As Leilin passed out, the red light inside the second floor of the villa not only didn't fade but actually grew stronger.
Time passed second by second, and soon the next morning arrived.
The scarlet glow intensified further, and even the blue runes on the walls began to creak and groan under the strain.
Crack!!! Like the sound of shattering glass, the blue runes finally began to collapse, and the red light pierced through the walls, shooting outside the villa.
"Look! What is that?"
The villa's anomaly was finally noticed by passersby. A bald man who looked like a merchant pointed at Leilin's villa and started shouting.
Following where he pointed, one could see that the second floor of the villa was continuously emitting a scarlet glow.
The red light was so dazzling that even the sun couldn't overshadow it.
As the light continued to radiate outward, many ordinary people near Leilin's villa collapsed unconscious before they even knew what was happening.
Boom!!! The bald merchant who had just been pointing at Leilin's villa, his face frozen in terror as though a creature had encountered its natural predator, clutched his chest with both hands, his eyes rolled white, and he crumpled to the ground.
As the red light kept expanding, more and more pedestrians began to fall, the phenomenon gradually spreading across the entire street.
Citizens screamed and wailed as massive crowds pressed together, surging out of the city as if some terrible demon were pursuing them from behind.
……
Leilin had a very long dream.
In the dream, he was a tiny young serpent, constantly hiding and darting about, learning the skills of hunting.
The world around him was a sea of flames, with lava and black, scorching rocks everywhere, the entire field of vision a blazing crimson.
He gradually grew larger, transforming from a creature that had to hide from enemies everywhere into one of nature's apex predators.
No matter how terrifying or grotesque the creatures outside were, they could only meet death and be devoured when they stood before him.
Leilin kept changing territories until one day, he arrived at a certain region.
It was filled with others of his kind, and a deep longing welled up from the depths of his heart, compelling him to crawl ever deeper.
The deeper he went, the more of his kind he encountered whose auras far surpassed his own. Some radiated such overwhelming pressure that he could barely breathe.
And the flames and sulfur around him rapidly faded, replaced by a darkness so thick it seemed almost solid.
This darkness carried countless shadows, yet it gave him a sense of safety, as if he had returned to the womb.
And at the very center of the darkness, he finally saw—
A colossal sphere of serpents, stretching across the horizon like a planet suspended in the cosmos—eternal and omnipotent, with every single massive snake within it being beyond anything he could have imagined.
"Hiss!!!"
Leilin flicked his tongue toward the sphere of serpents, producing the distinctive sound of a snake.
The massive sphere of serpents dispersed, revealing the silhouette of a dark-haired woman at its center.
The dark-haired woman had an extraordinarily bewitching face, her eyes bearing vertical pupils as clear and limpid as the finest crystal, her long hair flowing and twisting behind her like countless small serpents.
The snake-like black hair only added to her strange allure.
"You've come!!!" The woman spoke, her voice resonating directly in Leilin's mind. She spoke in an utterly bizarre language he had never heard before, yet he understood it perfectly.
Just as Leilin was about to speak, a burst of light flooded his vision.
He raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw a human palm. Only then did he realize he had awakened.
"I remember now. I am Leilin. I was conducting a bloodline transformation ritual, attempting to break through the bottleneck..."
The life within the dream appeared in Leilin's mind as if it had been a real experience, and for a moment, he felt a strange sense that things had changed.
It was as if everything in reality had been draped in a thin veil, no longer quite clear.
Slowly, a flood of memories surfaced in Leilin's mind.
"Is the villa ruined?" Leilin looked at the collapsed structures around him and the sunlight streaming directly through the ruined roof, finally noticing the full extent of the damage.
Centered on Leilin, everything within a radius of several li lay in utter devastation, and aside from himself, not a single other living thing had survived.
"It seems the energy absorption array failed, causing massive radiation to leak out..."
Leilin stroked his chin and suddenly remembered: "Wizard?! How did my advancement go?"
He was still completely naked, but Leilin could feel an overwhelming power thrumming beneath his skin, and his spiritual power had also surged dramatically compared to before.
With a rough idea of what to expect, Leilin sank his consciousness into his sea of consciousness.
The sea of consciousness was now filled entirely with scarlet light, transforming it into a blood-red space.