Chi Shi Choked

"Nyah~ Anyway, that's settled."

Luo Qiusheng said irritably, "Fine, fine, whatever you say."

With no choice but to end the call, he raised his hand and looked at the phone in his palm. Its casing bore the cold silver crest exclusive to Kassel College. It was a specially encrypted terminal issued by the college.

His fingers slid across the screen, and without hesitation, he dialed Headmaster Hilbert von Ange's private number.

There was no familiar, steady voice in the receiver, only the monotonous, icy ring of a busy signal, echoing again and again. After several seconds, the call ended automatically, and the screen went dark.

"Headmaster Angers, what role are you playing in this century-spanning game of chess?" Luo Qiusheng murmured, gazing at the black screen of his phone, layers of suspicion clouding his eyes.

The red Ferrari sped down the empty highway. The already gloomy sky suddenly turned wild, and torrential rain came pouring down without warning. Rolling thunder tore through the heavy night, making the car shudder.

At first, he could still glimpse the occasional speeding vehicle on the highway. But the farther he drove, the fewer cars there were, until he was the only one left on the entire road, a lone car cleaving through the endless curtain of rain.

The surroundings were also undergoing a strange, silent distortion. The streetlights on either side of the road went out one by one, and the outlines of the trees blurred and twisted. Nothing remained between heaven and earth but endless darkness and driving rain.

Luo Qiusheng was wholly absorbed in the Secret Party's tangled schemes and power struggles, lost in a maze of speculation. He didn't notice that the space around him had long since slipped beyond the laws of the real world.

The next second, the car jolted violently and began to shake wildly, as if it had driven into an invisible, twisted barrier.

Luo Qiusheng fixed his gaze on the road ahead. The straight highway stretched on without end. The pitch-black night, deserted road, and raging downpour combined into a familiar scene of utter desperation. Countless fragments of memory surged through his mind, and he instantly understood his situation—this was Nibelungen, the death realm of the Dragon Tribe.

His guard snapped taut. His mind raced through the options: turn back and flee, or face the threat head-on? In the space of a heartbeat, he slammed his foot down on the accelerator.

He knew all too well that Chu Tianjiao, an old-guard S-rank Hybrid at the peak of his powers, had been defeated and forced to retreat in the same domain, on a rainy night decades ago. That alone showed how terrifying Odin was. But he knew even more clearly that the god's target this time might well be him.

Not a single human figure could be seen in that utterly silent space, yet countless invisible gazes had fixed on him from every direction.

Beneath the howl of the wind and rain, faint, eerie whispers burrowed into his ears in layers. At times they sounded like the soft wailing of an infant; at others, like the mocking laughter of children. Their cold, uncanny quality made his scalp crawl.

"Dead Servants?"

Luo Qiusheng's gaze sharpened. He instantly abandoned all hope of luck and slammed on the brakes. The Ferrari's four tires scraped violently against the road, shrieking as four plumes of black smoke rose through the rain.

The torrential rain gathered into a thick wall of water and crashed down hard on the roof. The thunderous impact was deafening, and even the sturdy aluminum-alloy frame shuddered faintly, as though the downpour might crush it at any moment.

A black Maybach stood motionless across the very center of the highway, all four doors wide open. Its hazard lights blinked with a weak orange glow, wavering in the pitch-black rain like fireflies that might vanish in an instant.

Had he braked even a moment later, the outcome would have been a wrecked car and a mangled corpse.

Luo Qiusheng pushed open the car door and got out, his whole body on alert as he scanned the surroundings. The world was black as ink. Only the headlights of the two cars cut through the darkness, casting four straight beams of light. The entire space was terrifyingly quiet, without the slightest trace of a struggle, yet an inescapable sense of death and danger hung in the air.

He bent down and lightly touched the black mud collected on the road with his fingertip. A faint, chilling scent of blood clung to his skin, then, in an instant, transformed into an intensely sweet fragrance of honey. The two utterly incompatible scents mingled in a bizarre fusion.

A fine, tingling sting soon spread through his fingertip, as if a faint poison were seeping through his pores and into his skin.

His heart lurched. He immediately bent down and submerged his finger in a puddle by the roadside, scrubbing it over and over.

When he lifted his finger for a closer look, the skin that had touched the black mud had already turned a sickly white. Its corrosive, toxic nature was unmistakable. Prolonged contact could lead to unimaginable consequences.

"This is... Dead Servant blood?"

Fragments of hazy memories suddenly surfaced in his mind. This rain-soaked highway and the eerie Nibelungen were all too familiar: it was the classic desperate situation where Lu Mingfei and Nono had stumbled into the secret realm of Dragon IV and faced Odin.

Before the thought had even finished, the wind and rain surged. A colossal figure turned slowly in the depths of the downpour, its divine might crushing the world and bringing the entire rain-soaked domain to an abrupt standstill. The god stood at the heart of the endless storm, flames billowing around him. The scorching fire burned against the downpour, turning every falling raindrop into a hazy wisp of white mist. The flames around his divine form flickered through the mist, like the rise and fall of a god's breathing.

Beneath him stood an eight-legged horse, its head held high and its entire body covered in dense golden scales, each scale shimmering with an ancient light.

A low rumble of thunder rolled in the horse's throat. As it snorted, tiny bolts of lightning tore through the rain and mist, its power utterly fearsome.

The god wore heavy, dark golden armor, with a billowing azure cloak thrown over it. In his hand, he gripped a long spear as ancient and rugged as a dead branch. His attire and appearance were exactly as the gods were depicted in Norse murals.

Yet layers of ghastly white burial cloth were wrapped tightly around his imposing divine form, the fabric covered in winding, twisted blood-red runes. Holiness and death intertwined. Stripped of his divine purity, he seemed more like a fearsome ghost returned from the deepest pits of hell.

A silver-white mask covered his face. Icy air continuously spilled from its eyeholes and mouth opening, concealing every trace of expression and leaving only boundless authority.

"Odin," Luo Qiusheng said softly, his tone utterly certain.

No further proof was needed. The eight-legged horse Sleipnir, the chief god's spear Gungnir, and the god's blue robes and golden armor all matched the supreme deity who ruled over life and death in Norse mythology.

This god also served as the god of death in the underworld. His Valkyries gathered the souls of fallen warriors and sent them to Valhalla to await the final battle of Ragnarök. That was the source of the dense aura of death surrounding him.

According to myth, Odin was the archenemy of the black dragon Nidhogg and had deep ties to the supreme Dragon Tribe.

But that was precisely the greatest flaw in the story. A thousand years of research by the Secret Party had already proven that all the world's myths sprang from the history of the Dragon Tribe. In the eras of the dragons, no such transcendent deity as Odin had ever existed. He was like a paradox born from nothing, drifting beyond the rules of a world ruled by dragons.

"You've finally come?"

Odin, silent for a long time, slowly spoke. His voice was flat and emotionless, without the slightest ripple, as if he had been waiting quietly in this desperate place for hundreds or thousands of years, certain that Luo Qiusheng would eventually set foot there.

The god didn't take a single step forward, yet his divine might, towering above all living beings, had already become an invisible blade pressed hard against Luo Qiusheng's brow. The immense pressure swept over him from every direction. He could sense clearly that if Odin rode his horse forward even one step, the blade would pierce his skull in an instant, annihilating his soul.