A cold, calculating fury, honed by years of climbing from the gutter, burned in Lin Qing's veins. It was a fire he hadn't felt in a long time—the humiliating sting of being outmaneuvered. In his mind, sharpened by paranoia and envy, the pieces fit together with damning clarity. The only one in this damned farm with the cunning, the resources, and the cold-blooded audacity to set such a trap was that Xie brat. A noble-born prodigy, young yet unnervingly precise, orchestrating the slaughter of the swarm with a veteran's ease. They're all the same,he seethed internally. Gifted everything, yet still so greedy. They deserve to fall.His resentment, always simmering, boiled over. The evidence was circumstantial, but his conviction was absolute: Xie Guangyu had used his team as bait to draw the elite lieutenants, clearing the path for his own glory against the Brood-Prime. A classic, dirty play. One he himself might have employed.
"To the farm! Drag the swarm with us!" Lin Qing snarled, his command slicing through the panic of his surviving teammates. If Xie wanted a war, he'd bring the battlefield to his doorstep. Let him enjoy his triumph while drowning in chitin and venom.
Back at the farm, the defenders had braced for the final, desperate clash with the revealed Brood-Prime. The air crackled with released energy, shouts of challenge, and the deafening buzz of the swarm. The "king versus king" moment was at hand. Then, the world to the north erupted.
A flash of actinic light, followed by a ground-shaking crump. Then, a moving tsunami of Scorpid-Tails, spearheaded by five distinct, lethal forms, surged towards them. And at its forefront, a fleeing, battered squad.
"It's Lin Qing!"
"By the lost gods, it's them! They're leading the horde right to us!"
"Treacherous bastards!"
Fury and betrayal washed over the farm's defenders. Xie Guangyu, momentarily nonplussed by the brute-force idiocy of the move—so unlike the subtle predator Lin Qing was reputed to be—quickly adapted. Facts were facts. The threat was coming.
"You there!" Xie Guangyu's voice, amplified by a whisper of wind magic, carried over the din. "State your purpose! If you seek refuge, you fight with us! Otherwise, you share the fate of the vermin you bring!"
Lin Qing's laugh was a harsh bark, devoid of humor. "A temporary alliance, then! We share the walls, we share the fight!" The lie was smooth, a veteran performer's line.
"Agreed." Xie Guangyu's reply was equally hollow. The farm gates groaned open just enough to admit the sprinting figures, then slammed shut. The two groups now stood within the same barricades, separated by mere meters and a chasm of mutual hatred, both pretending the other wasn't a knife aimed at their back.
Magnificent,Yao mused from her hidden perch, a ghost at the window. The sheer, audacious hypocrisy was almost beautiful. Her plan, in its chaotic way, was working. The two most dangerous human elements were now corralled, their energies focused on the swarm. The great human alliance against the monstrous horde. All according to her design.
Yet, a dissonant note vibrated in her mind. The Brood-Prime. It should be retreating. It had seen Lin Qing's team, relatively intact, join a fortified position. A direct assault now was suicidal. Unless… unless it wantedto be in the thick of the fighting. What possible advantage could that offer?
A memory sparked—the discrepant data, the shift from Verdant-Brown to Scorpid-Tail. A theory, wild and terrifying, clicked into place. It wasn't an invasion. It was a coup.A lone, high-tier Scorpid female infiltrating a Verdant-Brown swarm, mating with its chieftain, producing a hybrid offspring. She then consumed the chieftain, absorbing his essence but not fully integrating it… passing that unstable, potent genetic cocktail to her egg. The egg became a gene-forge, a capacitor. Her toxins hadn't failed; the egg had absorbed them, metabolizing them as raw fuel. This entire battle, the energy, the death… it was all nourishment. The Brood-Prime wasn't here to conquer. It was here to feedits unborn champion, and then…
Her eyes widened infinitesimally. It's going to eat the egg.
Outside, the battle reached a frenzied crescendo. Lin Qing and Xie Guangyu, while glaring daggers at each other, unleashed their combined arsenal on the Brood-Prime. Fire, ice, corrosive mist, and slicing blades of concentrated air hammered the massive creature. Its carapace cracked, green ichor fountained, and its deafening shrieks of pain shook the very foundations of the farmhouse. The swarm, sensing their mother's distress, redoubled their suicidal attacks.
"It's dying! Now! All out!" The cry went up, a siren song of greed and desperation. Both leaders, their temporary truce forgotten, triggered their ultimate contingencies. Xie Guangyu's hand dipped into a pouch.
Yao, watching, felt a pulse of… not surprise, but professional acknowledgment. Expensive.
From the churned earth around the Brood-Prime and, crucially, at the feet of Lin Qing's clustered team, small, ceramic forms wriggled free. Geckos. Five of them. Their bellies glowed with a dangerous ruby light for a split second before—
KRAKOOM!
The detonation wasn't continent-shattering, but it was perfectly placed, impeccably timed, and devastatingly intimate. The blast was a concentrated sphere of annihilating force and white-hot shrapnel. It was the kind of tool only accessible through noble house procurement channels, a message written in fire and privilege. Lin Qing's men, already battered, were engulfed. When the light and dirt cleared, they were on the ground, broken, their life signs flickering like guttered candles.
Lin Qing, however, was not among them. He had… vanished an instant before the blast.
Yao's breath caught. He saw them. He sensed the traps. And he didn't warn his team.The cold logic of it was breathtaking. Academy season was approaching. His teammates were aging, liabilities. Their accumulated wealth, however, was not. A cleaner, more tragic way to inherit their shares.
Before the thought fully formed, Lin Qing reappeared, not from thin air, but from a fold of distorted shadow beside Xie Guangyu. His face was a mask of cold rage. Xie Guangyu's defensive barrier, a shimmering dome of green energy, flared to life. Lin Qing didn't chant. He simply moved. A blade of solidified moonlight, two meters long and humming with the power of a Level 20 Arcanist's full fury, materialized in his grasp and fell.
SHINK-CRACK!
The barrier shattered like glass. The force of the blow lifted Xie Guangyu off his feet and hurled him into the farmhouse wall with bone-jarring impact. Stone cracked. Xie Guangyu slumped, blood painting his lips.
Twenty. The man was Level Twenty. A predator who had knowingly entered a Tier 5 dungeon. The implications were staggering.
Lin Qing didn't pause. He flipped a small, adhesive disc from his belt. It sailed through the air with a soft whirrand slapped onto the Brood-Prime's heaving flank. A targeting beacon. It began to pulse, a steady, ominous red.
From the distant copse of trees—the same copse where a certain flyer was hidden—a deep, building thrum answered. A split second later, a streak of crimson light, too fast for the eye to truly follow, screamed across the sky. It was a line of pure annihilation connecting the woods to the beacon.
BOOOOOOM!
The explosion this time was seismic. A sun bloomed on the farmland, swallowing the Brood-Prime, a significant chunk of the swarm, the front gates, the pigsty, and a sizable portion of the courtyard. Dirt, stone, and burning insect parts rained down for hundreds of meters. When the glare faded, a smoldering crater marked the epicenter. The swarm's numbers were halved. Silence, ringing and profound, descended for one terrible second.
Then, Lin Qing glowed. The system's reward for delivering the cataclysmic blow. He allowed himself a fraction of a second of triumph.
It was all the time Xie Guangyu needed. The boy pushed himself up from the rubble, bloodied but far from broken. His eyes were pits of black ice. Around him, a miasma of Corrosive Miasma exploded outwards, not as a cloud, but as a living, hungry entity. Behind him, the spectral image of his Gene-Sequence tree flickered, six branches ablaze with light. "You," he spat, the word dripping with venom, "will die."
The stage was set. The noble scion, rising from defeat with hidden power, versus the commoner genius, standing amidst the ruins of his own making. The final, dramatic duel.
Gronk the marmot, peeking from behind a water barrel, trembled. "By my fluffy tail… it's like a bad stage play. One dramatic reveal after another. When does it end?"
Aqi didn't answer. Her eyes were fixed not on the two posturing men, but on the ground. Specifically, on the patch of earth between the crippled Brood-Prime, Lin Qing, Xie Guangyu, and the core of the remaining Teng and Xie forces. The earth that had been churned by battle, softened by blood and fire.
It moved.
Not with violence, but with a sudden, grotesque fertility. Forest Thorns, thick and dark, erupted. But these were wrong. They gleamed with a silvery, metallic sheen, and as they burst upwards, they were already entangled with near-invisible strands of something stronger than steel. It was a net, a cage, grown instantaneously from below, its bars a fusion of enchanted wood and monomolecular wire.
SNICK-SNAP-CRUNCH.
The sound was horrific. The cage enclosed the critically wounded Brood-Prime, the injured remnants of Lin Qing's team, and the front ranks of the noble factions. Then, the Gossamer threads woven through the thorns hardened.
The result was a blender of solidified magic. Bodies already hanging by a thread were severed, crushed, pulped. The mini-boss lieutenants, caught in the heart of it, were shredded. A complex, triple-layered spell (Thorns for area, Gossamer for reinforcement, a wave of Locust's Daze to stall reaction), perfectly tuned to execute anything already at death's door.
Aqi's mind reeled. Who thinks to use Forest Thorns as a delivery system for wire?The sheer, unorthodox brilliance of it was terrifying.
Lin Qing, his attributes high, shook off the Daze after a second. Rage and a sliver of fear warred in his eyes as he saw the meaty ruin of his former comrades. He snarled, and a wave of cryogenic energy exploded from him, flash-freezing the thorns and wires around him. They became brittle.
CRACK!
He shattered his section of the cage, bursting free. The moment his foot cleared the wreckage, a wave of nausea and blinding pain lanced through his skull. His vision swam, his balance fled. Poison? How?His disoriented gaze lifted.
And saw the arrow.
It seemed to hang in the air, trembling slightly, as if suspended by fate itself. He willed his body to move, to blur away, but the neurotoxin had seized his motor functions. He was a statue.
THWIP.
The arrow took him cleanly through the throat. He stumbled back, a look of profound incredulity on his face, then collapsed, the light fading from his eyes.
Xie Guangyu, reacting with the speed of a cornered viper, had also torn his way free. He ignored the dying Lin Qing, his enhanced senses stabbing towards the origin of the arrow, the source of the thorns, the architect of the poison. "The roof! There!" he screamed, pointing to the farmhouse's peak. His remaining men, along with the Teng forces, gathered their will for a concentrated volley.
They never released it.
A wave of weakness hit them. Men gasped, clutching their stomachs. They stumbled, retching, their limbs turning to lead. Xie Guangyu himself swayed, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin. Poison? The thorns? But Forest Thorns aren't poisonous… unless…His eyes shot to the vicious barbs of the cage. The tips weren't brown. They were a faint, sinister green. The thorns were tipped. With something else.They had assumed a common spell. They had guarded against steel, not toxin.
"It's a neuro-agent! We've been poisoned!" someone wailed.
Xie Guangyu, fighting the creeping paralysis, dropped to one knee, feigning worse weakness than he felt. Let the hunter come to inspect the prey.
The figure on the roof moved. A dark silhouette against the grey sky. It leapt down.
Now!Xie Guangyu exploded upward, all feigned weakness gone, a cloud of Corrosive Miasma vomiting from his hands to engulf the spot where the figure would land.
The figure did not land.
It seemed to stepon empty air, propelling itself sideways. Then again. And again. A series of impossible, zig-zagging leaps in mid-air, never touching the ground. Aqi stared, her analytical mind rejecting what she saw. Air-Step? A Level 50 skill… impossible!Then she saw them—faint, almost imperceptible lines of tension in the air, connecting gable to chimney, roof-edge to fence post. A web. The figure wasn't jumping on air; it was using pre-strung, hyper-taut Gossamer wires as springboards, a chaotic, unpredictable trapeze act only the weaver could navigate.
Xie Guangyu's mist washed over empty earth. His moment was gone. A Locust's Daze hit him, followed by a screaming Verdant Locust Wing. Then another. And another. He was battered, his defenses stripped away by the relentless, razor-sharp winds. The mighty, prideful scion was reduced to a stumbling, bleeding punch-doll under a hail of graceful, brutal violence.
"Mercy! We are of the Jingyang Xie! You dare—" Xie Yong's plea was cut short, not by a voice, but by a sudden, awful tension. He and his son, Xie Jun, were yanked into the air by their necks as if by invisible nooses. There was a sickening crack, and they went limp, dangling like grotesque puppets.
Yao knew. The pheromone attractant in her room. It wasn't Xie Guangyu; Oaks was useful to him. It was the envious uncle, the resentful cousin, clearing the path for their preferred pawn. A move in a petty, familial war she had been thrust into.
She walked towards the kneeling, broken Xie Guangyu, her expression unreadable behind her now-visible mask. Before she could reach him, Aqi's sharp cry cut the air.
"The Brood-Prime! It's not dead! Attack!"
All eyes snapped to the massive, presumed-corpse. No one had received a kill notification. The belly of the creature was convulsing, glowing with a violent, swirling light—green bleeding into a profound, oceanic blue. A protective sphere of shimmering, multi-hued energy began to form around it, humming with absolute negation. From its birth canal, it expelled a single, basketball-sized egg. The shell was not opaque, but translucent, and inside, a pulsating, radiant heart of raw power throbbed. With a grotesque, swift motion, the Brood-Prime twisted its head and swallowedthe egg whole.
Aqi's blood ran cold. "It's… it's using the battle! The energy, the spells, the death—it was all to charge the egg! It's consuming it to catalyze its own evolution to Blue-tier! The shield… it's an evolutionary cocoon! We can't break it!"
The air itself seemed to warp as the Brood-Prime began to swell, its aura skyrocketing. A system-wide alert blared in their minds: "Dungeon anomaly detected. Tier escalation in progress. Recalibrating difficulty: Tier 20. Participant cap expanding…"
Panic, absolute and final, began to take hold. They had fought, betrayed, and slaughtered each other, all to fuel this monster's ascension.
TWANG.
A sound, small and precise, like a single harp string snapping.
Interrupt.
The timing was supernatural. In the exact, infinitesimal moment the Brood-Prime's evolutionary energy completed the circuit, in the nanosecond the invulnerable cocoon sealed, a spike of pure, anti-magical resonance—a skill designed to break concentration, to stall transformations—lanced out. It found the nascent seam in the reality-warping shield and pickedit.
The glorious, multi-hued shield flickered, distorted, and with a sound like cracking crystal, vanished.
The Brood-Prime, mid-transformation, its stolen energy churning violently within, froze. Its multifaceted eyes, reflecting the raging power inside it, locked onto a single point. There, a human woman stood, one hand outstretched. From her fingertip, a needle of absolute blackness, colder than the void and radiating a familiar, deadly kinship, condensed.
Recognition, and sheer, biological horror, flashed through its primitive mind. My own sting. But… purer. Deadlier.
The black needle shot forth. It did not strike the hardened carapace. It flew true, aimed with impossible accuracy at the distended, glowing abdomen—at the stomach now digesting the unstable, hyper-charged egg. The needle, born of its own refined essence, passed through the Brood-Prime's natural defenses as if they weren't there.
Inside, the volatile core of the devoured egg, agitated by the failed evolution and now pierced by a catalyst of exquisite toxicity…
BLAM.
The explosion was internal, muffled, but utterly devastating. The Brood-Prime's abdomen distended like a rotten fruit, then split open in a gout of incandescent green and blue viscera. The mighty creature let out a final, wet gurgle and toppled, its grand ambition dissolving into a pool of steaming offal.
Silence, deeper than before, returned.
[Scorpid Brood-Prime (Evolving – Blue Tier) slain. Experience +200,000. Level +1. Level +2. Significant Tier-Variance Bonus Awarded: 'Arcane Will' Fragment received. Lodged in consciousness. Integrate at earliest opportunity.]
[Dungeon Cleared. Calamity Field to dissolve in 30 minutes. Final rewards calculcated. Please collect at your nearest sanctioned Arcane Athenaeum.]
The notifications shimmered in the survivors' vision, a surreal counterpoint to the carnage. The immediate, overwhelming relief was shattered by a raw, agonized scream.
It came from Xie Guangyu.
Yao had moved with efficient, dispassionate speed, looting the still-steaming core of the Brood-Prime. As she passed the prone form of Xie Guangyu, who was shuddering on the ground, her foot—not in a kick, but in a deliberate, crushing stomp—came down on the small of his back, directly over his spiritual core.
There was a soft, wet crunch, like a walnut being crushed under a boot heel. Xie Guangyu arched, a strangled scream tearing from his throat as a visible shimmer of silver energy—his cultivated Arcane power—bled out of him like lifeblood, dissipating into the air. The light in his eyes, once sharp and cold with ambition, dimmed into a hollow, pain-glazed shock.
She didn't kill him. She broke him. The once-feared prodigy, the corrosive mist-wielder, was now a vessel with a gaping hole.
As she stepped over him, her gaze, visible through the eye-slits of her mask, met his for a fleeting second. It held no triumph, no hatred. Only a calm, evaluative stillness. The same detached look one might give a dangerous tool that has just been successfully, and permanently, disabled.
The previous night, in this very hall, he had held her down, threatened to break her core, and looked at her with contemptuous ownership. This "second brother" of his, it seemed, had a flexible moral code, a long memory, and a very precise understanding of reciprocity. The consequences, as promised, were severe.