Chapter 569 Still a Chance!

Dodd did not know exactly what kind of monster he had become after his Fourth Evolution.

He could certainly feel the changes in his body, but even after years of adventuring in the Southern Archipelagos, he had no recollection of this rare monster from some unknown corner of the inland deserts.

Yet, just as birds in the sky were born knowing how to flap their wings, and fish in the water needed no teaching to flick their fins and tails, instinct took over.

Even though Dodd knew nothing about the kind of monster he was possessing, he instinctively mastered its newly acquired abilities right after evolving.

First of all, one thing had to be made clear.

It was true that his evolutionary path had fallen short of expectations, differing vastly from the planned "giant dragon," but that did not mean Dodd's overall combat prowess was weak.

On one hand, he had already reached the Fourth Evolution stage. On the other, even though his evolutionary path had gone astray, his superior base race still provided a substantial boost thanks to its solid foundation.

Then came his actual combat capabilities.

Though the six-legged lizard he now possessed was crystal-clear, as if forged from glass, it was exceptional in both its defensive capabilities and its overall physical attributes.

This had been proven two days earlier, when an adventurer possessing a monster crocodile—one that had likely reached its Third Evolution—ambushed him from a small nearby swamp. Clamping down on Dodd's flank, the crocodile attempted a "death roll," only to shatter its entire mouth of sharp teeth. Completely unharmed, Dodd countered with a backhand swipe of his claw, smashing the creature's skull to pieces.

Most crucially, he now possessed decent spellcasting ability.

At its core was a spellcasting organ—a single horn jutting from his forehead—that allowed him to manipulate earth elements to a degree and launch specialized evocation attacks.

These included earth spikes bursting abruptly from the ground, or sand and dust condensed in midair to obstruct an enemy's vision.

Of course, these were hardly advanced spells—many were merely basic applications of magical energy—but against primitive beasts that fought purely with fangs and claws, they gave him an overwhelming advantage.

Beyond that, this translucent, glass-like lizard body possessed a rare survival ability that ensured he could pull through even under extreme circumstances.

Taking all of this together, even though "Algae Scale" Dodd's evolution had completely deviated from his original plan, he was not overly disappointed. He still retained complete confidence in his combat prowess.

He moved remarkably fast.

The six short, thick legs jutting from the sides of his torso did not look built for speed, but his natural affinity for earth energy allowed him to draw a surge of power from the soil with every step.

Earthy-yellow light lingered like footprints beneath his claws as his massive, near-transparent body glided swiftly through the forest, swaying its long tail like a slithering serpent.

Time was short. In his Perception, that Adventurer Squad with its clear advantage in numbers was already beginning to close in on his direction.

He intended to quickly dispatch this last remaining lone adventurer nearby—who had only survived this long by hiding—and absorb their life energy to cross the threshold of the Fifth Evolution.

Focusing entirely on the hunt, Dodd pressed forward at full speed, reaching the lone adventurer's position in his Perception in just a few minutes.

The two points of light marking adventurers now overlapped.

The massive, transparent lizard stood in place, its earthy-yellow vertical pupils sweeping carefully across the surroundings.

It was a thoroughly ordinary wooded slope with nothing remarkable about it, save for a mess of scattered footprints. The trees and shrubs bore obvious signs of devastation—clearly left by other adventurers who had come through earlier in search of the hidden target.

Just as he had suspected, this lone adventurer possessed an exceptionally powerful concealment ability.

Having already thought this through on the way, Dodd did not hesitate. The single horn on his forehead vibrated faintly, its surface flashing with bright, earthy-yellow light as magical particles instantly gathered thick around him.

Whoosh—

As a sudden gale whipped through the woods, countless fine grains of sand materialized out of the air.

Dodd had conjured a localized sandstorm.

His possessed monster's natural adaptation to such environments meant Dodd's vision was not obstructed in the slightest. Instead, using the swirling sand infused with his own magical particles, he carefully probed for anything suspicious across the surrounding area, from the ground all the way up to the boundary of the secret realm overhead.

The result, naturally, was nothing.

Neither the surrounding woods nor the air held any sign of a concealed monster.

Glancing again at the overlapping points of light in his Perception, Dodd showed no disappointment.

He had anticipated as much; the sweep had merely been a precaution against any surprises.

His ferocious lizard head lowered slowly, cold vertical pupils fixing on the ground ahead.

Across that face of translucent scales crept a streak of cruelty unique to intelligent beings.

"Little mouse, hiding underground after all?"

For Dodd, this was without question the ideal scenario.

After all, manipulating earth elements was what his current body did best.

If his target were hovering in midair or hiding in some temporary planar fold, he truly would have had few options.

But if they were buried deep underground, cocooned in soil, they were right in his element. He had ten thousand ways to finish them off.

Hum!

An earthy-yellow light flared abruptly through the trees.

Dense magical particles rippled outward from the horn on the lizard's brow, enveloping its entire body.

The rock-hard earth beneath his feet, tangled with gravel and grass roots that would have defied even an iron shovel, suddenly turned as soft and viscous as a mire. The massive lizard sprang forward and down as if diving into water, slipping seamlessly into the depths and leaving behind only a dark, deep hole that slowly contracted shut.

Surrounded by packed dirt and shattered stone rather than the desert sand his creature was built for, his burrowing speed was ultimately a touch slower than on the surface.

Still, with the point of light marking the adventurer's position in his Perception already overlapping with his own, there was no need for a wider search.

Dodd dug straight down.

Unexpectedly, this lone survivor's hiding spot lay extraordinarily deep. Even with his speed, Dodd had tunneled through the earth for quite some time without finding a thing.

He couldn't help finding it strange.

Yet on second thought, it made sense.

Among the adventurers swept into the secret realm, there was certainly no shortage of those who could move freely underground. If the target were truly that easy to find, Dodd would never have been the one to claim the prize.

Even as he mulled it over, he felt the earth beneath him—which had been parting smoothly like muddy water under his magic—suddenly harden, dragging his burrowing speed down a notch.

Dodd was not disappointed in the slightest; instead, a gleam of delight surfaced on his all-too-human lizard face.

"Found you!"

A sudden shift in the terrain had to have a cause, and at this juncture, he naturally tied it to the adventurer most likely hiding deep below.

With that in mind, Dodd instinctively quickened his digging.

Subterranean tunneling made too much noise to conceal; rather than creeping forward only to be detected anyway, it was far better to pour on the speed and hit the adventurer with a direct assault before they could react.

And just as "Algae Scale" Dodd had anticipated, after barely two more minutes of burrowing downward, he finally caught sight of the cowardly, cunning survivor's hiding place.

Boom—

The earth beneath his sharp claws gave way all at once, crumbling into a shower of falling dirt.

A bright, warm glow flooded into Dodd's tunnel, forcing his eyes to narrow on instinct.

When he opened them again, an indescribably dazzling expanse of gold filled his vision.

Before his mind could even process what he was seeing, he tumbled fully into his destination, and the scalding air of the vast lair—heavy with the thick reek of sulfur—rushed into his nostrils.

Hum—

A colorless, formless, and indescribably vast pressure slammed down upon him.

It was an instinctual suppression rooted deep in bloodlines—a higher creature perched at the very peak of the food chain exerting absolute dominance over things too frail to even be called "prey."

In that moment, Dodd felt as if the surrounding air had been drained away and his heart had stopped beating altogether.

His consciousness was blasted to pieces in an instant. His thoughts scattered like willow catkins tossed on a gale, drifting and fraying across his mind, unable to coalesce into a single coherent thought. His head went entirely blank, his soul as good as torn from his body.

This was a sensation Algae Scale Dodd had never experienced in all his life.

He could only twist his neck on pure instinct, turning rigid, slitted lizard pupils toward a spot across the massive, gold-carpeted cavern below.

What met his eyes was a magnificent, undulating mountain range clad entirely in brownish-red scales.

He might have exaggerated the scale of what he saw, but with his mental defenses shattered completely by Dragon Might, that was genuinely how it felt to Dodd.

His pupils contracted sharply!

'A dragon! A red dragon!'

In that instant, the survival instincts of this monstrous flesh seized complete control of Dodd's mind.

He did not stop to wonder why tunneling straight toward the signal in his Perception had broken into the subterranean lair of a giant dragon; nor did he pause to consider why an adventurer who had merely scraped by until now would be hiding beside such a behemoth, much less guess what species of monster they might inhabit.

Dodd moved on pure instinct. In a flustered, undignified, almost comical posture, he braced his six stubby legs against the rim of the breach and held his breath. Step by agonizing step, with the most careful movements to avoid drawing the notice of the dragon below, he hitched his body backward.

Only when the breach he had labored so hard to dig out was quietly resealed through a delicate manipulation of magical particles did he violently bolt, scrambling frantically toward the surface.

'Why?!'

'Why?!'

The primal survival instincts of his beastly body tangled with his dragonborn soul's desperate craving to reach the Transcendent Tier.

'I was so close—just one final step left—'

'I can't die here! It absolutely cannot end like this!'

Terror-stricken after his sudden brush with a giant dragon, Dodd did not hesitate to play his ultimate trump card.

As the horn on his brow vibrated violently, an intensely concentrated shroud of yellow light wrapped itself across his body.

His already near-transparent, crystal-clear lizard body began to flicker erratically, like a faltering signal.

It was as though he were slipping intermittently into another plane, shifting between substance and phantom—vanishing in an instant, only to reappear a vast distance ahead.

His speed through the earth surged in an instant to an astonishing level.

Meanwhile, deep underground.

Nourished by all the life energy that had conveniently delivered itself to his doorstep, Alton had already grown into the Young Dragon Stage and was nearing adulthood, yet his nominal red dragon mother had not chased him out of the lair.

Instead, he was simply lying idly atop a pile of gold coins.

—

A lazy flick of his tail swept away the rubble and dust that had sprinkled onto his body.

Slitted pupils glanced up toward the bare stone vault where the noise had broken out, but it failed to hold his interest.

He had inexplicably wound up possessing a red dragon. Though amusing at first, after so many days even someone with a Halfling's temperament was beginning to grow bored.

'I hope this ends soon. It would be best if I could go back today.'

Alton thought. A wave of drowsiness suddenly washed over him; he let out a yawn, tucked in his wings and limbs, and curled up into a deep slumber.

Crash!

Across the battered woodland blanketed in yellow sand from the storm, an explosive boom suddenly erupted.

Like a fish leaping from the water, a massive figure caked head to tail in soil burst violently from the earth, spraying mud in all directions.

Carried by too much momentum to keep its balance, the colossal lizard crashed onto the meadow, tumbling twice before scrambling back onto its feet.

Clearly, that life-saving trump card—much like a gecko shedding its tail to survive—had taken a heavy toll on Dodd.

—

His once crystal-clear, nearly transparent body had reverted to the cloudy, semi-translucent state it had held before his evolution, and the glow emanating from the horn on his brow was noticeably muted.

Still, he had made it back to the surface alive.

Better yet, the red dragon deep below seemed not to have noticed his presence.

"Huff... huff..."

Dodd panted heavily, his reviving mind racing as he analyzed the situation.

He refused to believe that the colossal red dragon from his terrified glimpse was the form possessed by that lone adventurer.

For one thing, as the architect of the secret realm, he knew perfectly well that every ritual participant began as a hatchling upon descent.

None of them could possibly have started out as a powerful adult monster.

And even with accelerated maturation, given the normal growth cycle of dragons, this brief window of time was nowhere near enough.

On the other hand, the target was hiding so deep and had likely barely moved since descending. The adventurers who could even reach them were few and far between, meaning whatever life energy they absorbed had to be minimal. There was simply no way they could have grown to such a size.

All things considered, Dodd—his reasoning fully restored—judged that this lone adventurer had most likely possessed some vassal creature belonging to the dragon, surviving this long merely by hiding behind its master's terrifying aura.

And even assuming the absolute worst-case scenario—that the adventurer had astronomical luck and, against odds slimmer than one in ten thousand, had truly inhabited a red dragon hatchling—

they would still be far from an adult, at most only in the Young Dragon Stage.

'As long as I can reach the Fifth Evolution stage, maybe—'

Spurring himself on, Algae Scale refused to give up hope.

After all, he was only one step away from the Fifth Evolution. So long as he absorbed even a fraction more life energy, he would achieve the most critical qualitative breakthrough since entering the secret realm.

When that time came, hemmed in by the steadily shrinking boundaries of the secret realm, even a genuine red dragon whelp would be forced out from its parent's protection to face him alone.

With that in mind, his attention turned toward the Adventurer Squad in his Perception—a four-man team that had somehow drawn remarkably close to him.

'There's still a chance—there's still a chance!'