Previously before zaruk's arrival:
Gluttonfang stood tall on his hind legs, perched like a sovereign beast atop a great waterfall. His fur was sleek with mist, his many eyes blinking lazily beneath the sun's golden rays. He wore his usual pair of scratched-up sunglasses, stolen from lao ping long ago. In one of his mouths, a crooked bamboo straw slurped up the last of a fermented berry drink.
"Haaah. Finally, some peace."
And with that, he took one confident step forward and leapt from the waterfall's lip, his limbs folding against the wind. The air howled past him as he plummeted straight into the glittering lake below. He didn't resist. He didn't need to. He knew the water would catch him like an old friend.
**SPLASH!**
A moment later, he was diving deep, deeper still, gliding through the cool water like a ghost. Fishes darted by in shimmering schools. Some paused to look at him, and he looked back with a smug grin. He didn't even try to hunt them.
"No murder today, boys," he muttered through bubbles.
But then his eyes caught something strange.
On the lakebed lay a single conch-shaped shell.
It was ordinary at first glance, small, barely the length of his paw. Mold covered its ridges, moss clung to its grooves, and a soft haze of mud swirled around it. But it pulsed with something—something old, something bizarre. He paused, floating inches above it.
"This thing's uglier than Hippo's wife," he whispered, and reached out to tap it.
The moment his paw brushed the shell—it began.
A shrill hum echoed in the water. Bubbles spun violently around him, and a whirlpool exploded into existence. It wasn't a normal one either. It spiraled in impossible directions, warping space. The vortex clawed at him, and despite his strength, he couldn't pull away.
His limbs twisted. His joints cracked. His ribs caved. Blood sprayed from one of his shoulder mouths.
"AUGH! You piece of—"
And then he vanished.
There was no light. No sound. No sense of time.
He drifted.
Somewhere in that formless void, something dragged him further down—a cosmic undertow that felt like hands, ropes, maybe even roots.
And then, suddenly—**light**.
"...Ugh. Bright as Kong's bald head."
The wolf sat up, wincing. His bones cracked back into place with an audible crunch. He pulled out a crooked wine bottle from his storage and took a few gulps to ease the pain. It tasted like regret and fermented cherries.
His eyes adjusted.
And he saw a world like no other.
Above, instead of clouds, stone islands floated freely in the sky, bathed in a golden haze. Each island was massive, big enough to hold palaces or whole forests. Some had waterfalls falling upward. Others spun slowly like lazy moons. And below, there was no ground—only an endless pit of darkness.
"Well... that's quite the view."
The wolf stood shakily on all fours, still dripping from the lake's memory. His gaze drifted across the horizon of floating continents. Then he looked down.
More islands, descending endlessly like steps into an abyss. They were linked only by scattered debris—meteorite-like stones that glowed faintly and floated around in a slow cosmic dance.
And then he heard it.
**Singing.**
A lullaby. Soft. Old. Beautiful. It echoed from one of the far-off islands.
His ears twitched.
There it was—a tree.
It sang.
Silver leaves shimmered like moonlight in motion. Its trunk was not brown, but liver-colored, pulsing like a living organ. It stood alone on an island far, far away. But its song reached him, seeped into his bones, stirred something deep in his many chests.
It was unlike anything he'd ever heard.
"What the fuck is this place..." he whispered.
He looked at his paw, then back at the stone sky.
And took another swig of crooked beer.
"How the hell does that tiny ass shell have this kind of shit inside it?"
With curiosity, gluttonfang inspected his surroundings, soon gluttonfang squinted at the distant tree, lips curled in amusement. "Mysterious ancient tree in a floating dream realm, silver grass, a puzzle to solve... heh, all that's missing is an old turtle spouting riddles and a drunk poet reciting bad haikus."
With a shrug that jiggled the mouths on his shoulders, he leapt from his perch.
Tap.
He landed on the first floating stone.
Then the next.
Then the next.
The parkour began—stone to stone, leaping with ease, ears twitching, eyes scanning for traps that never came. It was monotonous, really. Graceful, yes. A display of beastly agility and dexterity? Absolutely. But also boring as dirt.
In the real world—the one outside the strange shell dimension—the boars were being, well... boars.
"Did he finally leave us?" the younger one asked, scratching his butt with no shame, even managing to grunt in rhythm with each scrape.
"Where would he go, though?" the older replied, his tone puzzled as if the concept of "independent movement" was foreign to him.
The older nodded at his own words, proud of their philosophical depth.
Their conversation was deeply moving—if you were a rock.
But fate wasn't done playing games. Somewhere in the Verdant Wilds, Sect Leader Zaruk of the Nail Strom Sect had arrived with grand purpose and grimmer expectations. He was ready to face the wolf, to offer... something. Or maybe beat him into obedience. Probably both.
And then, as the universe chuckled softly, because on the same day, the wolf had accidentally disappeared on his morning waterfall bath.
Because of course he did.
"ARGH! That damn wolf! Where did he go!" Zaruk's voice thundered across the landscape.
So fierce was his roar that, far above, a little egg—whose mother had been singing lullabies of patience and power—suddenly cracked open. The baby bird flopped out with a terrified shiver, chirping in confusion and trauma.
Back to the gluttonfang
He wasn't aware of the cosmic slapstick comedy occurring elsewhere. He had been jumping for hours. Still no progress. Still the same rocks. Still the same distance between him and the tree, which stubbornly refused to get closer.
"Hm?" He looked around, then down. "Wait a sec... I'm stuck in a loop! I'm video game glitched!"
His tail lashed in irritation.
Then, just when despair was setting in and he was considering screaming profanities into the void, the tree sang.
A low, melodic hum, vibrating through the air, not loud but somehow vast—like a lullaby echoing from the bones of the world.
Suddenly, the realm shifted.
Energy pulsed, silver light bloomed faintly along the edges of each floating stone.
Gluttonfang eyes widened. "Oh you sneaky bastard," he muttered with admiration. "You were the key the whole time."
This time, each leap took him forward. Every stone floated closer to the tree. Within ten minutes, he landed with a soft thud on the island.
The singing faded.
Silence returned.
Gluttonfang blinded and looked around. "...That's it?"
The island was modest—just thirty meters across, maybe less. Everything was silver. Grass, flowers, even the pebbles shimmered like moonlight made solid. It was beautiful in a surreal, slightly nauseating way.
He bent down, picked a silver flower, and without hesitation fed it to the mouth on his palm.
Chomp.
He waited.
"…"
Nothing happened.
He squinted.
He picked another. Chomp.
Still nothing.
"…Huh?"
More flowers.
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…
The palm-mouth scarfed them down lazily, a developed technique of the wolf's to save effort. One pluck, one bite. Very efficient. Very lazy.
Still… nothing.
The wolf finally collapsed to the ground under the tree, ears drooping. "This place is way too weird," he muttered.
He reached into his space ring—the one Bronze Kong had handed over after an absolutely humiliating bribe-trade exchange involving jade lilies and death threats—and pulled out a flask of wine.
Gulp. Gulp.
He drank deeply, staring at the shimmering grass, suspicious and offended.
"This grass has no taste. That flower had no qi. That rock… it's not even warm! What kind of broken simulation is this?"
He tried to reason it out. The tree only sang every few hours. The stones only moved when it sang. The grass drained his stamina. The flowers did nothing. The rules here weren't just foreign—they were fundamentally broken.
He lay down and closed his eyes. "Just five minutes," he whispered, swishing wine around his mouth. "Then I'll figure it out…"
Time passed.
An hour.
Two.
Three.
He counted each in silence, occasionally sipping, occasionally shifting.
Then, in the fourth hour, the tree sang again.
The wolf sat up quickly, ears perked.
But something else happened.
His stomach growled. Violently.
He grunted, clutching his gut. "Ughh… okay, maybe I drank too fast—"
Then the pain hit.
He dropped to his knees, gasping. His body shivered uncontrollably as a dangerous pressure built up inside.
"AAAGHHHHHH!"
He screamed, howling into the silver sky like a beast mortally wounded.
Inside his stomach, a volatile, liquid energy was surging.
The flowers—those useless, tasteless, meaningless silver weeds—had hidden their nature until the tree sang. With each note, the once-indigestible matter melted within him, releasing a strange essence that twisted through his meridians and bones.
"WHAT THE ACTUAL FU—"
He rolled, then slammed his head against the tree's trunk as if pain would counteract pain.
The mouths on his body screamed too—grotesque harmonics of agony.
Then... just as quickly as it came, the pain stopped.
Gluttonfang gasped, face soaked in sweat, pupils dilated. "What... the hell… was that...?"
He looked at his palm. A faint silver glow radiated from it.
Gluttonfang blinked.
"Huh…"
He sat in silence, heart still thudding.
And then—he laughed.
He laughed like a lunatic.
"It's a digestion trap!! A goddamn digestion trap! You eat the flowers, you die later! But only if the tree sings! Who the hell made this place?! Some celestial troll?!"
He laid back down.
Everything hurt. But he was grinning.
Because he had finally learned one thing about this place:
Nothing in here is ever what it seems.
The pain had stopped.
For a moment.
Then came the surge.
It wasn't a gentle, great tide—it was a violent torrent, a river of raw force rampaging through his body like a stampede of enraged bulls on fire. Silver energy, faint moments ago, now blazed across his meridians in a serpentine dance, wrapping itself around his bones and threading between muscle fibers.
His golden lightning qi reacted.
It didn't welcome the silver guest.
No, it screamed.
Where the silver flowed, the gold resisted—like noble blood rejecting poison. It wasn't an explosive rejection, not yet. It was colder. More personal. An icy, subtle refusal that stabbed like needles into every corner of his being.
Gluttonfang clenched his teeth, blood trickling from the edges of his mouth. One of his many tongues had bitten itself in the struggle.
"Control it," he thought. "Tame it. Dominate it. Or die."
A strange vein popped on the side of his face, so swollen and red it looked like it might burst forth and start screaming on its own. It wasn't from the clash of qi—it was him, holding back everything.
Not screaming.
Not whimpering.
Not begging.
Just... enduring.
Enduring the kind of pain that made lesser beasts explode into a mess of organs and regret.
In the cultivation world, this wasn't rare.
Many had attempted to mix two types of qi. Elemental duality—it was a beautiful concept on scrolls, in legends, in drunken tavern tales shared by those too weak to try it themselves. In reality? It was a suicide pact written on your own flesh.
Only a few survived it.
The rest became fine red mist.
Gluttonfang, naturally, hadn't intended to try.
But here he was.
Because of a tree that sang, and silver flowers that lied, and an idiot's curiosity mixed with too much wine and a very chew-happy hand-mouth.
And now, this.
Lightning and silver light wrestling inside him, making each cell feel like it was hosting a war of prideful gods who refused to share a throne.
He gasped, and the sound echoed across the silver island.
It was a ragged, mortal sound. Weak. Almost human.
His vision swam.
Each heartbeat felt like thunder in his skull. A low, pounding pulse that made his thoughts stagger like drunks in a foggy alleyway.
"Am I…" he murmured aloud, voice hoarse. "...going to die?"
He wasn't sure he'd meant to say it.
But the words floated there, hanging in the air like ashes from a fire.
It was hard to focus.
Memories slithered up from the depths of his mind.
His first meal after birth: the raw, steaming heart of a snake that had tried to eat him.
His first friend: a rabbit who had died ten minutes later, because friendship had made it drop its guard.
His first defeat: a beetle beast that had knocked out two of his eyes and a tooth.
He had come far.
Too far to die here. Alone. In this silver graveyard that smiled politely while stabbing your insides.
And yet… it was happening.
He was losing.
Slowly. Inevitably.
His golden qi, his signature, his pride—it hated the silver. Treated it like an invader, an unwanted guest, a cockroach in a palace.
The more the silver tried to merge, the more the gold pushed back. Not with fury—but with elegance, with that quiet finality that said: "You do not belong."
"Fine," he rasped.
The words were cracked, desperate.
"Then I'll make you belong…"
He gathered his strength. Whatever was left. Somewhere deep inside, he pulled it together. The tiniest bit of will. A thread of defiance.
One last gamble.
He remembered a technique—not a formal one. Not from a manual. Something he had once seen an old snake do. It had been dying too. Poisoned. Its core conflicting with the venom of an opponent. The snake had done something insane.
It had bitten its own core.
Forced a reaction.
Forced a new path.
Gluttonfang grinned.
Lips cracked.
"Let's see what happens when I do the same…"
With a mental howl, he gathered the golden qi and shoved it into the largest cluster of silver swirling inside his chest.
Like oil and water meeting fire, the result was immediate:
Detonation.
His body arched.
Muscles ripped. Bones groaned.
Every mouth on his body screamed. Even the ones that didn't usually scream. One near his back made a noise so high-pitched it shattered a silver pebble nearby.
The sky above the silver tree shivered. The entire realm pulsed, as if reality had been struck with a tuning fork the size of a mountain.
Gluttonfang fur stood on end. Literally.
Static discharge crackled from his claws to his tail-tip.
His body glowed gold and silver—bright enough to cast shadows across the silver field.
And still, he forced the energy together.
It was no longer about compatibility. It was about supremacy. His will had to dominate. There was no harmony in this technique. No peaceful balance.
Only conquest.
The silver qi had tried to worm its way in like a parasite. Now he was going to digest it.
Turn it into fuel.
Or die trying.
The struggle stretched on.
Minutes? Hours? He couldn't tell anymore. Time was meaningless when your entire nervous system was screaming.
But slowly...
Painfully...
The silver qi began to change.
Where once it resisted, now it bent. Where once it clashed, now it curved around the golden lightning like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
Submission.
It was happening.
Not fusion—but assimilation.
The golden qi didn't merge with the silver. It consumed it. Refined it. Claimed it.
Gluttonfang's body twitched.
Then, like a spring uncoiling, he collapsed, gasping.
Steam poured from his mouth.
One of the mouths on his thigh burped smoke.
The sky had returned to normal. The island was still.
The silver tree stood silent.
But inside him... something had changed.
His golden lightning was no longer just golden. It shimmered at the edges now. Subtle, but visible. A faint silver hue traced its arcs, making them thinner, faster, sharper. Less raw. More precise.
He had not gained a new element.
But he had refined his old one.
An unintentional advancement.
A broken miracle.
The wolf laughed.
Weakly. But it was laughter nonetheless.
"I win," he whispered.
And then he passed out.