Bo City Bathed in Blood

"How are we supposed to leave? This is a sealed chamber." Mo Fan stared wordlessly at the sweat-drenched female guard.

"Just follow me." Lin Yuxin didn't waste words on him. She moved quickly toward the altar.

She pressed something — it was impossible to say exactly what — and the Earth Sacred Spring water, which had been circulating through its steady cycle, began draining away into small holes in the stone.

**Glug... glug, glug...**

Within seconds, every last drop was gone. The stone channels stood completely dry.

Lin Yuxin strode to the very top of the altar and yanked up the leather meditation cushion — still warm from where Mo Fan had been sitting. Beneath it was a removable panel; when she lifted it, a small blue bottle was nestled inside, containing what appeared to be perfectly clear Earth Sacred Spring water.

Mo Fan was quietly baffled. *How on earth did all that water fit into something the size of a soda bottle?*

Lin Yuxin carefully secured the bottle and turned to face the slightly dazed student who was about to sit the Magic College Entrance Examination. "This is the emergency preservation protocol for the Earth Sacred Spring. There's another passage out of this chamber — it should lead to the hills behind Tianlan Magic High School."

"Behind the school?" The anxiety in Mo Fan's voice sharpened. "Could you please just tell me what's actually happening?"

"You'll see for yourself once we're outside. Come with me — the spring is their target, and we cannot let it fall into their hands." Lin Yuxin didn't want to say more than that.

"*Their* hands?" Mo Fan was thoroughly lost — he had no idea what she was talking about.

Lin Yuxin crossed to the wall and began pressing against the stone surface. It looked completely uniform and featureless, yet her fingers moved across it with deliberate precision, as if entering a code.

Mo Fan watched, bewildered. He had been so deep in cultivation that he'd never once noticed how many hidden mechanisms this chamber contained.

**Clunk—**

A section of the warded stone wall swung open with a single sound, revealing a dark passage that vanished into the unknown.

"Leaving is what matters." Without another word, Lin Yuxin grabbed Mo Fan and pulled him into the darkness.

Mo Fan had already sensed that something catastrophic was unfolding outside. He didn't hesitate.

They had only taken a few steps into the tunnel when Lin Yuxin stopped abruptly. She turned, her sharp eyes fixing on him.

"This passage may not be safe either. The Black Church will be targeting me specifically — take the Earth Sacred Spring and keep it safe, no matter what." Even as she said it, she looked as though she knew it was a reckless call.

But she had no other choice.

The Black Church had come fully prepared, with knowledge of the Earth Sacred Spring that bordered on intimate familiarity. If they encountered Black Church operatives in the escape tunnel, she would be the primary target — the Deputy Guard Captain. Mo Fan, just a student, would likely be overlooked entirely.

As long as the spring could be kept safe, there was still hope.

"Would you *please* just tell me what's happening?!" The frustration finally cracked through Mo Fan's voice.

One look at Lin Yuxin's shattered composure told him that something enormous had come apart in Bo City.

"Scarlet Alert." There was no time to explain everything — and besides, this student had been sealed inside the chamber for days, cut off from the outside world.

Scarlet Alert?

The words struck him like a boulder hurled into still water, sending shockwaves through his chest.

Ever since arriving in this world, Mo Fan had understood one fundamental truth about it: in this magical society, humans were not the undisputed masters. Beyond the city walls lived Demon-Beasts numbering a hundred times, a thousand times the human population.

Demon-Beasts had always coveted the resources humanity held. Under the command of sovereign-class Demon-Beasts, they could mobilize like armies and descend upon human cities in force. There were recorded cases of entire cities — those with insufficient defenses — ceasing to exist in a single night.

And so the highest Magic Associations of the world's five continents had designated this type of crisis as an Alert, with tiers defined by the number of Demon-Beasts and their strength.

Like the warning systems a scientific society issued for natural disasters — graduated levels for hurricanes and earthquakes — Demon-Beast invasions, humanity's own category of catastrophe, had been assigned their own classification.

Orange Alert: the first tier. It meant Demon-Beasts numbering over three hundred had appeared near the Safe Zone. Two years ago, an Orange Alert had been declared once, and even that had been enough to send the city spiraling into dread.

A Blue Alert was far worse — for Bo City, it would mean a bloodbath, with untold numbers of Mages and civilians falling to the invasion.

And the tier above that, Scarlet Alert...

That was annihilation. Slaughter. A city-scale catastrophe. The Military Mages available could not fully hold back the Demon-Beast tide — the creatures would pour through the streets and kill without mercy. Not a handful of strays: hundreds upon thousands of Demon-Beasts.

Many Mages, facing even a single Demon-Beast, were already helpless as livestock led to slaughter. What then of ordinary people, who couldn't fight at all?

Scarlet Alert. Rivers of blood flowing through the city streets. Bodies carpeting the ground as far as the eye could see.

Reading descriptions of it in books was enough to make the blood run cold. But when it was actually happening in front of him — what kind of living hell was this?

They emerged through the secret tunnel onto the northern face of a hill within the city. Mo Fan still couldn't fully believe it.

Heavy rain fell in relentless sheets from a dim, oppressive sky that pressed down over all of Bo City. From somewhere not far off, bone-chilling roars drove through the downpour and burrowed into his ears, raising the hair across every inch of his skin.

Mo Fan turned toward the source of those Demon-Beast cries—

*God. That's a residential neighborhood.*

Low-rise buildings. Worn concrete streets. A market district running red.

That blood couldn't be from slaughtered livestock. It was human blood — pooling into streams, flooding down through the rain into gutters and drainage grates.

Blood-red. A red that screamed.

Standing there on the sheltered face of the hill, Mo Fan looked out at Bo City — usually a soft grey watercolor in the rain — and saw blood everywhere.

Bo City was a city of ink-wash beauty, quintessentially southern in character; in the rain it normally resembled a delicate painting come to life. But today, that painting was spattered with blood from end to end. A nightmare had arrived.

**ROOOOAAARR—**

A roar erupted that seemed to shake Bo City itself, driving a wave of goosebumps across Mo Fan's skin.

He spun around, following the sound — and the sight that greeted him drove the air from his lungs.

A grey shroud of sky hung over the city. The Silver Trade Building — Bo City's most iconic landmark — towered above every other structure, its roof nearly grazing the low clouds. And perched at the very top of that tower was a massive black shape.

Its tail draped down from the building's domed roof, hanging nearly halfway down the structure's full height.

Its fleshy wings were half-spread — one half lost in the curtain of rain, the other half blotting out more than a dozen floors of the office tower below.

Its head was thrown back, jaws agape — a maw vast enough to swallow storm clouds whole — and from that maw came the roar that had shaken all of Bo City.