Liu Feng's hands shook. A drop of liquid mercury spilled from the pipette, sizzling on the scarred wood of the table.
"Steady," Yang Yi rumbled. He sat on a stool that groaned under his calcified weight. "If you spill a drop, I spill a pint of your blood."
The alchemist swallowed hard. He tipped the mercury into a beaker of bubbling green sludge—concentrated Hemlock and Fire-Ant acid. The mixture turned a violent, swirling purple.
"This isn't a tonic," Liu Feng whispered, pushing the beaker across the table with a trembling finger. "It's a suicide note. It will melt your stomach lining and boil your marrow."
Yang Yi picked up the glass. The heat radiated against his calloused palm. The smell alone was enough to make eyes water—a sharp, chemical stench of death.
"Bottoms up."
He downed it in one gulp.
Silence descended on the wrecked laboratory. Liu Feng backed away, clutching his broken ribs, waiting for the inevitable screaming and dissolving.
Yang Yi didn't scream. He froze.
The poison hit his gut like a swallowed coal. It burned through the mucus layer, attacking the flesh. The Wolf essence in his liver snarled, overwhelmed. The Rat essence panicked, trying to purge the toxin.
Yang Yi clenched his jaw. He forced his will inward. He grabbed the chaotic chemical energy and dragged it to the Dragon Transformation Token.
Filter it.
The token flared hot against his hip. It acted as a secondary kidney, a divine filter. It stripped the necrotic elements from the poison, leaving behind only the raw, volatile power.
Yang Yi's skin turned purple. Then black. Then a pale, sickly white.
His veins bulged, visible through his skin like dark webs.
He exhaled. A puff of green mist left his lips. The floorboards beneath his feet bleached white.
"Spicy."
He slammed the empty beaker onto the table. It shattered.
Liu Feng's knees gave out. He slid down the wall, staring at Yang Yi with the reverence of a zealot finding a new god. "You... you assimilated it. Venom Blood."
Yang Yi flexed his hand. His fingernails had darkened, turning the color of dried blood. He could feel the new power coursing through him—a cold, numbing lethargy that masked pain and slowed his heartbeat to a reptilian rhythm.
"I need more," Yang Yi said, standing up. "But not today. Today, we organize."
Lin walked in. She stepped over the dissolving remains of the table Yang Yi had used as a shield. She looked at the shattered glass, the cowering alchemist, and the purple tinge to Yang Yi's skin.
"The Centipedes have secured the perimeter," she said, her voice flat. "The Vipers surrendered. They're waiting for orders."
"Good."
Yang Yi walked to the window. The view from the penthouse offered a clear line of sight down to Block 9 and the ravine beyond.
"Merge them. Centipedes are the shield. Vipers are the fangs. I want patrols on the rooftops. If a mosquito enters our territory, I want to know its flight path."
"They don't trust each other, Yang. They'll kill each other in the barracks."
"Then let them fight. The winners get the rations."
Yang Yi turned to Liu Feng.
"You. Can you brew Mist of the Sleeping Dragon?"
Liu Feng blinked. "The hallucinogen? It requires Blue Moon petals. Very expensive."
"We have the alchemy hall's rejects," Yang Yi said, tossing a pouch of stolen ingredients onto the table. "Improvise. I want a perimeter of gas around Block 8 and 9. Anyone who crosses without an antidote goes to sleep. Permanently."
Liu Feng scrambled for the pouch. He opened it, smelling the herbs. His fear replaced by professional intrigue. "This... this is high-grade refuse. I can make it work. But the ventilation—"
"I'll handle the ventilation."
Yang Yi walked past him. He stopped at the door and looked back at Lin.
"Get the cores from the Viper stockpile. We need to pay the miners."
"You're building a kingdom on a landfill," Lin warned.
"Better than building a grave in the sky."
The consolidation was brutal.
Yang Yi stood in the muddy square between the two blocks. Sixty men stood before him—thugs, thieves, and killers. The Centipedes on the left, nursing bruises. The Vipers on the right, stripped of their blowpipes.
Iron Hand Zhang stood next to Yang Yi, leaning on his crutch, his face swollen but his eyes shining with a strange loyalty. He had found a master who broke him, and in that breaking, gave him a place.
"There are no clans here anymore," Yang Yi announced. His voice carried, amplified by the strange acoustics of the canyon. "There is only the Pack."
He held up a bag of spirit stones—the loot from Liu Feng's safe.
"The sect pays you in scraps. I pay in power."
He tossed a stone to a shivering Viper.
"Tonight, we feast. Tomorrow, we dig. We are going to hollow out the mountain beneath us. We are going to find what the Dragon Transformation Palace is hiding in the dark."
A cheer went up. Ragged at first, then louder. A chant of desperate men finding a banner.
Yang Yi didn't smile. He felt the vibration in the ground again. The deep, rhythmic thumping of the veins.
He looked toward the massive, dark silhouette of the mountain peak.
They're feeding on us, he thought. Time to bite back.
He turned to Zhang.
"Double the watch. The noise we made... it won't go unnoticed."
"Who do you think will come?" Zhang asked, spitting blood. "The Enforcers?"
"Worse," Yang Yi said, his venom-infused blood running cold. "The Recruiters."
As if on cue, a shadow passed over the moon. A massive shape, silent and winged, gliding high above the smog layer. It wasn't a bird. It was a person on a flying sword, circling. Watching.
Yang Yi narrowed his eyes. His vertical pupils tracked the heat signature.
"We have an audience."
He touched the Myriad Beast Assimilation Record in his tunic.
"Let them watch. By the time they land, I'll be ready to eat them too."