Chapter 33: Sound of a Heartbeat

The sky-obscuring black shadow crushed the moonlight.
Thousands of ghostly figures, like asphalt, devoured and merged with each other, condensing into a thirty-meter-tall deformed giant arm that smashed down.

The owner of that giant arm, a huge monster tens of meters tall, crawled out of the concrete road, and rubble fell like a torrential rain.

“Boom!”

The dust kicked up when the giant arm smashed down almost covered the entire sky.
The airflow stirred by the helicopter’s propellers rolled the dust into a vortex.
The faint blue light from the Vulcan cannon illuminated the Shanhe Group logo, and the bullet chains wove into a boiling net of light in the air.

The roar of the huge monster, formed from countless ghostly figures and mucus, resounded through the sky.

It had absorbed countless black mucus and the Skin-Painter’s body.
At this moment, the demonic energy fluctuation reaction was already approaching level seven.

“Free fire!”

The veins on the special operations team leader’s neck bulged.
He held the trigger of his rifle tightly, and the faint blue trajectory of the spiritual energy bullets hit the monster’s body.
“Aim for the joints!”

These spiritual energy rifle bullets, which could kill a level-four demon with just three shots, could only leave shallow dents on its skin.

“Damn it! Light weapons can’t cause effective damage to it!”

“Requesting heavy fire support!”

The continuous sound of gunfire, shouts, and curses intertwined.
The special operations team leader’s roar was cut to pieces by the sound of tearing metal.
The monster’s giant arm swept across a low-rise building, and the steel frame twisted and groaned like a crushed soda can.

The ground under the boy’s feet suddenly bulged.
He stumbled and grabbed the hem of the tea-haired woman’s windbreaker.
The woman’s phone camera, however, was steadily aimed at the monster’s core, and she took a photo with a “click.”

“Only a place like this is big enough for you to raise such a pet.”
She linked her arm with the boy’s, her fingertip swiping open the selfie filter, using the explosive firelight as a natural fill light.
“Come on, say cheese~”

This big guy came from the drop of black liquid that the boy had dropped into the water tank earlier.
Only after fully assimilating the large amount of water resources stored in Lin’an University could it form such a large individual.

“Are you sure this won’t cause any deaths?”
The boy shrank his neck, staring at the monster’s huge figure under the moonlight.
“If there are deaths, the boss will be very angry, right?”

The ghostly figure’s limbs, embedded at the end of the giant arm, were twitching at an anti-joint angle, like the legs of an insect pinned to a specimen board.

This image reminded the boy of a boss from a game with the theme of hunting monsters in a dream.
It was called the Reborn Ancient God.

Or rather, as the developer of this monster, the boy had designed it based on the image of that boss.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry! I know what I’m doing.”

The tea-haired woman suddenly pulled him back three steps.
The spot where they had been standing was smashed into a half-meter-deep pit by a flying concrete block.
“Hasn’t that little snake already revealed her true form?”

Before she could finish, her phone’s ringtone pierced through the roar of the guns and the ghostly figure’s roar.

The woman glanced at the caller ID and then put on a helpless expression of “I knew it.”

“Hello? Tsk, I know, I’ll be right there!”

The tea-haired woman hung up the phone, grabbed the boy’s collar, and retreated through the golden light curtain.
The barrier made of threads rippled like water.

“There’s a problem with the operation in Laboratory No. 3, and the boss is coming back. What a pain…”

Her lazy trailing voice, along with the two figures, disappeared into the night outside the light curtain.

And the moment the light curtain closed, a powerful, cold demonic energy suddenly exploded in the sky above Lin’an University!

An extreme cold, like an invisible giant hand, gripped the entire campus.

In the cracks of the clouds, the demonic energy turned into countless ice prisms and fell vertically.
A white figure stepped down the stairs formed by the prisms, and the slender snake tail extending from her tailbone swayed left and right with her movements.

The scales on her body slowly opened and closed with her breath, and the abundant demonic energy was gradually spreading from the gaps between the scales.

Xu Zhi barely blocked a blow from the huge monster.
The wind pressure from the giant ghostly palm tore his shirt into a spiderweb of cracks.

‘This is endless!’

Xu Zhi thought, and a certain aura in his blood vessels suddenly boiled.
The surrounding air gradually became stained with a scorching high temperature.

The monster’s giant arm smashed down again, but the pitch-black mucus that had condensed into its body was mostly evaporated by the boiling high temperature in mid-air.

The violent aura drilled into its body, raging and corroding its demonic energy like a poison.

But the immense force still made Xu Zhi stumble back, his shoe soles leaving two scorched trenches on the asphalt road.

Until his back leaned against a cold support, a small hand supported his tilted spine, and the violent high temperature surrounding his body was instantly dispelled by the cold air.
The cold air even formed frost flowers on his shoulders!

Xu Zhi turned his head and found that the snake demon girl had appeared behind him at some point.
Her pupils had melted into a molten gold-like fiery gold.

‘It’s her!’

Xu Zhi’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
The white mist he exhaled was scattered by the snake demon girl’s fingertips before it could form.

A chill exploded in his heart.
This was the third time he had seen this snake demon girl, but it was not the same as the last time he had seen her in the ruins of the deserted courtyard.
At this moment, she was exuding a bone-chilling cold, as if she were a god who stood above the world.

This was more like the feeling he had when he had first seen her in Rongcheng: cold, sharp, and unapproachable.

But there was a hint of attachment in her eyes.

The snake demon girl’s thumb caressed the smoke on his cheek.
This gentle action should have appeared on a gentle girl like Lu Qingyu, but it didn’t seem out of place on the snake demon girl.

However, a powerful demonic energy suddenly erupted in the air.
Frost flowers bloomed from the tips of her toes, quickly condensing into ice crystals and climbing up the huge monster’s body.

The monster’s swinging giant arm froze ten meters above the ground.
The ice crystals proliferated crazily along its body, casting it into a tens-of-meters-high ice sculpture in the blink of an eye.

And those ice crystals, they continued to climb up, condensing into an ice crystal dome in the sky that almost covered the entire Lin’an University.

Icicles formed on the propellers of the hovering helicopter, and the white mist exhaled by the special operations team members solidified into ice cones hanging in mid-air.

The instantly arriving ultra-low temperature had even frozen time!

“Crash!”

The snake demon girl flicked her finger.
A crisp sound of porcelain shattering came from inside the ice sculpture, accompanied by the crashing sound of the ice crystal dome.

In that instant, time resumed its flow.

A storm of ice shards swept through the campus, obscuring the sky and the moon!

The ultra-low temperature instantly receded.
The sound of helicopter clusters’ propellers came from the horizon, and the red and green navigation lights flickered in the night sky.

Xu Zhi rotated his stiff neck.
The giant monster had already shattered into a pile of ice shards.
The ultra-low temperature from just now had almost frozen the entire Lin’an University.
All the Skin-Painter clones and black mucus hidden in the university were instantly frozen and then shattered into a pile of ice shards.

And that snake demon girl had already disappeared.

The evening wind blew in from the shattered outer wall of the sixteenth floor.
The snake demon girl casually threw away the red-clothed ghost she was holding.
A silver light flashed, and the red-clothed ghost’s demonic energy instantly dissipated.

The young man with the bronze beast mask stood with his saber.
The evening wind blew his bangs, revealing that familiar scar.

Bai Ling’s eyes shot open.
She suddenly arched her body, panting heavily.

A cold sweat slid down her neck and into her collar, splashing on the ground.

The scales on her collarbone, which she had been unable to get rid of before, had now disappeared without a trace.
The release of the demonic energy that could freeze time had almost exhausted her demonic energy.

She suddenly felt very cold.
The thirty-degree summer wind blew on her back, but she was almost frozen stiff, like a fish thrown into an ice cellar.

The girl subconsciously looked for a heat source.
Fortunately, the oven in the cafeteria was still emitting a faint residual heat.
She slowly curled up next to the oven, trying to use that faint warmth to drive away the cold in her body.

The images hidden in her deep memories gradually revived—in fact, she had seen Xu Zhi on the night she had turned into a girl, but she had only just remembered.

When she lost consciousness, she seemed to have activated her demonized form because of the surrounding demonic energy and had acted on instinct.

That day, she had thought she had slept too soundly.
In fact, she hadn’t been asleep at all, but had been driven by the snake demon’s instincts to hunt that red-clothed ghost.

“So it really was me…”

The girl, curled up in the corner of the cafeteria, smiled wryly.
The destroyed outer wall of that residential building had indeed been her doing in her demonized form.

The heat dissipating from the oven turned into a warm current and brushed past her calves, but it still couldn’t drive away the chill that was seeping from the depths of her marrow.

The moonlight shone in from the hole in the ceiling.
The girl couldn’t help but start to think about her and Xu Zhi.

“He recognized me…”

The girl covered her head in distress, thinking, ‘Maybe I should just fake my death and hide?’

But before she could let her thoughts wander, the rustling sound of falling rubble suddenly interrupted her chaotic thoughts.

Concrete fragments rolled down one after another.
Xu Zhi’s ash-covered knuckles pushed aside the crisscrossing steel bars.
He looked up and saw the girl curled up next to the oven, shivering from the cold.

At this moment, she had lost her previous thorny appearance of being dissatisfied with everyone.
All that was left was a fragile shell curled up next to the oven, as if trying to get that little bit of warmth.

“A-Lin, are you okay?”

Xu Zhi’s palm brushed against the back of the girl’s neck.
The cold touch was like caressing a piece of pure white jade.

He took off his bronze beast mask and pressed it on the girl’s face.
“The demonic energy here is too thick. This thing can filter demonic energy…”

“I’m not dead…”

The girl interrupted him before he could finish.
The bronze beast mask muffled her originally light voice.

The girl’s forehead rested on his chest.
The body heat seeping through the fibers of Xu Zhi’s shirt was like a hot spring flowing over her frozen limbs, making her unconsciously curl her toes.

‘This guy, how can his body temperature be so warm?’

“When did you recognize me?”

the girl asked in a low voice.

“Just now when you shouted ‘Blind Xu’…”
Xu Zhi answered with a foolish smile.

But before he could finish, the girl in his arms suddenly leaned back and broke free from his embrace like a little wildcat.

“Alright! I’m Bai Ling! I’m your childhood friend!”
The girl angrily grabbed the jade pendant peeking out of his collar.
“Give it back!”

The crack on the jade pendant brushed against her fingertip, bringing a slight stinging sensation.

‘Alright, now you can look at me with the eyes of someone seeing a monster. Anyway, you only just recognized me now. Anyway, I’m a monster who turned from a boy into a girl. Anyway…’

“Actually, I was a little suspicious from the first time we met.”

Xu Zhi suddenly held the back of her head, his warm palm caressing the roots of her hair, and pressed her back to his chest.

“After all, you never told me you were actually a girl. I wasn’t sure.”

“The way you shook off my hand that day was exactly the same as when you were having a tantrum as a child,” he said again.

The familiar scent of cedarwood mixed with the smell of smoke filled her nasal cavity.
The girl’s cheeks turned bright red.
She heard his heartbeat passing through his skin and clothes, vibrating the invisible shell of ice that had formed between them.

The remaining glass windows of the cafeteria suddenly trembled.
The roar of the helicopter blades stirring the airflow in the distance was deafening.

But at this moment, the girl could only hear the sound of the sea wave of blood rushing to her eardrums, and the ticking of the mechanical watch on Xu Zhi’s wrist.
The rhythm was gradually overlapping with the reviving heartbeat in her chest.