Victory's sweetness was as fleeting as morning dew. The shelter reeked of blood and char, its broken walls a silent testament to the battle's ferocity. Survivors moved like ghosts, clearing debris and carrying away their fallen, their faces etched with exhaustion and grief.
Lin Yuan's wounds stabilized under Su Qingxue's precise care. He stood on the broken ramparts, Qingxue silent beside him, both gazing at the scarred land.
"We won," Lin Yuan's voice was hoarse. "But the cost…"
Qingxue squeezed his hand, her cool touch a anchor. "We're alive. That's what matters."
The tally was grim. Over thirty percent of their people were dead, countless more gravely wounded, their defenses in ruins. It was a pyrrhic victory.
"We rebuild. Fast. The Black Dragon remnants, or other scavengers, will come," Lin Yuan commanded. The shelter buzzed with renewed purpose—tending wounds, repairing fortifications, inventorying salvaged supplies.
Searching the bodies of Long Aotian and Long Xiaotian, Lin Yuan found two tokens, inlaid with a black dragon sigil. They were cold to the touch, made of an unknown material. He pocketed them; his instincts said they were important.
In the following days, the shelter became a hive of frantic activity. Driven by the will to live, they worked miracles. Lin Yuan and Su Qingxue's authority was now absolute; they were the undisputed leaders, the heart of this small pocket of resistance.
Lin Yuan solidified his Level 10 power and honed his [Energy Perception]. Su Qingxue mastered her A-Rank ice abilities, even learning to craft intricate tools and weapons from ice.
But Lin Yuan's unease only grew.
Through his perception, he felt the ecosystem warping. Zombie and mutant numbers were plummeting, their movements becoming coordinated, as if herded by an unseen hand. The ambient energy itself sometimes twisted and gathered unnaturally.
"Qingxue, do you feel it?" he asked her one night as she repaired a wall with ice.
She paused, frowning. "Yes. The energy flows are wrong. Like the calm before a storm. Something vast… ancient… is stirring."
They shared a look of shared understanding. The Black Dragon Society might have just been the prelude.
At dawn the next day, his fears materialized.
A sentry stumbled back, face white with terror, his voice a strangled shriek. "They're back… more of them! A black tide… it stretches to the horizon!"
Lin Yuan and Qingxue were on the watchtower in an instant.
To the northwest, a moving "black tide" advanced. Not an army, but a legion of thousands of zombies and grotesquely mutated beasts, moving with a terrifying, unified purpose. The pressure they exerted dwarfed that of the Black Dragon.
At the head of this death march stood a gaunt figure in archaic black robes, holding a staff topped with a skull. The blood-red gem in it pulsed with a malevolent light a hundred times stronger than the one "Corpse Controller" Mo Xie had wielded.
He lifted his head. Two points of crimson light fixed on the shelter from under his hood. A rasping, non-human voice, like the chorus of a thousand damned souls, echoed in every mind:
"Sinners who defile the God's servants… offer your flesh and souls as tribute. The true apocalypse… awaits."