Logan, watching this, felt the urge to scold the creature for its rude behavior—departing without so much as a word of acknowledgment. But when he noticed that his trait progress bar, which had previously been reset to zero, had suddenly risen by another ten percent, he magnanimously chose to forgive it.
After all, all he had done was spit out a burst of fire, fan some wings, and watch the show for a good while—yet he had gained such a hefty reward. If there were ever another chance, Logan truly wished he could run into such good fortune a few more times.
With the show over and the melon eaten, Logan planned to find a good spot to rest for a while.
What he failed to notice, however, was that although the Chaotic Gore Magala had been slain, the faint black-violet dust of fine scales drifting through the sky still lingered.
And they showed signs of spreading across the entire Coral Highlands.
Not long after Logan and Nergigante departed, the Shagaru Magala tore across the sky, its body radiating a golden glow. Within its senses, the aura of that rebellious "kin" had already faded away completely.
At this outcome, the Shagaru Magala felt no surprise.
Both the Shagaru Magala and Gore Magala were despised existences. No matter how strong they were, they always carried a high risk of being hunted down.
Thus, to the Shagaru Magala, the death of its kin was of no concern. What mattered now was ensuring that its scales spread to cover all the Gore Magala here—and to attempt to gather them together and lead them back to the Old World.
After all, though its scales had a suppressive effect, as time passed, under the metabolism of the Gore Magala, that effect would ultimately fade. For that reason, it could not remain in the New World for long.
One could say the Shagaru Magala's intentions were good—but it forgot one thing. The scales it released, while suppressing the growth of Gore Magala, were themselves the Frenzy Virus. And not just any strain, but a more virulent, more terrifyingly transmissible one, with reproductive cells intact.
In its effort to restrain the overpopulation of Gore Magala, it had instead unleashed a stronger, deadlier wave of Frenzy Virus—bringing forth an even greater catastrophe.
Having done this, could the Shagaru Magala truly return to the Old World?
The New World, after all, was one of the designated passageways of the Elder Crossing—
...
On a prominent ridge of the Great Ravine, a burst of disordered light and shadow streaked across the air. The seemingly empty space began to twist and warp as if a program had glitched, the image blurring, giving rise to an indescribable sense of distortion.
From within it, the violet figure of Chameleos slowly surfaced. Its purple head cautiously poked out from behind the rocky hill, eyes sweeping the surroundings with sharp vigilance. Only after confirming that no creature had noticed did it finally let out a relieved breath.
Chameleos's gaze then shifted downward, landing on the Coral Highlands. The vibrant four-colored coral and the uneven platform-like terrain left it visibly displeased. What irked it most were those coral reefs that shimmered in different hues when the sunlight struck them at shifting angles.
In such a place, achieving perfect invisibility demanded far more analysis and data collection than usual. For Chameleos, this wasn't particularly difficult—after all, it was a being capable of remaining unseen even in strong wind or pouring rain. But still… it was exhausting!
For a shut-in dragon that spent its days lock-picking, loafing, overeating, sneaking, and watching the drama unfold, any effort beyond the minimum felt unbearably tiring.
What's more~~~
The violet scales drifting in the air posed a new problem. The earlier distortion in its invisibility had been caused entirely by these scales.
The moment its body made contact with them, the scales attempted to invade through its hide. Chameleos's bioelectric currents reacted instantly, purging the scales in defense. Yet in doing so, its perfect camouflage momentarily faltered.
In this environment, maintaining flawless invisibility would not be easy.
Worse still, within those scales, Chameleos had sensed a kind of biological feedback—an indication that the scales' master could, to some extent, observe the surroundings through them.
Realizing this, a strong urge to withdraw welled up within it.
An opponent with wide-ranging biological perception was the last enemy it wanted to face, bar none.
Its invisibility, however perfect, was still only invisibility—it was not true disappearance. If even its toxins failed to disrupt the other's senses, then Chameleos's greatest advantage would be nullified.
Direct combat was not its style.
But… leaving just like this—wouldn't that seem a little too lame?
After all, it had already come all this way. For a shut-in dragon, to travel this far only to slink back without doing anything—it wasn't just a blow to pride, it also felt like a huge waste.
Its round eyes swirled with hesitation, while its curled tail twitched uneasily. In the end, Chameleos decided to stay a while longer and test things out.
At the very least, it could spread its mist once—to get a clearer sense of the situation.
With this thought in mind, a white haze slowly seeped from its body.
This was the poisonous mist Chameleos had developed during its encounters with Frenzy-afflicted monsters. Since Frenzy was irreversible, creatures that succumbed to it became nothing more than nourishment for the world.
And with the Rotten Vale nearby to better consume and recycle these corpses, Chameleos felt freer than ever to release its mist—expansive as it wished, swift as it wished. The goal was simple: maximum spread, maximum speed.
Thus, within the thickening mist, Chameleos's violet form grew faintly visible and hidden by turns.
In the sky above, white fog intertwined with black scales. To its surprise, this specially concocted biological toxin produced an extraordinary reaction when it met the Frenzy Virus scales in their inorganic state.
Normally, Frenzy Virus scales had to enter a living body and react with certain substances in the blood before they could transform into organic matter. Yet here, upon touching the poison mist, they began to convert right in midair. In less than three seconds, the transition from inorganic to organic was complete.
Lacking the protection of blood, the exposed Frenzy Virus, once it again encountered the mist, rapidly withered. It decayed, lost vitality, and died outright.
By sheer accident, Chameleos had stumbled upon a poison mist capable of restraining the Frenzy Virus.
Perhaps this owed something to the dense life energy of the New World, or perhaps it was connected to the countless potions from the Research Commission it had been guzzling for years.
Either way, without realizing it, through instinctive choices shaped by the ecosystem, Chameleos's body had begun to undergo subtle, almost imperceptible changes.
As for why the poison mist—despite suppressing the Frenzy Virus—still brought death to Frenzied monsters, the likely answer was simple: they could not handle the strain.
Chameleos's mist was still poison, not medicine. The immune systems and resistance of Frenzied monsters had already been driven to their limits by the virus. Once Chameleos's toxins entered their bodies, killing the virus, it dragged the monsters down with it.
Realizing that its mist could wipe out these annoying pests all at once, Chameleos leapt about gleefully on all fours, its tail whipping through the air like a banner—like a child at heart, despite being a creature over 24 meters long and hundreds of years old!
At this very moment, however, the overjoyed Chameleos—slipping once more into its invisible state—had no idea that its mass eradication of Frenzy Virus scales had already drawn the attention of a Shagaru Magala glowing with golden light.
Wings sliced through the clouds. By now, Shagaru Magala had long since begun searching for and gathering the scattered Gore Magala. Through its unique perception of them, coupled with the feedback from its own scales, it could easily locate the Gore Magala hidden within the Coral Highlands.
Counting them one by one, there were still as many as eight!
To Shagaru Magala, this was utterly inconceivable.
It had been in this region for days, and in its judgment, the ecosystem here was remarkably stable. There were even traces of other Elder Dragons frequenting the area. In such an environment, the survival of so many Gore Magala without being eradicated was completely beyond its expectations.
Under normal circumstances, in a stable ecosystem, without the protection of Shagaru Magala, there was no room at all for Gore Magala to exist. Only around Heaven's Mount—the ancestral homeland of both Gore Magala and Shagaru Magala—where human presence was scarce and life seldom intruded, did they have the soil to survive.
And even there, they remained targets of relentless hunting, leaving not a single Shagaru Magala able to live as long as other Elder Dragons would.
Thus, for this Shagaru Magala, the objective was singular: to take every Gore Magala it had converted into its "kin" through its scales and lead them back.
But now, the one who had begun annihilating its scales on a massive scale, undermining its very perception—that intruder had drawn Shagaru Magala's full attention.
It had to see what was going on.
And if necessary, it would drive the interloper away!
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