“Whatever you dream, don’t be afraid.”
I clenched my fingers into a fist, gritting my teeth to endure all the tearing pain and fear of the unknown. My arm broke free from the black spider threads, and I swung my fist directly at it.
Xie Zhuo’s words, “Don’t fear!” became the only sound echoing in my ears at that moment!
My punch felt like it hit cotton.
But the black shadow before me dispersed.
The spider threads gripping my heart and binding my limbs all retreated in that instant.
I fell to my knees. Just that one punch had nearly exhausted all my strength.
I gasped for breath, and before me, the black malevolent energy gathered again. I was already annoyed by its endless persistence, but when I looked up, I saw that the malevolent energy had formed into the shape of a woman.
There was something strangely familiar about this woman’s features, but I couldn’t quite place why.
The woman formed from malevolent energy clasped her hands in front of her, her demeanor arrogant as she looked down at me, examining me.
“Second time.”
She spoke, her voice truly ethereal and vague, making it impossible to distinguish between male and female after hearing it, just like… that shape-shifter from before…
Was it him again?
“Who exactly… are you?”
He didn’t answer me, only continuing to speak: “Few can break free from such control. Do you want to be the second Xie Zhuo?”
The name Xie Zhuo made my ears twitch. I looked up at him.
Seeing my gaze, he seemed to find it quite interesting and slightly curved the corner of his lips: “Every time malevolent energy enters his body, he has to struggle with me once. It seems you truly don’t know anything.”
He hid it well; I knew nothing at all.
I felt a pain in my heart, not from being attacked, but simply from heartache.
In five hundred years, how many times had such torment and pain ended without my knowledge?
And how many times had he awakened, having to face me as if nothing had happened, covering everything up?
And what about me?
How had I responded to him?
“Feeling sorry for him?”
The woman before me tilted her head slightly, observing my expression: “You’ve won for the second time. I’ll give you a gift.”
As he spoke, he waved his hand, and the surrounding darkness receded. I returned once more to the frozen lake in the ice forest.
On the lake was still that man resurrected by the black flame. He bowed respectfully to the black flame before him, his voice mechanical and hollow: “Snow Wolf tribe, has a strange woman, compatible with my lord, can birth a son, suitable as a vessel, can help my lord, return to the world.”
Snow Wolf tribe…
My heart trembled, and I turned sharply to look at the person beside me.
But in the instant I turned, the surrounding scene suddenly changed. Before I could see the person formed from malevolent energy beside me, I had already appeared in a new scene.
This was… a tribe.
In the tribe, men and women were gathered in one place. Some people held children in their arms, but the children here each had a tail behind them, large or small, indicating their identity—the Snow Wolf tribe.
Standing in front of this group of Snow Wolf tribe members was that man resurrected by the evil god. The darkness in his eyes was gone.
If not for the extra black flame mark on his forehead, he would have looked no different from ordinary people.
“Chief?” the Snow Wolf tribe people asked the man, “Why have you gathered us here…”
Before the person could finish asking, the one called the chief raised his hand and directly grabbed a woman from the crowd.
When I saw this woman’s face, I was shocked.
This… wasn’t this the exact likeness of the woman that the shape-shifter had transformed into earlier?
I turned to look for that shape-shifter but couldn’t see any trace of him. I was like a wandering soul, floating in the air, watching everything happening below.
“The evil god has chosen you,” the Snow Wolf tribe chief said to the woman. “You will bear a child for the evil god.”
The woman was shocked, and everyone below was also astonished.
A man holding a child rushed out from the crowd: “Chief!? What… what is this evil god? Ayu has already formed a blood oath with me, we already have a son, why…”
With a “whoosh” sound.
Black energy flashed by, and before everyone’s eyes, the man’s head rolled to the ground.
The man’s body still held the child, standing in place. The child’s face was splattered with fresh blood, but the child seemed not to have yet processed what had happened, only staring blankly at the severed neck and the blood flowing out.
Everyone was silent.
Then the man’s body fell to the ground.
The child fell with him. He didn’t cry; he still hadn’t reacted to what had happened.
At this moment, “Ayu,” who had been grabbed by the chief, suddenly let out a piercing scream and began to wail.
She struggled desperately, trying to break free from the chief’s hand to rush to the side of her husband, with whom she had formed a blood oath.