The first time Su Bai met Blood Epiphyllum, she was amid a stretch of utterly collapsed ruins.
The eternal night of the Nightmare World was deep and dark. Beneath the Red Moon, the surviving structures were barely discernible among the broken walls, tracing the former outline of an ancient castle. The stone bricks had weathered and crumbled, and blood and dust filled their cracks, declaring that the civilization this building belonged to had long since vanished into the river of time.
The land here had long been thoroughly corroded by the Red Moon's Power. The soil had lost all its natural vitality, becoming damp and dark red, as though every inch had been soaked in blood. A bloody stench filled the air, oppressive and heavy, making people instinctively hold their breath.
Blood-colored threads climbed like vines over the castle's remains, winding around long-dead trees and wrapping them into twisted crimson sculptures. Like the imprints of a nightmare, they gave the entire ruin an eerie air. By all rights, a place like this should have been a favored haunt of Blood Ghosts and other Strange Creatures. Restless monsters should have lurked in the shadows, waiting for prey to step inside.
Strangely, however, Su Bai sensed no dangerous presence there.
There were no echoes, nor any prying gazes. The entire area was extraordinarily quiet, so silent that even time seemed to have stopped in some distant past.
That only made the Su Bai of that time feel that the place was even more dangerous.
He knew well that if not even the lowliest Strange Creature appeared in an area brimming with powerful energy, there could be only one explanation-a powerful Strange Creature had claimed this territory.
And that being had to be intensely hostile to outsiders.
Had the place not lain on