The Dawn of the New World

"Did you people think I wouldn't be able to find if you just went underground?" Dai Zhi's tone of voice rose by a few octaves until he realized how pointless it was, at which point he took a deep breath to regain his composure.

"You can run but there is no hiding from me, not in this world. Everything and every one of you already belong to me. Fight as much as you want but at the end of the day, you only live when I allow you to."

With a forward thrust of his hand, Dai Zhi's palm forcefully attached to the Ade's forehead. His body moved back and forth in the air due to the sudden shock but he himself couldn't do anything other than stare back at Dai Zhi with a venomous gaze.

"Tsk tsk tsk, so much hate, if someone was to see you looking at me like that they would think I killed your loved ones or something..." he paused for a moment, trying to rack his brain before shrugging lightheartedly, "But then again, I might actually have killed a few of your relatives. Hahaha."

Dai Zhi's laughter filled the empty room. It was so loud in fact that even the wheezing and gasping coming from Ade was washed away in the howling. The sunlight coming in through the window suddenly dimmed and a darkness took hold of everything.

The shadows of all the furniture became bigger and darker until they covered all but Dai Zhi and Ade himself. A red viscous liquid started pouring out of Dai Zhi's skin, its volume increasing with every passing second.

It moved along his arms towards Ade where it started to engulf him from head to toe. In less than a minute he was completely immersed within this semi-transparent red liquid.

Dai Zhi's eyes shone brightly within the darkness, his expression becoming solemn as he murmured lightly, "Blood Arts: Sanguine Marionette."

A loud gurgling sound fulminated around the room the moment he finished talking and tendrils of some kind of dark matter came out of the shadows. It looked like they were alive as they blindly fumbled about for a moment before abruptly shooting towards Ade like they had caught his scent.

They shot into the red liquid but didn't stop there and continued moving forward, piercing Ade's skin and flesh. It started with around four tendrils but within a handful of seconds that number had increased to several hundred.

Ade's body shuddered nonstop. The whites of his eyes were visible and his teeth were grinding so hard that blood oozed out of his gums but it mixed with the semi-transparent liquid becoming darker and darker until his body wasn't even visible anymore.

It continued to harden until a sheen of leathery epidermis was formed around Ade. The shuddering gradually came to a stop as the obsidian chrysalis solidified.

The surface lost all its previous luster and within the next 10 minutes or so the darkened surface had become colorless. It became soft enough for Dai Zhi to finally pull back his arm.

He took out a piece of cloth and wiped off all the chunky viscous materials that were sticking to his skin. After about a minute the rest of the chrysalis softened and peeled away, allowing a dark-skinned creature to fall on the floor.

It was humanoid but the skin under the jaw, on its arms and legs was cracked. It was much thinner, almost half the width of a normal human but it was slightly taller and had elongated limbs.

It stood up and was a whole head taller than Dai Zhi. Its hunched back swayed back and forth until it opened its eyes, revealing a dark color with bright yellow pupils in the middle.

Its arms ended in extremely thin and long claws that reached the floor.

It opened its mouth, unfurling a half a meter long two-pronged tongue that ended with 5 centimeter long pointy teeth on each side.

"Ma...ster..."

It uttered the words slowly. The bottom half of its jaw cracked open, revealing a row of teeth on the side.

Dai Zhi was examining the creature up and down in excruciating detail, making a note of every mutation from its previous state.

"Very good. I wasn't expecting much to begin with but you managed to develop quite a bit. Come here," he extended his hand the creature walked forward.

Its tongue had a snake-like quality to it as it moved about in the air meeting Dai Zhi's hand and coiling around it.

Dai Zhi brushed his fingers on the tongue which had extremely small serrated backward-facing extensions on it.

Once the tongue had wrapped itself around its prey it would be next to impossible to break free from the grasp since each thorny extension would dig into the flesh if pulled away by force. But these thorns were as soft as silk around Dai Zhi's hand.

An odorless colorless viscous fluid was secreted from the pores in its tongue that caused a numbing effect on Dai Zhi's hand.

"This is a welcome surprise.. None of the others had such a drastic transformation."