"No! No matter what, I have to get 'that' back!"
The old man pulled out a pale yellow notebook and opened it. Maps and small black dots immediately materialized on its pages.
"Find him! Tear him apart! Bring everything back!"
Following the old man's roar, wisps of brilliant light flickered within the crystal chamber. Several translucent puppets snapped their blood-red eyes wide open.
As if they understood the old man's words, they quickly tore through the void and vanished without a trace.
......
"What's going on? I've suddenly got a really bad premonition!"
Lei Lin's brow furrowed. In truth, ever since he had emerged from the Path of Bewilderment, he had felt an extremely uncomfortable sensation—as if someone were watching him from the shadows. But neither his soul power nor the Chip's scans had detected anything.
And now, that discomfort had intensified sharply, even turning into genuine unease!
"This hostility permeating the surroundings?" Lei Lin closed his eyes, then quickly opened them. At that moment, his pupils had transformed into a pair of amber-colored vertical slits, with a thread of blood-red flashing through them.
"Boom!!!"
As if the sky were collapsing and the earth splitting apart, countless wizardry runes flickered. Multicolored light surged skyward, combining to form a massive ice cage that trapped Lei Lin inside.
"What? I didn't trigger any traps at all... unless..."
Lei Lin narrowed his eyes slightly. Under these circumstances, he had actually become more clear-headed.
"Haha... with the entire core chamber under my control, I am invincible within the Crimson Arc Moon!"
Meanwhile, in the core control room, the old Wizard's face was aglow with excitement. Clutched tightly in his hand was a red gemstone, its tip connected to a mass of fine crystal threads.
One string after another of complex commands was continuously transmitted through the gemstone in his hand.
Crack! Crack! Within the trap, countless crystalline hexagonal snowflakes suddenly condensed, forming a profusion of ice swords and blades, along with shields, axes, and the like, all crashing down toward Lei Lin's head.
"Comoran's Scales!" "Blood Flame!"
With a mere thought from Lei Lin, his body was immediately enveloped in a layer of fine black snake scales. Blood-red flames roared to life overhead, directly vaporizing the mass of ice.
Ssss! As if provoked, the ice all solidified at once. At its center, a streak of blue became even more crystalline and translucent, brimming with bone-piercing cold.
The blue-glowing ice withstood the blazing Blood Flame, stubbornly enduring the onslaught. Massive quantities of cold energy radiated from it, actually breaking through the Blood Flame's blockade and shooting toward Lei Lin. He scowled and shattered them with a punch.
The razor-sharp ice blades slicing across his body only raised thin trails of sparks, failing to even breach his outermost energy barrier.
"Absolute Zero!" Lei Lin's pupils contracted. Gone was the relaxed expression he had worn before.
"Truly worthy of a ruin laid out by an ancient Wizard — a formation like this, one that integrates every magical rune across an entire region, would be virtually impossible for an ordinary Morning Star Wizard to withstand... What a pity... It doesn't seem to be running at full power. If that's the case, then..."
On the surface, Lei Lin appeared locked in a stalemate with the massive Ice Wizard Formation, but inside his mind, calculations were spinning at breakneck speed.
*Whoosh whoosh!* At that very moment, the void suddenly warped. Several streaks of white light seemed to punch through the boundaries of space itself, materializing directly in front of Lei Lin.
The pommel of a sharp, broken sword was already pressed against the edge of Lei Lin's chest.
"Fast!" That speed left Lei Lin barely enough time to react. The only thing he could do was push the defensive scales of his Comorin heritage to their absolute limit.
Unlike ordinary spells, a Wizard's innate ability was activated purely through the will — instantaneous and devastatingly fast. It was the universal lifeline shared by all Wizards.
*Crack!*
A broken sword that looked as though it had been forged from pure crystal struggled to pierce through the energy membrane and runic defenses layering the black scales, finally making direct contact with the scales themselves.
*Pop!* Something gave way. Lei Lin's brow furrowed as a colossal phantom of a six-armed alien race erupted behind him, dark-green energy cloaking his entire body.
"Hah!" The muscles on his right arm bulged as he drove a devastating punch into the figure, sending that translucent silhouette hurtling backward.
Only after the attacker had retreated a considerable distance did Lei Lin glance down at his chest with a grim expression.
There, a bright white arc was etched clearly across one of his Comorin scales — a deep gouge carved into the surface, with several small scale fragments already missing entirely.
"Puppets?!" When Lei Lin finally got a clear look at the ambushers standing before him, he couldn't help but cry out in surprise.
Before him stood several translucent figures dressed in pristine white formatic robes, their hands equipped with an array of mechanical instruments. That crystal broken sword was among them as well.