Dragon

Darkness and silence reigned all around.

In the distance, several bizarre-looking fish were faintly visible. They had strange, oversized mouths and razor-sharp teeth, their bodies emitting a faint phosphorescence as they swam slowly through the water.

Yue Shi did not recognize what these ugly creatures were. He only vaguely recalled seeing something similar online; they were likely some kind of deep-sea fish.

Cold.

Wet.

It wasn't until this moment that Yue Shi could definitively judge his current environment: he was in the deep sea. The bone-chilling cold of the seawater and the omnipresent dampness reached his senses with a slight delay.

The surrounding water pressure was immense, and there was no air to breathe. A powerful sense of suffocation washed over him.

Yue Shi activated a spatial jump again, attempting to forcibly escape the depths of the ocean. This time, he set his coordinates for the most prosperous part of the city center. He did it on purpose; he wanted to head toward the crowds.

“【Tidal Lock】!”

“You cannot escape my palm with mere spatial displacement.”

As Yue Shi activated his ability, a gruff voice echoing like crashing waves boomed from all directions.

Hum!

The spatial jump was completed.

He was still surrounded by the cold, dark deep sea, the heavy water pressure, and the lack of oxygen. Yue Shi had failed to escape the deep-sea environment. More accurately, this patch of the deep sea had locked onto him; no matter where he transferred, it followed him like a shadow.

Noises from the outside world drifted in faintly, heard unclearly through the seawater.

“A flood! It's a flood!”

“My god, where did all this seawater come from in the middle of the city?”

“Save me! Someone save me...”

Amidst the terrified cries and wails, a single white-haired woman stood at the entrance of the city center hospital, looking up at the sky and laughing. In her hands, she held a banner that read: “Give me back my child's life!”

“Hahaha! Die, all of you! Die!”

“This is a heavenly scourge! It's retribution! All of it is retribution!”

She spread her arms wide, joyfully welcoming the sudden deluge of seawater as she muttered, “Our family is finally together again...”

“You really are wicked. Did you deliberately choose a crowded place to teleport to?”

The gruff voice rang in Yue Shi's ears once more.

Yue Shi did not respond. The lack of oxygen was causing his vision to blur, and dark spots danced before his eyes. He couldn't understand what was going on with this sea.

He couldn't allow himself to be trapped here until he died!

【Time Reversal】

He wanted to return to the past to warn his past self that this was a trap.

“【The Flux of Ages】!”

“So sorry. This seat also knows a thing or two about the power of time,” the gruff voice teased.

Yue Shi felt an ancient, majestic power forcibly intervene, smoothing out the temporal ripples he had just stirred up. 【Time Reversal】 was forcibly interrupted!

Not only that, but the pressure of the surrounding seawater suddenly doubled. It was as if the weight of the entire ocean had condensed and pressed down upon him alone.

Under the dual effects of high pressure and oxygen deprivation, his consciousness began to rapidly slip away.

Just as he was about to lose consciousness, a long, slender creature swam swiftly toward him through the gloomy depths. The creature was long and sinuous, with majestic horns on its head and faint shadows of scales covering its body, emitting a ghostly blue light.

A dragon?

It was actually a dragon!

A storm of shock surged in the depths of Yue Shi's eyes. How could a dragon appear here?

The dragon seemed to be composed of water and energy. It circled Yue Shi once, and the blue light gradually retracted and condensed, finally transforming into a human form.

When Yue Shi saw that face clearly, he fell into an even deeper state of shock. He recognized that face.

Xin Yanzheng!

No, it wasn't the Xin Yanzheng from his memories. The person before him not only had a pair of blue horns on his forehead, but his cheeks, neck, and exposed arms were also covered in fine scales that shimmered with a pearly luster.

His hands and feet were savage claws, and a tail swayed gently behind him, churning the water. He looked like a half-human, half-dragon hybrid.

The dragon slowly approached, gazing at Yue Shi, who was on the verge of losing consciousness. This was the last scene Yue Shi saw before falling into a complete coma.

...

“Wow, this thing has so many layers.”

A bright, chirpy female voice rang out.

Somewhere in the deep sea, the light grew inexplicably brighter. A girl with an extremely strange appearance was floating in the water. At first glance, she looked like an innocent, blooming young girl, but she stood over two meters tall.

The strangest thing about her was her hands. Instead of the five-fingered structure of a human, she had two massive pink crab claws!

At the moment, one of the girl's claws was gripping a struggling humanoid creature. The other claw was skillfully tearing away layers of skin from the creature's body, much like peeling an onion.

The surrounding seawater was filled with a dense mass of floating human skins that had just been peeled off. These skins drifted slowly with the undercurrent. Regardless of whether they belonged to men, women, the young, or the old, every single one of them was breathtakingly beautiful.

Clearly, the person caught in the girl's claws was Boss Pi. He no longer had the strength to struggle, and his eyes were filled with nothing but terror. This time, he had truly fallen. He was completely finished.

Previously, he had collaborated with the Resonant Daoist to ambush Yue Shi, but they had failed. Boss Pi knew that with Yue Shi's vengeful nature, the boy would never let him go.

He wasn't some brain-dead villain from a storybook who would sit around and wait for the protagonist to level up and take revenge without doing anything himself. His executive ability had always been high.

Yue Shi's power was too bizarre, and Boss Pi couldn't guarantee he could hide forever. He could hide for a while, but not for a lifetime. Furthermore, he truly coveted that skin.

Since his own strength was insufficient, he had to find a powerful collaborator. Yue Shi's reputation was so fearsome that very few people dared to make a move against him. Boss Pi could only set his sights higher.

The one who had submerged Chijing City was the easiest to contact and the most likely to cooperate. He had promised that he could perfectly disguise all the aquatic supernatural creatures in the sea as humans, allowing them to blend into human society.

The other party had agreed to the cooperation very cleanly and decisively, without any haggling. At the time, Boss Pi had felt a faint sense of unease. But since he had already reached that point, the arrow was on the string and had to be fired.

Now, his unease had been vindicated.

Plotting with a tiger for its skin only leads to being eaten by it. The other party had used him to bait out the stupid and poisonous Yue Shi and lure him into a trap. Then, they had turned on him instantly.

The crab-claw girl's movements were incredibly fast, and the sound of tearing was constant. No matter how many human skins Boss Pi had in reserve, he couldn't afford such squandering. Under the girl's brutal tearing, Boss Pi was soon stripped completely bare.

As the final layer of human skin was peeled away, his true form was finally revealed. It was not a body of flesh and blood, but a painting.

The material of the painting was very peculiar, appearing yellowish-brown and possessing an oily luster. It was a human-skin painting. The painting depicted a breathtakingly beautiful woman with expressive eyes, looking incredibly lifelike.

A mass of disgusting things resembling nerve fibers spread from the back of the painting, still wriggling incessantly. In the bottom right corner of the scroll, a small piece was clearly missing. It was the very fragment Yue Shi had used to track Boss Pi.

“So your true form looks like this?”

“Are you an object that gained sentience? Or an out-of-control transcendent?”