"What... is that thing?"
After Xia Xu's reminder, Yao Fu used ultrasonic detection. His breath caught, and he murmured in a daze.
Xia Xu did not ask what he had seen.
Before long, it had already entered their field of vision, advancing slowly with an astonishingly oppressive presence.
It was a... monster.
That was the only description Xia Xu could think of.
The creature before them no longer resembled any known living thing. It crawled on all fours, yet stood over a meter at the shoulder-not its full height, but the distance between the ground and its shoulders when all four limbs were planted on the ground.
Instead of fur, the monster's back bore enormous membranous bat wings that hung to the ground like a cloak, dragging and scraping along as it advanced. Countless claws overlapped across those wings, large and small, long and short, without any discernible pattern.
These claws grew haphazardly all over the wing membranes. Many were merely withered hooks, and without arms to support them, they clearly served more as decoration than anything practical. Yet their constant, unconscious, disorderly grasping was maddening to behold, the visual impact overwhelming.
Atop this deformed body grew an even more deformed head, covered in swollen pustules. Dense black hairs forced their way out of facial pores, nostrils, eyelids, and even eyeballs, curling into little coils.
Complementing those hairs were sharp canine teeth that sprouted brutally from its cheeks, chin, and forehead. The mere sight made them shudder as though they could feel it themselves.
Deformed and twisted-those were Xia Xu and Yao Fu's most immediate impressions of the monster.
Then came its powerful, oppressive presence. The massive creature stood a full 1.6 or 1.7 meters at the shoulder. Especially with those enormous bat wings trailing on the ground and stretching