Chapter 6

Chapter 6: The Devil Beasts Arrived

Every beastman in the clearing changed color in the same instant—as if the drumbeat had reached into their chests and squeezed.

“The devil beasts are here!”

The shout tore through the air, and panic surged behind it.

Tribal Shaman Grom moved like lightning. “All females—shift into beast form. Now. Move to His Highness the Beast God’s hidden cave!”

Ashley transformed first. Her body shrank into a mouse a little over a foot long, gray-blue fur gleaming sleek along her sides. Her clothes dropped in a heap, forgotten.

“Follow me!” she called, her voice human even through a mouse mouth.

She seized her clothes in her teeth and sprinted ahead.

Su Yan didn’t follow. She turned her head and called to Little Luo, “I’m going home. I’m not going to the hidden cave.”

She shifted before anyone could argue—into a little white mouse —and hopped onto Little Luo’s shoulder. Instinct told her his body was safer than Ashley’s path.

Little Luo understood. Su Yan wasn’t close with the other females, and the Mi Lu Te family had hidden caves of their own.

Mice dug. It was what they did. A few secret burrows were nothing.

Grom didn’t force Su Yan either. If she didn’t want to follow Ashley, that was her choice.

Grom shifted into mouse form, then led the other females—also now mice—toward His Highness the Beast God’s hidden cave.

Little Luo adjusted Su Yan gently on his shoulder. “Sister, I’ll take you home first.”

“Okay,” Su Yan said.

She barely got the word out before Lin Lang’s hand closed around her.

He lifted her like she weighed nothing. “Come with me,” he said. “Watch me kill devil beasts.”

Su Yan kicked and twisted. “No! I refuse!”

Little Luo’s lips parted, but under Lin Lang’s crushing presence, the words died before they could form.

“I paid the dowry,” Lin Lang said, voice hard as stone. “You’re my female now.”

He shoved her into the pouch at his chest.

“No, I haven’t—mmph!”

His palm clamped over her mouth, sealing her protest behind it.

…The devil beasts attacking the Mouse Clan tribe were wolf beasts—gray-brown hulks with muscle like coiled rope.

They reared up on hind legs and stood over three meters tall. Their fangs glistened with green, poisonous slime that stretched in strings when they snapped their jaws. Their red slit pupils burned with starving brutality, the kind that wanted to tear, crush, and devour until nothing remained.

Su Yan poked her tiny head out of Lin Lang’s pouch, saw the wolves, and immediately shrank back. “Can you kill them?” she asked, voice thin.

Lin Lang’s answer was a short, almost taunting, “What do you think?”

Power exploded off him.

The ground answered.

A deep rumble rolled underfoot as the earth trembled. Cracks split open in jagged lines, and from those fissures, stone spikes surged upward—sharp, hard, relentless—thrusting toward the pack like spears launched by the land itself.

Su Yan stared, stunned. “You’re incredible!”

Lin Lang didn’t relax.

Something was wrong.

These devil beasts weren’t like the ones he usually fought. Their red eyes looked… wrong, as if something unseen was gripping them by the mind and steering them like puppets.

A wolf threw its head back and spat out a blade of wind—then another, then another. The wind blades shrieked through the air, slicing stone spikes apart. Wolves leapt, agile and vicious, crashing into Mouse Clan beastmen with snapping teeth and tearing claws.

And then—

A shadow loomed.

A massive brown bear devil beast appeared, over ten meters tall, its bulk blotting out the space behind it like a moving cliff.

It opened its mouth and swallowed a mouse beastman whole.

Su Yan recognized the beastman instantly.

Kane Xue Zha De Lin—the one who had stood with Lin Lang earlier, watching the ceremony.

Lin Lang saw his friend vanish down that throat, and fury flared through him like wildfire. He charged straight at the bear.

The bear’s red eyes burned, too. It raised a paw—huge as a boulder—and slammed down.

Lin Lang moved to dodge—

—and froze.

His body didn’t respond.

“This is… a domain.” His eyes went wide with disbelief. “How is that possible?”

He forced his head down toward Su Yan in his pouch. “Can you move? If you can, run!”

Su Yan couldn’t move at all.

And with Lin Lang’s hand still sealing her mouth, she couldn’t even answer.