Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

He suddenly realized: it really was Deadpool.

not human.

It's Deadpool.

He repeated the sentence to himself three times.

Deadpool is not human. The moment they fell into depravity, they lost their human souls.

...Then why did it feel so bad when I kicked its chest?

He didn't say it aloud.

The serpentine corpse fell into the darkness below the elevator shaft.

But it didn't land.

The expected dull thud did not come.

It was torn to pieces halfway there.

Suddenly, dozens of golden pupils lit up in the darkness at the bottom of the well.

Pair after pair, like candles lit one after another in a cemetery. Their light flickered, chillingly cold. Greedily, thirstily, impatiently, they stretched out their sharp claws to meet the falling, still-warm corpses of their kind.

The female Deadpool was intercepted mid-air.

A dozen or even twenty pairs of bony, hook-like claws simultaneously pierced its body from all directions. Some grabbed its calves, some pierced its waist and abdomen, some seized its arms, and some went straight through its chest.

Then they exert force in different directions—

Tear it open.

Black blood rained down.

In the darkness, those golden pupils all looked up, gazing at the well opening, at the source of the light, and at the presence of living beings.

A horde of Deadpools are climbing up the steel frame.

The female assassin who attacked Chu Zihang was the smallest and most agile of them all, which is why it crawled the fastest. At this moment, its remains were being devoured by its kind, not even having time to utter a mournful cry.

Behind it, below it, there were dozens, even hundreds, of similar figures.

Long tails coiled around angle iron, deformed limbs clung to vertical steel beams, their movements somewhere between apes, snakes, and spiders. They were incredibly fast, leaping three or four meters with each bound, the sound of scales rubbing against metal creating a chilling rustling noise.

Caesar shivered violently.

He had only seen similar sights in one place.

Gao Tianyuan.

The Nest of Corpses.

He sat in the cramped cockpit of the Trieste, gazing up at the city that had been submerged for millennia through the thick portholes. Above the dark dome, thousands upon thousands of corpses awoke like upside-down bats; they fell, they unfurled their membranous wings, they ascended to the heavens like a flock of dragons.

That was the dragons' rehearsal for the end times, prepared for humanity.

And now, he finds himself once again in the lair of demons.

"Your pet?"

Caesar's voice was as cold as if it had been chilled to the bone. He loosened the young man's collar, grabbed his tie, and pulled him close enough that their breaths met in the air.

“Even if I were to keep such a thing,” Genji said calmly, almost indifferently, “I wouldn’t keep it in my own home. Just like the U.S. Department of Defense wouldn’t build a nuclear weapons base in the Pentagon’s basement.”

He did not evade, struggle, or display the agitation often seen when defending himself. He simply looked directly into Caesar's eyes and stated his case, word by word.

"That's common sense, Caesar Gattuso. You should know that."

Caesar did not immediately let go.

His thumb was still pressed against Genjiro's Adam's apple, and through that thin layer of skin, he could feel the pulse of the artery—steady, even, without any acceleration. There was none of the physiological reaction commonly seen when lying.

He hesitated.

Upon seeing a horde of Deadpools, anyone's first thought would be: there must be their nest nearby, someone is keeping them, just like when you see a group of snakes intertwined and flicking their tongues, you would subconsciously think that you have approached a snake's den.

But Genjiro's rebuttal is also logical.

Even if the Snake Clan were incredibly ruthless, even if they were willing to raise undead for their research, they wouldn't build their breeding base in the heart of their headquarters. If security measures failed, if these out-of-control creatures broke free of their cages, the building would become a living hell within minutes.

No madman would turn his home into a powder keg that could explode at any moment.

Unless what he wants is an explosion.

Caesar slowly loosened his grip.

He still doesn't believe Genjiro.

Chu Zihang pulled a light stick from the inside pocket of his trench coat.

As standard, each trench coat has several dedicated slots in its lining, each containing a few palm-length plastic tubes. He bent them a few times, and the chemicals inside mixed and reacted, emitting a bright, non-scorching orange light.

He threw it into the elevator shaft.

The light stick spun and fell, tracing a bright arc.

Where the light reaches, the darkness recedes layer by layer.

In the first second, it illuminated the five-meter-deep well wall. Concrete, steel frame, rusty maintenance ladder, and several pairs of golden eyes attached to the steel beams, quickly disappearing into the shadows.

In the second, it illuminated the ten-meter-deep well. More steel frames, denser beams, and layers upon layers of long tails wrapped around them. Those tails were as thick as an adult's arm and as thin as an infant's wrist; some were bluish-gray, some were deathly pale, and some were a vibrant, tender pink, freshly shed.

In the third second, it illuminated the bottom of the well, twenty meters deep, and everything there.

The flare fell right in the center of the Deadpool group.

The orange light instantly outlined the contours of hundreds of twisted, coiled, and writhing bodies.

They clung to every steel beam, every crossbar, every inch of surface they could climb. They secured themselves with their long tails, scratched at the metal with their sharp claws, and looked up with their golden, never-closing eyes.

Looking up at the well opening.

Looking up at the light.

Looking up at living things.

The quantity cannot be counted.

Maybe eighty, maybe one hundred and twenty.

Perhaps more.

Chapter 684 The Abyss of the Elevator Shaft

Several elevators are still in operation.

The metal carriage moved slowly and rhythmically up and down in this abyss, brushing past layers upon layers of deadly servants, intersecting with them at very close range. Each brush was accompanied by the sound of claws scraping against metal.

The people inside the sedan chair must have heard it.

A strange, continuous sound, like something trying to tear open the sheet metal.

Heavy, damp breathing seeped in through the crack in the door.

Then came the screams.

Separated by tens of meters of thick concrete and the double-layered alloy doors of the high-speed elevator, Caesar and his companions could not hear the screams.

But they all knew that scream was there.

It's like a diver looking through thick seawater and knowing that on the deck of the ship above him, someone is crying because he hasn't returned.

"Have you ever seen a Deadpool with a long snake tail like this?" Chu Zihang's voice was a little hoarse. He was still rubbing his throat, where there was a clear, purplish-red ligature mark.

“No.” Caesar’s gaze remained fixed on the dense golden specks at the bottom of the well. “The Deadpools I’ve seen all have varying degrees of distortion, but their general appearance is still human. Some have extra fingers, some have bone spurs that shouldn’t be there under their skin, and some have eyeballs that are so large they take up half their face. But, none of them have snake tails.”

He paused.

"I have only seen this human-bodied, snake-tailed figure in three places."

"Takamagahara."

"Mural Hall".

and also--

"In the textbook of Demonology."

In Professor Senoy's brick-thick book, *The Genealogy of Dragons and Related Myths*, Chapter Nine, Appendix Part Three, among the few pages of color illustrations printed on coated paper, is a medieval woodcut: a naked woman rises from the sea, her long hair like seaweed, her legs fused into a winding, scaly serpent's tail. Behind her is a sinking ship, masts broken, sails torn, sailors struggling in the waves. The Latin inscription below the painting reads: "Siren."

The siren in ancient Greek mythology, who lured sailors to their deaths by singing.

Those beings described as "half-man, half-bird" in Homer's epics, who evolved into "half-man, half-fish" in later legends—

The prototype of the mermaid.

Chu Zihang nodded.

"It's very similar to the mermaid corpse guardian in Takamagahara."

Caesar understood his subtext.

The mermaids in Takamagahara are the guardians of the dead. They are ancient hybrids killed by the power of the Dragon King six thousand years ago, preserved to this day by the high pressure and low temperature of the deep sea and the effects of alchemy. Their bodies have decayed, but their spirits remain, becoming the guards of the burial grounds of the gods.

This is also the definition of the Corpse Guardian: a weapon sealed at the boundary between death and resurrection using alchemy.

But these things are alive.

They bleed, they breathed, they ate.

They tear apart the corpses of their own kind with their sharp claws and stuff the warm entrails into their mouths.

The difference between a Corpse Guardian and a Deadpool is not a difference in biological classification, but a difference between life and death.

Ancient creatures that should have long been extinct have been resurrected in the heart of Shinjuku, Tokyo, inside a modern building made of steel and glass.

"Their distortions are induced."

Genjiro's voice broke the moment of deathly silence.

Caesar and Chu Zihang turned to him at the same time.

"Triggered?" Caesar frowned. "What do you mean?"

“The characteristic of dragon blood is that it greatly activates genes.” Yuan Zhisheng leaned against the remaining edge of the screen wall, the seven bullet holes in his abdomen starkly visible under the light. “This activation is disordered and uncontrollable. It leads to all sorts of random and unpredictable mutations: scaly body mutations, bone mutations, blood mutations…”