humans, displeasing.

And he, who walked the path of dragon transformation and possessed power, was displeased — so he would kill!

As the killing intent rose in his heart, the wings at his sides slowly spread outward to either side, and along with them, metallic flying feathers fanned out one by one, like a peacock spreading its tail.

In an instant, two broad wings, each a full eighteen meters long, occupied most of the hollow space within the mountain.

And this action also caused the feathers on his wings to be stained with large amounts of bright red blood — but this was exactly what he wanted.

Along with the appearance of a pale white light, the biting cold instantly turned the blood on the wings into tiny ice needles.

And at this moment, a volley of arrows came flying in unison.

However, Baichuan's preparation was also ready; one front claw slammed hard into the ground, instantly splashing up countless drops of blood.

The instant those drops of blood flew up, the cold swept out and turned them into a large number of ice crystals.

Then his wings beat, a howling cold wind rose, and a great mass of blood needles turned into afterimages in an instant, shooting forth.

As a series of faint but distinct impact sounds rang out, the arrows fired by those fewer than twenty people were knocked away by the dense volley of blood needles.

The few that dodged the blood needles had their force reduced by the howling cold wind; by the time they reached Baichuan, the kinetic energy on them had long since been weakened beyond recognition.

At this point, the arrowheads couldn't even pierce the feathers on Baichuan's wings, let alone penetrate his scales.

His current scales come from the fearsome scales of an Arapaima LV3 (King)-class creature.

Just how strong are these scales?

Suffice to say they fear neither slashing by blade nor chopping by axe nor piercing; they possess not only hardness but also a high degree of flexibility, and can be called one of the most powerful biological materials in all of nature.

In the blink of an eye, Baichuan had neutralized the enemy's attack, yet the other side had not expected Baichuan to also possess ice-attribute offensive techniques.

Remembering only to defend against the poisonous fire assault, a few of them were caught off guard in their carelessness and were pierced through like sieves by the blood-ice needles, with their wings suffering the worst damage.

Thus, a few unlucky ones also fell down along with them.

And at this moment, the other side didn't even know what had attacked them, or what had invaded their hidden place.

However, this attack also made the enemies opposite thoroughly cautious; no longer thinking of closing in, they began to pull back distance, preparing to attack from afar.

One by one they puffed out their strange gill-pouches, as if about to howl in unison…

(End of this chapter)