Blood Rage Experiment

The hours of hellish torment had finally, barely, come to an end.

The sealed room still held the heat, and the air carried the faint stench of dragon blood and the scorched smell of energy burned away.

Jiu De Mai braced one hand on her knee and gasped for breath. Her chest heaved, and fine beads of cold sweat soaked through her black combat suit, clinging tightly to her graceful curves.

Unlike her usual sharp, aloof self, she now looked disheveled, yet radiated an almost savage strength. On her neck, cheek, forearms, and the exposed skin of her waist and abdomen, patches of dense, pitch-black dragon scales gleamed with a metallic sheen as they slowly writhed and receded.

It was proof that the bloodline of a purebred Dragon Tribe member had boiled over completely, breaking through the shackles of humanity.

She had endured the backlash of her bloodline collapsing through her first Blood Rage, and succeeded.

Nearby, Su Enxi had remained on high alert the entire time, ready to step in at any moment. The nerves she had kept taut for a full hour suddenly relaxed. She let out a long breath, her delicate features still colored by lingering fear.

She wiped the sweat from her temples and watched Jiu De Mai's breathing gradually steady. At last, her own heart settled.

Luo Qiusheng stepped forward, his gaze falling on Jiu De Mai, whose condition had changed dramatically. A hint of scrutiny and confirmation showed in his eyes as he asked softly, "You barely managed to steady the backlash during your first Blood Rage. How do you feel now? Has your Spirit Word changed at all?"

As the last dragon scale dissolved into tiny specks of light, the heavy shackles binding her body vanished completely.

Drained of strength, Jiu De Mai could no longer support herself. She slumped onto the padded floor of the cabin, her back thumping against the wall, but a carefree, triumphant smile spread across her lips—the smile of someone who had made it through alive.

A long-suppressed sense of power filled her every limb. It was a terrifying strength far beyond even her peak, a whole new realm beyond the limits of a Hybrid.

"This power... Ha!" Mai chuckled, fierce brilliance surging in her eyes. Her voice brimmed with confidence. "Forget ordinary high-level Hybrids. Even if I faced Caesar's Spirit Word, Kamaitachi, head-on, I'd be completely confident I could crush him!"

Luo Qiusheng gave a slight nod, then turned his gaze to Su Enxi, who sat nearby with a languid air and a stubborn expression.

Su Enxi's Spirit Word, Heavenly Deduction, was one of the finest support abilities in the world.

She had no need to kill or fight. Her mind was like a supercomputer cluster, capable of instantly calculating billions of probability lines, predicting the course of a battle, avoiding lethal risks, managing investments worth hundreds of billions, and planning every precise operation to slay dragons. She was the core strategist and trump card of the support team.

"Your Heavenly Deduction never needed Blood Rage in the first place." Luo Qiusheng spoke with solemnity as he slowly laid out the stakes. "Its core is deduction, calculation, and probability forecasting. It's an ability that provides the ultimate mental support, not a combat-type Spirit Word. Other people use Blood Rage to enhance their bodies and combat skills. If you force yourself into Blood Rage, the price will be upsetting the balance of this world's rules."

He paused, his gaze deepening as he revealed the deadly risk. "Once your calculations break through their limits, they'll transcend ordinary probability and glimpse the threads of fate. In the end, you'll calculate every secret of heaven and foresee every blessing and disaster. Instead of remaining an ordinary person, or an ordinary Hybrid, you'll become an all-knowing 'fortune-teller'—and suffer fate's backlash."

That was only the price on the surface.

A shadow passed through Luo Qiusheng's eyes, unnoticed by anyone. He concealed the most fundamental and terrifying truth.

The essence of Heavenly Deduction had never been simple probability calculation.

Among billions of tangled fragments of spacetime and countless overlapping branches of fate, it could pinpoint errors with precision and lock onto the one and only truth.

That meant the ability had already touched the world's underlying rules. It could peer into the very foundations of this Dragon Tribe world.

If she pushed past her limits with Blood Rage and tore open the barrier of those rules, then as Su Enxi saw through the nature of the world, all the secrets hidden within her—her bloodline's origin, the threads of fate laid for her—would also be stripped bare by the world's rules, exposed for all to see.

The consequences would be unthinkable.

But as soon as he finished speaking, Su Enxi raised her head. Her clear eyes held not a trace of hesitation, only stubborn resolve. "I want Blood Rage too. I can bear any price."

She had never been a hothouse flower, clinging to life in the shelter of others. She was one of the support team's two trump cards, its chief of logistics. Mai commanded the killing, and she commanded the plans. Neither could be missing.

Now that Mai had broken through her limits, she refused to be left behind.

Luo Qiusheng looked at her resolute eyes and, in the end, did not try to stop her again.

Another stretch of torment, long beyond measure, followed and dragged on until late at night. The energy in the room surged in waves, growing more violent each time, then falling into a dead, silent stillness.

In the latter half of the night, all movement ceased completely.

The next day, the plane cruised smoothly through the skies, ten thousand meters above the ground, heading toward Jiangnan.

All three were physically and mentally exhausted, drained to the very limit.

The most obvious change was the dragonlike pressure faintly spilling from them. After Blood Rage, their bloodlines had been fully awakened, and they could no longer completely contain their dragon aura.

Ordinary passengers couldn't sense the dragon power itself, but they instinctively felt the oppression rising from deep within their blood—its chill and aloofness. They unconsciously avoided the trio's seats and kept casting wary, puzzled looks their way. A faint, strange unease hung over the area around them.

After the plane landed, Luo Qiusheng supported the two exhausted women on either side as they entered the terminal. Amid the scattered whispers and inexplicable, sour hostility around them, he found them seats where they could rest.

Jiu De Mai leaned against the chair back, still a little unsteady, and glared at Luo Qiusheng. "You shouldn't have given it to her."

"She insisted," Luo Qiusheng said helplessly.

"So you just gave it to her because she insisted?" Mai raised an eyebrow. Her tone held a trace of reproach, though she knew that Su Enxi never changed her mind once she had decided something.

Once they had boarded and taken their seats, the spacious first-class cabin was unusually quiet.

Su Enxi had overexerted herself. Her face was pale as paper and her body limp, so she could only lean slightly against Jiu De Mai's shoulder with her eyes closed. Her brows remained knitted, as if she were enduring a backlash-induced pain no one else could see.

Jiu De Mai stayed quietly by her side, eyes closed as she regulated her breathing and stabilized her newly awakened bloodline.

Luo Qiusheng sat alone by the window across from them, his eyes gently closed. He appeared to be resting, but his awareness had already spread outward, quietly probing the hidden changes within his body.

The bloodline lying dormant in him had shown faint signs of stirring, roused by the ritual that helped the two women undergo Blood Rage. A strand of golden dragon aura lay hidden deep within his meridians, flowing silently, unnoticed by anyone.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, in the principal's office at Kassel College in Chicago.

The warm yellow light of a floor lamp illuminated a desk piled high with confidential files.

Hilbert von Ange rubbed his chin with his fingertips, silver hair falling over his shoulders. His eyes, which had weathered a thousand years of storms and seen through countless schemes and killings, were full of deep thought and confusion as they remained fixed on Luo Qiusheng's top-secret personal file on the screen.

"How many more secrets are you hiding...?"

His low murmur drifted through the empty office.

An eerie image kept replaying in his mind: the Five-Clawed Golden Dragon that Luo Qiusheng had once casually drawn.

In the north, there was Nidhogg, the progenitor of the black dragons. In the west, there were endless Dragon Tribe lineages and a thousand years of Hybrid history. But the Five-Clawed Golden Dragon was a true dragon god rooted purely in Eastern Chinese mythology—a supreme form of Dragon Tribe being that Kassel College had barely any record of, and that had never appeared before.

He had found nothing in the ancient texts, no trace in the secret histories, and nothing at all in the Hybrid lineages.

Why could a young Eastern Hybrid accurately depict a supreme dragon god that existed only in Eastern legends—and even give it the genuine pressure of a Dragon Tribe being?

As his thoughts turned, an even stranger matter surfaced again.

Luo Qiusheng had once ignored the absolute seal of the Spirit Word, Commandment, in front of everyone. All the rules suppressing Spirit Words had been as good as nonexistent to him.

That alone, that extraordinary talent and physique that transcended the world's rules, was more than enough to qualify him for an S rank—or even an unknown rank beyond S.

But back then, Luo Qiusheng had forcefully suppressed that rating.

A trace of helplessness and coldness passed through Angers's eyes.

The Council of Elders of the Secret Party was rotten and obstinate, wary of every unknown power. Years ago, Angers had forced his way through their opposition to give Lu Mingfei an S-rank seat, and the old fossils had been grumbling and obstructing him at every turn ever since.

If another Luo Qiusheng appeared, someone who stood above all Hybrids, the Council of Elders would surely do whatever it took to suppress, monitor, imprison, or even eliminate him.

On top of that, another fatal question, one that had haunted Angers for a thousand years, lingered in his mind.

China had a long and ancient history, with myths and legends scattered everywhere, yet there had never been a true Dragon Tribe Hybrid. Every record of dragons described divine beasts—the rightful rulers of heaven and earth—entirely separate from the West's dark history of dragon slaying.

Where, exactly, did Luo Qiusheng's bloodline come from?