novelraw Chapter 348: The Human-Dragon
Chapter 348: The Human-Dragon
Evelyn’s Tesla Coil Glove, pushed to its absolute overload, unleashed at that moment a terrifying power comparable to a localized thunderstorm.
The blue-white arc roared as it tore through the spiritual barrier around the altar, and with crushing momentum it slammed into Yan Xilou’s left hand as he spun the Nine-Bend Yellow River staff.
The three-sectioned staff, endlessly flowing in his grip, was forcibly split open where the current touched it; the high-voltage electricity, crazily conducted along the metal, sent Yan Xilou’s left arm into momentary numbness and rigidity.
It was a fleeting opening.
For an ordinary fighter it might have lasted no more than the blink of an eye, but for Lin Jie—who had been under extreme pressure the whole time, nerves stretched taut to the limit—this was the turning point he’d been waiting for.
His left hand plunged into his coat and seized the still-warm alchemical vial filled with golden nectar.
“Catch!”
Lin Jie’s eyes remained locked on Yan Xilou, who was trying to recover from the paralysis, but the metal bottle in his hand was sent with a clever flick toward the elevated platform behind and to the side, where his teammates still suppressed the surrounding grunts with gunfire.
This was an act of total, unreserved trust.
Julian, standing at the edge of the high platform, reacted the instant he heard the shout. He loosened his grip on the foregrip with his left hand and, with no protection, shoved his body far out past the railing. It was an extremely dangerous move.
One stray bullet or an opportunistic slash could have ended the scholar’s arm—or his life—right there.
“Clack.”
A weighty impact registered through Julian’s palm; inside the vial lay William’s hope to survive, and the ultimate answer they sought by plunging into this green hell.
“Got it.”
Julian quickly shoved the bottle into his pack, then regripped his rifle with both hands and opened fire on the beast-men.
At the altar center, however, the situation went utterly upside down the moment the nectar changed hands.
Yan Xilou’s face, which had so far displayed calm and composure, finally betrayed a trace of displeasure.
He was not upset about the nectar itself; for the man who controlled the entire Garden of Eden resource cache, it was a consumable that could be regenerated at will. What truly angered—and frightened—him was the chain reaction triggered by Lin Jie’s sequence of actions.
The Corpse-Scent Arum, Ghost Mother—the central energy core of the entire lab—suddenly went into a frenzy when its nectar pipeline, the crucial medium connecting it to the suspended Living Holy Embryo above, was severed. It convulsed as if someone had sliced open its main artery.
Its petals, visibly, rapidly withered and browned, shrinking together like strips of dehydrating human skin.
The root network, cut off from nectar nourishment, began to writhe and thrash madly underground. Those thick roots ceased controlled outward growth for nutrients and began indiscriminately destroying surrounding structures, arching up like runaway earth-dragons to burst through the floor and pierce the steam pipes embedded in the walls.
“Rumble—”
The entire subterranean space started to shake.
The foundation of this vast underground base was being undermined from within.
Load-bearing columns supporting the dome groaned under the pressure of the roots; cracks raced along walls and ceilings, chunks of stone plummeting from above.
“Brother Lin… do you think I can’t kill you?”
Yan Xilou forcibly dispelled the residual numbness from his left arm. The Nine-Bend Yellow River in his hand exploded into a dazzling, murky yellow light. This time he made no effort to hold back, no concern for damaging the precious experimental devices around him.
Only one thought filled his mind: before this damned place was destroyed, he would eliminate the culprit who had sabotaged his life’s work.
“Die!”
The three-sectioned staff became a yellow storm capable of tearing space apart.
It pressed down on every square meter within ten meters of Lin Jie with unbearable weight.
That was the “momentum” of a martial master.
It was also the “domain” of a high-grade Grotesque Armament.
Under that horrific pressure, Lin Jie felt as if he had been sealed inside amber that was hardening around him; even breathing became agonizingly difficult.
But after the series of bloody battles he’d endured—especially the fight against the Giant Nabau Serpent that had pushed him beyond his limits—his understanding of the Black Mercury trench coat and his own combat techniques had advanced to a new level.
Though his raw power still couldn’t match a monster like Yan Xilou, steeped in decades of practice, he was no longer the rookie who could only run away in shame.
“All systems open.”
Gritted teeth, Lin Jie felt the black coat bloom with a ghostly blue sheen almost to the point of boiling.
As the rain of staff-shadow descended, his body made a string of bizarre twists and slides.
He was unloading force.
Each earth-shattering strike that contacted the coat’s surface was forcibly deflected by a unique phase field; though the tremendous impact still rattled his blood and organs and stabbed him with visceral pain, it never managed to shatter him outright.
“Bang!”
Lin Jie’s Silencer collided violently with Yan Xilou’s three-sectioned staff in midair.
This time Lin Jie was not flung away.
Using the coat’s near-frictionless trait, he rode the staff momentum back and drifted ten or so meters, landing steadily on a slab of rock at the altar’s edge that had not yet collapsed.
A mouthful of fresh blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.
But he stood.
Still gripping his blade.
This tenacious, near-“cockroach” survival ability flashed a moment of shock across Yan Xilou’s face, soon replaced by deeper anxiety.
Because in the few dozen seconds Yan Xilou had been engaged with Lin Jie, conditions at the altar had deteriorated beyond salvage.
With the Corpse-Scent Arum withering and the foundation collapsing, the floating glass cultivation tank had lost both its energy supply and its physical support.
Pipes attached to the tank’s bottom—responsible for delivering nutrient fluid and stabilizer—burst open. Vast quantities of green liquid gushed out.
The white-robed acolytes who had clung to their posts now could not even manage to chant their sutras; they stared at the frenzied roots with faces twisted in extreme fear.
“No… this can’t happen…”
Yan Xilou abandoned his pursuit of Lin Jie. He turned and sprinted toward the tilting cultivation tank, his hands rapidly forming complex hand seals in a desperate attempt to forcibly stabilize the collapsing vessel.
“Quiet! Be quiet, now!”
He shouted at the lifeform inside the tank.
This was his trump card to save his decaying empire. He could accept the lab’s destruction, accept the deaths of his subordinates—but he could not accept the “god” dying before being born.
But fate does not bend to human will, even when wielded by someone with sky-reaching ambition.
The creature in the tank ignored Yan Xilou’s call.
Once freed from the restraining effect of the stabilizer, its genome—built from dozens of different UMA fragments, chaotic and violent—began an unchecked reassembly and proliferation.
It opened eyes containing countless overlapping pupils.
There was no divinity within them.
Only hunger.
Only the primitive desire to consume everything and destroy all.
“Crack—”
Then a second crack, a third.
Yan Xilou’s hands froze midair.
“Boom!”
The enormous cultivation tank finally exploded.
Tons of nutrient fluid, carrying countless shards, cascaded down.
At the center of that deluge, the entity called the Living Holy Embryo fell hard onto the altar’s corroded, pocked surface.
It did not, as Yan Xilou had hoped, transfigure into a sacred draconic humanoid to accept the world’s worship in a blaze of golden light.
It slumped on the ground.
A massive, hideous, writhing mass of flesh that continued to proliferate.
Its skin was a sickly gray-white, riddled with pus-filled blisters and oozing pores.
The dragon-bone spines sprouting from its back had severely malformed, becoming twisted bony growths that punched through skin and hung exposed to the air.
But the worst of it was its sound.
The thing had no vocal cords, no lips, yet the dense network of openings across its body produced hair-raising noises as they opened and closed with its breaths.
“Wah—”
It sounded like a baby crying.
Even with the Serene Heart’s aid, Lin Jie felt a sudden, violent headache at that sound, as if countless steel needles were frantically stirring his brain.
The nearby Black Lotus sect cultists and beast-men were even less able to bear it.
They clutched their ears and howled in agony as black blood poured from their eye, ear, and nose orifices; some of the weak-willed collapsed to their knees and began scratching at their faces until they were unrecognizable.
Indescribable.
This was the so-called manufactured god.
This was the “prescription” meant to save the world.
“Hungry…”
An intent directly projected into everyone’s minds issued from the mass.
It began to move.
Fine tendrils that sprouted from beneath its body writhed across the floor.
Its speed was astonishing.
Several nearby Black Lotus cultists had no time to flee before thick, fleshy tentacles suddenly shot out from the mass and wrapped them tight.
“Help! Help! Leader!”
The cultists reached out in desperation toward Yan Xilou.
But Yan Xilou stood there, stunned.
What followed made even Lin Jie, who had seen blood and carnage, reel with visceral disgust.
The mass did not simply eat those cultists. Or rather, it did not only eat. It fused.
The bodies of the cultists caught by the tentacles began a grotesque melting on contact with the mass. Their skin adhered to the mass’s surface; bones were forcibly stretched, twisted, and reassembled.
In only a few seconds, those living humans vanished—they became part of the creature’s body.
Two victims’ upper bodies were grafted forcibly to the sides of the creature’s head; their arms became stiff, elongated, nails overgrown, turning into two bone structures like “dragon horns.”
Others’ lower bodies were fused to its abdomen; their femurs stretched and thickened, muscle fibers entwined with the creature’s tissue, forming four deformed but powerfully explosive “dragon claws.”
Still more were packed into its back and tail; their spines connected to form a long, grotesque tail bristling with faces, hands, and feet.
It was evolving.
It was violently assembling itself into the “dragon” Yan Xilou had imagined.
A dragon-man formed from human limbs, pain, and flesh.
The newly completed abomination raised its savage head.
The two “dragon horns” made of living humans still twitched slightly; the human faces on them retained the frozen terror of their final moments.
In its chaotic eyes flickered the ecstasy and greed of newfound power.
It looked at the people around it.
More materials.
More parts.
“Wrong…”
Watching, Yan Xilou’s body trembled uncontrollably. The face that usually radiated confidence and control was now sheer despair.
“All wrong…”
He muttered, voice hollow with the collapse of belief.
“This is not what I wanted… not this…”
“Taoist inner elixir… summoning… alchemy…”
“The formulas are right… the theory is right… why—”
“Why did it become like this?!”
He suddenly threw back his head and howled.
He couldn’t accept the outcome. He could not accept that what he’d created had become a monster that devoured its own kin.
“Since I made you…”
Yan Xilou tightened his grip on the Nine-Bend Yellow River. The master’s bearing had vanished, replaced by a thick, murderous intent. He charged alone at the human-dragon.
“Boom!”
The three-sectioned staff slammed down on the monster’s head in a blaze of yellow light.
That strike contained the full weight of Yan Xilou’s cultivation and fury.
But against the creature it only dented the patchworked human-hide armor slightly.
That bio-armor—strengthened through devouring countless UMA and humans—had toughness surpassing steel.
The monster lowered its head and regarded the insignificant human who attacked it.
It seemed to recognize him.
The one who had stood above watching it.
The one who had fed it.
Its “father.”
A low, intimate moan came from the creature’s gaping maw.
Then it swung its thick forelimbs—made of human legs.
“Bang!”
Yan Xilou was brutally sent flying.
He spewed a mouthful of blood midair and fell into a deep, black chasm formed by the collapsed foundation.
No echo returned.
The Black Lotus lord who had made countless people tremble vanished into the collapsing ruins.
With its controller gone, the laboratory descended into absolute chaos.
After knocking Yan Xilou away, the human-dragon rampaged unchecked through the wreckage, devouring every living thing it could find.
Whether loyal cultists or ferocious beast-men, all were lambs before it.
“Run!”
Lin Jie stared at the monster looking their way, his scalp crawling.
He knew this was no situation they could handle.
The creature’s power tier had far exceeded normal combat limits; without heavy ordinance, there was no killing a being with regeneration and consumption abilities like this.
The mission was complete. The antidote was secured.
Now the sole objective was to survive.
“Julian! Evelyn! Nadia!”
Lin Jie shouted.
“Retreat! Now! Immediately!”
“This place is collapsing!”