Boom!
The flames of the explosion surged out first.
The three held their ground. Yu Lie formed a sword-finger gesture with his right hand and incanted, "Wind Dragon summoned! Make haste as mandated by law!"
He then thrust his sword-finger forward. A violent gale instantly blasted from his fingertips toward the gushing flames, driving the fire entirely back into the factory's interior. Many of the half-finished perfect creatures that might have escaped collapsed on the spot, scorched to death in the extreme heat created by the flames being forced back inside.
Yet these half-finished specimens from the upper levels were merely an appetizer.
Shortly after they went down, dozens of severely burned perfect creatures charged out of the flames. Spotting the trio blocking their path, one creature covered in aberrant worm tentacles opened its mouth and spewed a massive stream of scalding, corrosive green fluid.
This time, all three intervened.
Yu Lie reacted the fastest. A ray of golden light shot from his Heavenly Eye, immediately cleaving the green fluid in two. Though the spitting creature dodged swiftly, many of its tentacles were still severed by the golden beam as it cut through the liquid.
Xiao Cheng then produced a staff and lightly tapped the ground. Instantly, countless lines of light resembling electronic circuitry spread across the floor. Any perfect creature touched by the light slowed to a crawl, trapped in sluggish motion.
Yu Xian attacked last.
His strike had an enormous area of effect, pinpoint accuracy, and overwhelming destructive power.
The spatial bubbles hidden within the grooves of his fingerprints appeared above every single perfect creature. The bubbles expanded, their interiors churning with chaotic distortion, before slamming down with a roar, twisting and rupturing all the perfect creatures into a mist of blood.
No sooner had this batch been slaughtered than a monster slowly stepped out of the raging inferno. It had the head of a goat, the body of a bat, and limbs like octopus tentacles.
Opening its mouth, it inhaled, drawing all the surrounding blood mist straight inside. Then, baring a maw packed with dense rows of teeth, it roared at the trio.
"Watch out, that's a Tiger rank!" Yu Lie warned the other two.
The flawed specimens just now had been Wolf rank at best, but this one was a genuine Tiger rank.
Before they could make a move, however, the floor suddenly shattered. A massive arm shot up and grabbed the Tiger-rank perfect creature. Although the creature struggled furiously and slashed at the arm, it left only faint scratches behind.
In the next instant, it was dragged down beneath the floor. Soon, the sound of crunching and chewing reached their ears.
Both Yu Lie and Yu Xian looked shocked. Yu Lie's Heavenly Eye had failed to detect any underground presence whatsoever, and Yu Xian's scent model held no trace of the beast either.
Evidently, this creature possessed a stealth capability of an exceptionally high tier.
In the scent model within Yu Xian's mind, there was nothing beneath them at all—only jumbled machinery and blazing fire, without even a "blank spot."
He checked repeatedly, finally saying with a grave expression, "Minister, on a sensory level, that monster seems to not exist at all."
"They really managed to cobble together something terrifying," Yu Lie said, his face equally somber. Originally, he hadn't even drawn his weapon, but now he retrieved his three-pointed double-edged blade from his dimensional storage and gripped it firmly.
Boom!
The crater the creature's arm had burst through was violently ripped open. A beast resembling both a crocodile and a dinosaur climbed out of the hole, its cold, vertical pupils sweeping over the trio.
Yu Xian immediately cast Appraisal on it.
With Super Smell and Super Brain, he already understood most living things intimately, rarely having any need for Appraisal. But against this monster, Appraisal was an absolute necessity.
The monster's attributes swiftly surfaced in his mind:
***
Name: Divine Beast Amalgam
Codename: Perfect Creature No. 006
Species: ?
Gender: None
Age: 3
Lifespan: 0
Rank: High Dragon-rank
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Abilities:
[Existence Occlusion: Unless appearing directly before an enemy's eyes, the user's presence cannot be perceived by the enemy.]
[Super Brain, Super Sight, Super Smell, Super Hearing, Super Taste, Super Heart, Super Skeleton, Super Skin, Super Muscle, Super Organs, Super Blood, Super Nerves, Super Teeth, Super Scales, Super Absorption, Super Mimicry, Super Self-Healing...]
[Dragon's Might: Possesses the bloodline of a true dragon; strength is substantially enhanced, and grants immunity to fire attacks below ten thousand degrees.]
[Summary: Eat, eat, eat. This fool only knows how to eat.]
***
After reading No. 006's attributes, Yu Xian immediately shared them with Yu Lie and Xiao Cheng.
"Existence Occlusion... I feel like I've heard of that somewhere," Yu Lie muttered with a slight frown.
Xiao Cheng reminded him, "Existence Occlusion is an ability of the Bai Ze. But isn't the Bai Ze the hardest creature to find or encounter?"
"It might not have been a real Bai Ze," Yu Xian chimed in. "A girl at our academy was influenced by a Bai Ze and awakened its abilities."
The abilities of Yu Meiren, the student council president of Superpower Academy, were said to have awakened after she dreamed of a Bai Ze.
Where there was one, there were bound to be others. There could easily be more people or beasts that had gained abilities under the influence of a Bai Ze, and Existence Occlusion might well be one of them.
Although Pengzu had tried to blow up the factory to disrupt Qilin from gathering intelligence, the moment Yu Xian stepped inside the barrier, he had already gained total awareness of the entire facility.
Using the model of the parts of the factory that had not yet detonated, he uncovered vast troves of experimental data and grasped much of the inside story.
The whole series of "super" abilities possessed by the perfect creatures actually originated from various beasts bearing divine beast bloodlines. For instance, Super Smell had been extracted from a black dog with the bloodline of the Xiaotian Dog.
That black dog had inherited none of the Xiaotian Dog's other powers, but the divine beast's Super Smell had been passed down to it.
Similarly, Super Brain came from a descendant of the divine beast Xiezhi. Although intelligent, it had remained a beast at heart; when Pengzu and his cohorts launched their wide-scale capture of strange beasts, it was unfortunately netted and ultimately reduced to raw material.
"Can the abilities of different divine beasts be stitched together using the unique properties of aberrant worms?" Yu Lie asked, gazing gravely at No. 006.
Qilin had not conducted much research into perfect creatures. The main issue was that aberrant worm serum blended the original genes together into an unrecognizable mess, as if they had been encrypted.
As a result, everyone knew perfect creatures were formidable, but the origins of their abilities had remained an enigma.
Xiao Cheng let out a long sigh and cursed, "Why must people always turn to crooked paths, constantly looking to plunge the world into chaos? What's wrong with just cultivating properly and living a good life?"
While the three conversed, the muscles in No. 006's legs bulged. In the next instant, it sprang straight into the air, lunging toward them with its jaws wide open. Xiao Cheng unleashed a burst of gray energy, freezing No. 006 dead in midair, whereupon Yu Lie struck out in fury.
His three-pointed double-edged blade slashed forward, a golden arc of light shooting straight toward the factory ceiling. No. 006 was sliced cleanly in two on the spot, and at least a tenth of its flesh disintegrated into ash under the blow.
That single strike demonstrated just how terrifying Yu Lie's offense truly was. If he had failed to breach the Xingtian zombie king's guard before, it was solely because that zombie king's defense had been absurdly monstrous.
Before a supreme expert like Yu Lie, ordinary Dragon-ranks were nothing more than clay chickens and pottery dogs.
Chapter 113