Lin Hao moved.
He didn't stop to shower. He didn't bother to find a shirt. He was still caked in the foul, dried-tar remnants of his [Level 6: Marrow Cleansing], his bare torso, arms, and cargo pants a mess of black grime. He was a monster, moving to hunt other monsters.
He stepped out of his hidden warehouse and into the cold, midnight air of the industrial park.
Then, he pushed.
His [Level 3: Tendon Connection] and [Level 4: Bone Forged] legs, powered by the internal Qi of a [Level 6] cultivator, became high-tension springs.
He didn't "run." The action was too human, too inefficient.
He flew.
He wasn't a blur of motion; he was a ghost. His feet barely touched the pavement as he crossed the derelict, three-kilometer exclusion zone. Streetlights, broken fences, and abandoned cars passed by in a silent, fluid, dream-like rush. The wind howled past his ears, the only sound he registered.
The three-kilometer distance from his warehouse to the campus gate, a thirty-minute walk for a mortal, he crossed in fifty-eight seconds.
He vaulted the ten-foot brick wall of the campus, landing on the grass of the quad as silently as a falling leaf.
He arrived to absolute chaos.
The campus was a warzone. Red and blue emergency lights from a BSA jeep strobed across the buildings, painting the scene in flashes of panic. A high-pitched, terrified scream was coming from the direction of the main library, nearly drowned out by a sound he'd only heard in nature documentaries: the snarling, vicious, territorial barking of a wild pack.
And... CRACK. SMASH. The sound of something heavy and determined hitting glass.
Lin Hao moved toward the noise, his [Level 6] senses cutting through the panic.
He saw them. The "A-Team."
Two men in brand-new, black BSA combat uniforms. They were on the ground, twenty feet from the library entrance. One was screaming, clutching his leg, which was a mangled, bloody ruin of shredded tactical pants and flesh. The other was on his back, feebly trying to kick away one of the dogs, his [Level 2: Adept] strength, which would have seemed god-like yesterday, proving utterly useless against the feral, [Level 1]-infused creature.
And then he saw the "bait."
Huddled against the library's main glass doors, trapped in the small, well-lit atrium, were three students.
Su Yun was there, just as the text had said. Her face was paper-white, her hands pressed against the glass, tears of pure, unadulterated terror streaming down her face.
Beside her was a large, heavyset boy", Fatty Zhang" who was holding a-desktop printer above his head, his knuckles white, ready to use it as a club. He was screaming, "GET BACK! GET THE HELL BACK!"
A third student, a girl he didn't recognize, was crumpled on the floor behind them, sobbing hysterically.
The glass doors were a spiderweb of cracks. The pack was winning.
Lin Hao stopped, a statue in the shadows of the quad, 100 feet away. He took in the full scene.
It was worse than he'd thought. It wasn't the small, four-dog pack from that morning.
There were ten of them.
The Reiki of the last 48 hours had been a catalyst. They were visibly, horribly mutated. Their bodies were unnaturally dense, muscles bunched and knotted under patchy, matted fur. Saliva, thick and stringy, dripped from their black-gummed jaws.
And their eyes. They weren't just "red-glinting" anymore. They were glowing. A deep, baleful, crimson light, like ten pairs of red-hot coals in the darkness.
They were all, at minimum, [Level 1: Iron Skin]. They were slamming their bodies against the reinforced glass, over and over, their bony skulls and tough hides taking the impact without even flinching.
The glass cracked again, a long fissure splitting from top to bottom. It wouldn't hold for another minute.
The pack leader, the scruffy terrier from that morning, now the size of a small wolf, was directing the attack, snarling and snapping.
Then, it stopped.
It stopped slamming its body into the glass. It lifted its bloody muzzle from the leg of the downed BSA guard. It went utterly still.
It sniffed the air.
It had smelled him. It had sensed the dense, pure, [Level 6] beacon of power that was Lin Hao.
The crimson-red eyes, full of feral, blood-mad rage, swiveled. They passed over the screaming students, over the downed guards, and locked onto the shadows of the quad.
The pack leader's gaze, glowing with supernatural light, met Lin Hao's calm, cold, hungry ones.
The real threat had arrived.