Skinwalker Belle – Chapter 452 – Red Horn City

The light of the rift faded behind her.

The gray desolation in her vision was replaced by a dense expanse of lush green.

Lin Fan stepped onto the soft, decaying humus, the air thick with the damp scent of vegetation.

She rolled her shoulders twice, scanning her surroundings.

A remote stretch of forest.

The canopy overhead was so dense it blocked out nearly all daylight, leaving only a few mottled patches of light swaying on the ground.

In the distance, the faint sound of flowing water reached her ears.

No Space Stone had been used for positioning—the rift had simply dumped her into this wilderness.

It was exactly like her first step onto the Dragon Spirit Continent.

She glanced down at her attire.

The cyan silk hanfu stood out far too conspicuously in these woods.

Lin Fan willed it, and the Myriad-Change Witch’s talent within her activated.

A faint film of light cascaded down from the top of her head.

Her flowing white hair, which had shimmered with luster, instantly lost its sheen, overtaken by a deep, ink-green hue.

The strands that had reached her ankles rapidly shortened, settling at her back with naturally soft curls at the ends.

The bones of her face emitted faint cracking and twisting sounds.

That breathtaking visage—one look at which could make anyone utterly lose themselves—began to rearrange.

The refinement of her features was forcibly dialed down several notches, settling into a face that was merely pretty by ordinary standards.

The skin at the sides of her forehead split open.

A pair of dark-gold dragon horns emerged, their surfaces etched with fine, dense patterns.

Long Ningshuang.

It was a Collateral Dragonkin identity she found very convenient to use.

In the old Azurewood City, this identity had served her well.

But across the entire Dragon Spirit Continent, Long Ningshuang was nothing more than an utterly ordinary collateral female.

Due to the barrier imposed by bloodline restrictions, creatures of this collateral branch were, in the eyes of the Pureblood Dragon Clan, at best senior menial workers.

Unremarkable—and absolutely perfect for getting things done.

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She pulled a black-and-gold horse-face skirt from her System Space and changed into it, slipping on a pair of black cloth shoes and tossing the ostentatious hanfu back inside.

Mental Strength scan—thirty kilometers to the southeast, there was a city.

Based on the map information she had previously extracted from the memory fragments of the Pure-Blood Dragon Long Xuan—

Crimson Horn City.

A third-rate minor city under Pureblood Dragon Clan jurisdiction, surviving on mining and livestock.

The garrison numbered at most five hundred.

The city lord was a sixth-tier Collateral Dragonkin, barely qualifying as a tax-collecting contractor.

Getting there would take no effort at all.

Lin Fan didn’t rush at full speed, deliberately concealing the pressure of her Spiritual power radiating outward.

She looked down at the leaf-strewn path beneath her feet, her mind working through the intelligence Chu Chen had provided.

Those one hundred and three rifts on Blue Star were a variant of a spirit-gathering formation.

The Formation Eye was in Hangzhou.

Its purpose was to drain the life force of all humanity on Blue Star, supplying Long Hao’s breakthrough to the tenth tier.

The logic held together perfectly.

But there was one glaring inconsistency.

The Dragon Spirit Continent was dozens of times larger than Blue Star, and its Spirit Energy concentration wasn’t even on the same scale.

High-order beings here were as numerous as ox hairs.

If Long Hao simply lacked energy, he could have set up a lethal formation on his own turf and devoured a few major cities to get it done.

Why spend so many years laying groundwork on Blue Star?

Going so far as to painstakingly corrode the Federation’s upper echelons through drugs, using Wang Shan and his ilk to push the “Human Evolution Plan.”

And deliberately catalyzing the “Crystal Bone” within High-order Evolvers.

Crystal Bone.

Lin Fan rolled the two words around between her teeth.

When Evolved beings on Blue Star reached a certain level, their bones would harden and crystallize.

Her body had long since evolved beyond traditional skeletal structure, composed entirely of high-purity energy crystals.

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But on the Dragon Spirit Continent, no lifeform ever grew Crystal Bones, regardless of how far it evolved.

This was the fundamental difference between the two worlds’ species.

Chu Chen’s words had hit the mark—it was a product of Otherworld Spiritual Qi combining with Blue Star lifeforms.

Otherworld energy was the Dragon Clan’s cultivation environment.

Blue Star lifeforms carried human genetics.

When these two forces collided, they gave birth to Crystals and, at a higher level, Crystal Bones.

This was no simple clumping of energy.

When two completely different sets of dimensional rules clashed, they had forcibly forged a “brand-new substance” at this Rift intersection.

Long Hao had been stuck at the peak of the ninth rank for countless years.

He had likely consumed every resource the Dragon Spirit Continent had to offer, but the upper limit of the world’s rules was firmly locked in place. No matter how much he consumed, it was only quantitative change—unable to cross that threshold between species.

He needed a catalyst for qualitative transformation.

Crystal Bone might be the only key he could use to shatter the ceiling of the tenth rank.

Once she understood this, his practice of keeping humans penned up made perfect sense.

That old bastard wasn’t simply stealing life force—he was trying to undergo a metamorphosis at the level of the rules themselves, forcibly ascending to godhood.

And what about Hangzhou?

The massive spirit-gathering arrays scattered across the globe—why did the Formation Eye have to be nailed precisely to Hangzhou, the city where she had been reborn?

What taboo made that place special?

Was it the weakest node in the Spatial Barrier between the two worlds, or was there some other unspeakable reason?

Lin Fan vaguely felt that this was somehow causally connected to her own rise through the Skin System.

But she couldn’t be bothered to keep speculating.

Once she gathered two hundred Epic-grade Skins, fused with Long Xi, and completed her Bloodline of the Progenitor of Life—

She would charge straight into the Dragon Emperor Hall, split open that old bastard Long Hao’s skull, and search his soul.

Every damn rule and secret would be scraped clean.

Lin Fan didn’t follow that line of thought any further.

Half an hour later, the view opened up.

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Ahead stretched vast tracts of forcibly reclaimed wasteland, planted with broad-leaved purple crops.

Scattered among the fields were several extremely diminutive beastmen, digging the soil with crude iron tools.

Hearing the sound of footsteps, the beastmen looked up and swept wary glances over her.

When their eyes touched the pair of dark-golden dragon horns on her forehead, the low-ranking beastmen immediately dropped their farming implements, bowed their heads as low as they could, not daring to breathe too loudly.

On this continent, bloodline rank was an insurmountable mountain.

Anyone bearing dragon traits—even a mere branch family member—was a living judge of life and death to these bottom-feeders.

She continued another kilometer forward.

The gray-brown, crumbling city walls of Red Horn City came fully into view.

Low and shabby.

At the city gate, a few ore carts pulled by horned horses were lined up, giving off a pungent smell.

Two werewolf guards in worn leather armor were inspecting each one.

Lin Fan maintained a leisurely pace and took her place at the end of the line.

About a dozen steps from the city gate.

She caught sight of a half-dead tree trunk, two people tall, by the roadside. A piece of beast-hide paper was nailed to it with two thick wooden spikes.

A wanted poster.

Bounty: ten thousand third-rank Crystals.

Dead or alive.

The seal at the bottom bore the dark-red stamp of the Dragon Emperor Hall’s Council of Elders.

The illustration was a woman drawn in black ink.

White hair, white robes, and a pair of eyes rendered with the fierce aura of someone who would skin you alive and break your bones.

Lin Fan stepped closer and stopped in front of the wanted poster.

With a sketch artist this lousy, they might as well try to catch someone across the entire continent with a child’s drawing.

He glanced at the bounty amount.

The esteemed Council of Elders of the Pureblood Dragon Clan.

Wanted for the murder of three elders and five elders of an extremely dangerous person, yet they were only willing to offer ten thousand third-grade Crystals.

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That amount of money, in the current Azurewood City, was just one month’s revenue.

The Dragon Emperor Hall was just going through the motions. A woman who could piss on Long Zhan’s head—who would actually dare to go after her if they really encountered her?

Lin Fan withdrew his gaze and followed the ore cart ahead toward the city gate.

The fourth-grade werewolf guarding the gate caught the difference in her scent and looked up to meet the dark-gold Dragon horns on her forehead.

The werewolf immediately put on an extremely fawning expression, propped his short spear to the side, and waved her through with a sycophantic smile.

Lin Fan passed through the thick arched gateway of the city wall.

The moment she stepped inside.

The potholed dirt road reeked of a pungent mix of livestock manure and mineral dust.

The wooden and stone buildings on both sides were dilapidated, with years of accumulated dust hanging from the eaves.

Lin Fan wore a black-and-gold horse-face skirt, walking with steady, measured steps and impeccable poise.

This outfit suited Long Ningshuang’s status as Collateral Dragonkin.

After having seen Azurewood City’s smooth asphalt roads, bright streetlights, and modern sewage system, looking at Redhorn City now was like looking at a massive slum.

She needed to spread her Mental Strength two inches beneath her feet to keep her skirt hem and black cloth shoes from touching the disgusting mud.

Too backward.

A place with no infrastructure whatsoever didn’t even have the value of harvesting faith.

There were few people on either side of the street.

Lin Fan walked to a stone-built crossroads ahead.

At the center of the intersection stood a wooden board specifically used for posting government decrees.

Aside from a few tattered scraps of paper about mining tax collection, the very center held a brightly colored fresh animal hide nailed in place.

It wasn’t an ordinary announcement.

It was a mandatory conscription order.

“By the death decree of the Council of Elders of the Dragon Emperor Hall, Redhorn City shall henceforth forcibly conscript all Evolved beings of fifth-grade and above within the city to assemble at White Bone Pass and await orders.”

Lin Fan’s gaze froze on those three words.

White Bone Pass.