Black Flame Appeared, the Fire Seed Emerged

At first sight of the creature hiding in the rocky crevice and making that strange hissing sound, Little Leopard thought it was a loach or a water snake. A closer look, however, showed that it was neither.

The black creature was not very long, only about thirty centimeters, with a body roughly two or three centimeters thick. It resembled a loach, but only in shape. Fine, densely packed black scales covered its entire body, far thicker than a loach's scales, and gleamed faintly like metal beneath the moonlight. A ring of fins grew around its neck alone. Whenever it hissed, those fins spread into a circle around its neck, as though someone had fitted an umbrella over its body.

"So it's just a little monster. Gave me a fright!" Once Little Leopard saw what the creature looked like, his vigilance dropped considerably. To his mind, even if it was not a loach, it belonged to the same kind. This world was so strange that it was hardly surprising for its loaches to look different from those in his previous life. At worst, it was venomous. As long as he stayed out of the water, no amount of venom in an aquatic creature could have anything to do with him.

That thought put him at ease. He looked around again and, finding nothing unusual apart from the strange creature in the crevice, relaxed, leaped down, and walked toward the Rootless Grass.

The few stalks of Rootless Grass here were enough. All he needed to do in the remaining four days was find the Drifting Glass Flower, and his task would be complete.

His excellent mood made him lower his guard despite himself. He walked over to the Rootless Grass in a few strides and reached out to pick it. The instant he extended his hand, trouble struck.

As Little Leopard approached the Rootless Grass, the strange creature's cries from the crevice grew increasingly piercing. He ignored it, treating it as nothing more than a loach. Even if it screamed a hole in the heavens, what could it possibly do to him?

But before his hand even touched the Rootless Grass, the strange creature shot out of the crevice, opened its mouth wide, and lunged for his hand.

"Fuck-!"

Little Leopard let out a startled cry and jerked his hand back, dodging the bite. He had never imagined that a tiny loach could leap out of the water, much less move so fast and jump so high. Most importantly, as the creature sprang from the crevice, it abruptly opened its enormous mouth. That truly frightened him.

How was this a loach? It was a miniature version of a deep-sea alien from an American blockbuster. The instant it opened its mouth, its head unfolded like an alien spore in the film Alien, exposing several densely packed rows of chilling teeth. Those teeth were frighteningly white, covered with countless tiny serrations, and glimmered with faint, eerie blue light. Little Leopard was certain that a single bite from this monster would cost him at least half his life.

Little Leopard withdrew quickly, and the monster's bite missed. Its body twisted and darted in midair, flipping at an incredibly bizarre angle before dropping toward his feet. Once it landed, it slithered like a snake and flashed toward his feet for another bite.

"Shit-!"

Now Little Leopard was truly furious. He raised both hands and fired two Kunai toward his feet.

Clang, clang-! The two Kunai struck the creature squarely in the forehead and the middle of its body, but only knocked off two bright sparks. They briefly checked its charge, then bounced away.

Taking advantage of that momentary pause, Little Leopard shot upward, activating the Wild Goose Floating Heart Method and leaping thirty or forty feet into the air. Almost simultaneously, the creature jumped too, streaking beneath his feet.

"What a strange creature!" Little Leopard used a Thousand-Pound Drop to land, then rolled with the momentum, performing the legendary, ever-reliable Lazy Donkey Roll. He retrieved the two fallen Kunai, leaped into the rocky crevice, and pulled up the stalks of Rootless Grass.

Not daring to linger, he set his movement technique into motion, hoping to shake off the strange thing. But just as he started moving, a chill swept across his back, and almost every hair on his body stood on end.

"This is bad!" Startled, Little Leopard threw himself forward, landing face-first like a dog eating dirt. Almost at the very instant he hit the ground, he felt an intensely scorching current skim past his head.

"That was-!"

Little Leopard did not stop moving after diving to the ground. He followed with another Lazy Donkey Roll, rolling several dozen feet away before finding a chance to get up. At last, he saw what had happened when he tried to flee.

Flames.

Black flames!

A great mass of black flames burned eerily on a tree ahead of the spot where he had thrown himself down. The tree, once hundreds of feet tall, had already been reduced to a stump less than a meter high, while the mass of black flames slowly dwindled.

Looking back, he saw the loach remaining motionless where it stood, its body trembling slightly. Something stirred in Little Leopard's mind. He felt he had grasped a crucial point.

"Damn it, after spitting out one mouthful of fire, this thing looks just like me after using the Three Realms Minor Shift-completely overdrawn, like it's fucked itself to death! Those last couple of rolls were for nothing!"

Thinking of the unnecessary rolls he had just performed, Little Leopard's expression soured. "While you're sick, I'll take your life. I refuse to believe your body is really that tough!"

He sprang up and swept his right hand across his waist. With a flash of dark light, the Black Gold Short Sword appeared in his hand. He stamped his right foot hard against the ground and charged toward the strange loach.

It was exactly as Little Leopard had guessed. The strange loach had already expended some of its strength chasing him, and after spewing that mouthful of flame, it had no strength left at all. Strange and unusual though the monster was, its body was simply too small, and its intelligence remained undeveloped. Little Leopard's charge was swift, and the Black Gold Short Sword in his hand was the personal weapon of Blood Wuy a, an eighth-grade expert. Even with a body as hard as metal and stone, the strange loach was severed in two by Little Leopard's powerful strike before it even had a chance to react.

Clang-! As his sword cut through, Little Leopard's heart tightened. The strike felt like using a sharp weapon from the Wu Ironworks to chop through an iron bar. He had cut it in two all the same, but the blade had met considerable resistance, and he even felt a faint recoil.

"What kind of monster is this? How can it be so hard?!"

The Black Gold Short Sword in his hand was, at the very least, a hundred-times-refined weapon, far sharper than the so-called divine weapons and treasured blades of the martial world. Little Leopard had tested it before. No matter how thick a tree he cut with it, the blade passed through like slicing tofu, without the slightest resistance.

Yet cutting through this thing had taken so much effort.

"No wonder my Kunai couldn't do a thing to it. This thing's body is several times tougher than solid gold and refined iron!"

Still, whatever else might be true, his sword had struck, and it had cut the creature cleanly in two.

Little Leopard finally relaxed.

But just as he relaxed, something suddenly changed.

His heart lurched.

No, the danger hasn't passed!

A wisp of black light flew from the loach's severed corpse and floated in the air, flickering eerily beneath the moon.

"Is that... a flame?"

Little Leopard focused his gaze on it. The black light floating in midair was indeed a flame. It was small, only the size of a soybean, compact and undispersing. Apart from its flame-like shape, he could not even feel any heat from it.

But Little Leopard dared not lower his guard in the slightest. He could feel no heat from it now, yet deep in his heart he sensed an immense threat emanating from it, as though some destructive power lay wrapped inside that tiny, soybean-sized black flame.

Little Leopard stepped back twice, cast another reluctant glance at the corpse on the ground, then turned to leave.

Everything that had happened today was simply too bizarre, and the thing before his eyes was equally strange. It was not that he failed to recognize the potentially enormous value of the loach's severed corpse, but the black flame before him made him shrink back.