Only the skeleton giant with tentacles for hair remained. It let out a weak, despairing wail, collapsed into the cemetery grass, and dissolved into mist.
Pan Long gave a cold laugh.
"Shedding your shell like a golden cicada won't work on me!"
As he spoke, he raised his left hand and clenched it into a fist.
Dazzling flames erupted from every corner of the cemetery. Pillars of fire shot skyward, then drew toward one another and joined roughly twenty meters overhead, forming a vast cage around the entire cemetery.
Inside the fiery cage, the mist seemed to take on substance. It lunged this way and that but could not break free. At last, it condensed again into a giant taller than the skeleton before it. This one had flesh and blood, though scarcely a patch of skin showed beneath the countless eyes of every size layered across its body.
Those eyes rolled toward Pan Long. An ordinary person would have collapsed into incurable madness from the horror of that single instant.
Pan Long was unmoved.
"That's all?" he said. "That's the extent of it?"
He opened his left hand. Three dried Umbilical Cords glowed with an eerie light in his palm, as though answering the giant covered in eyes.
"That's your trump card, isn't it?" Pan Long said with disdain. "Swallow these three Umbilical Cords, and you gain the power to fight you—but in truth, they only remake the person who swallows them. Their body outside the dream becomes a seedbed for your rebirth."
The giant gave a low roar. Some emotion seemed to lurk within it, but the sound was too indistinct to make out.
Pan Long shook his head. "You're still playing the 'cannot be understood, cannot be communicated with, cannot be killed' game? I admit I can't