Failure Is Not an Option!

The Black-Beast Demons were fast, but circling all the way up the escalators to the second floor and then looping back around to the elevator doors cost them time. That delay gave Mo Fan the breathing room he needed to throw himself into the emergency stairwell.

He ran. No looking back.

From memory, he knew the mall's third floor housed a heavily reinforced control room — he'd nearly barged into it himself once, back when he and Xinxia had come here shopping and he'd gone searching for a restroom. The walls there were far thicker than anything else in the building. If he could reach it, the Black-Beast Demons wouldn't be able to get to him — at least not right away.

The problem was their claws. Those things could shred car steel with a single swipe. A proper vault might hold against them, but a civilian security room was never built to withstand ten Demon-Beasts tearing at it indefinitely.

Still — buy time. That was all that mattered.

More importantly, that control room was his best shot at finding Ye Xinxia.

It was, in effect, the mall's surveillance center. Every camera in the complex fed back to those monitors, and the room ran on its own backup generator. Even after the mall lost power, the cameras should still be live.

He hit the third floor. The control room was close to the stairwell exit. As he reached the door, he could already hear the frantic footfalls and hungry, heaving breaths of the Black-Beast Demons somewhere in the stairwell below — then the crash and clatter of debris as they knocked over whatever was stored in the passage.

"Thank God it's not locked." Mo Fan spotted the control room and threw himself inside without breaking stride, slamming the heavy door shut behind him.

The moment the iron bolt drove home, a thunderous impact punched a deep dent into the door from the other side. One of the Black-Beast Demons had run straight into it.

The room was empty. Mo Fan swept his gaze across the monitors and immediately zeroed in on a camera near the control room — the feed showed all ten Black-Beast Demons converging in the corridor outside, trying every method they could think of to tear the room open.

*They probably can't break through that iron door quickly.* His eyes raced across the screens.

In front of him, the monitors formed a wall of honeycomb-packed displays covering virtually every corner of the complex — including the basement Walmart.

The supermarket was enormous. Shelves stretched in long rows, blocking plenty of sight lines. He scanned once and saw no sign of anyone—

Wait. Something moved.

Through an overhead camera, Mo Fan caught a faint, slow shifting — something crawling out from the direction of the Walmart's warehouse.

He quickly pulled up the warehouse feed. Ice shot down his spine. Squeezing through a drainage pipe, its fur matted with blood, was a Giant-Eyed Ape-Rat.

The underground was the Ape-Rats' territory. Any opening and they'd surface. Right now, two of them had clearly used that drainage pipe to slip into the Walmart.

*Good thing Xinxia isn't down there...* He shook off the thought. *Xinxia, where are you?*

He swept the Walmart footage again. Nothing.

On his second pass, Mo Fan suddenly locked onto a wheelchair parked beside one of the large drink coolers.

He leaned forward and worked the controls, zooming the camera in as far as it would go. A few keystrokes and the image sharpened — and with it, his certainty hardened into something absolute. That was Xinxia's wheelchair.

She wasn't in it.

The feeling hit like a blade driven straight into his chest. His thoughts scattered.

*Could she—*

"Wait — what's that??"

Just as the bottom fell out of him, Mo Fan noticed something: a faint movement inside the large upright refrigerator standing right beside the wheelchair.

He scrambled to another camera and zoomed in.

On screen, he stared. Huddled inside what had once been a frozen dairy cooler was a girl — long black hair, a plain pale skirt, curled into herself.

The wheelchair sat just outside. Someone was hiding in the refrigerator. It had to be Xinxia. Even without a clear view of her face, Mo Fan had no doubt.

*Thank God. Thank God.*

His eyes stung. From the moment he'd heard that Mingwen District hadn't evacuated, there hadn't been a second of peace in him. He'd half-convinced himself he'd never see her again — and she was alive.

Alone in this Walmart. Clearly the group that had fled through the drainage tunnels had left her behind.

In a grim twist, that abandonment may have saved her. The others had walked straight into the Giant-Eyed Ape-Rats' fangs.

But Mo Fan couldn't feel any relief — not when the monitors showed those two blood-soaked Ape-Rats wandering steadily toward the dairy section where Ye Xinxia was hiding. His heart hammered against his ribs.

Think about it: the person who mattered most in the world to you, curled up in a refrigerator; two creatures that could end her life in a heartbeat prowling the same aisle — and all you could do was watch it play out on a security screen and pray. That kind of helplessness didn't just weigh on you. It multiplied. It amplified, until it felt like every hair on your body was standing on end, until your skin crawled with a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature.

His heart wouldn't slow. His eyes never left the screens.

He wanted nothing more than to tear that door open and blast those two Ape-Rats into ash before they took another step toward her.

But his own situation was no better. Outside that iron door, ten Black-Beast Demons — every one of them a match for a Giant-Eyed Ape-Rat — were already working to force their way through. All he could do right now was watch.

*No. This is not acceptable.*

Whether it was his own trap or Xinxia's slow countdown to death — neither of them could survive on prayer and waiting. Waiting was just a slower way to die.

That door would give eventually.

And Ye Xinxia couldn't stay in a sub-zero compartment indefinitely. No fresh air — and the cold alone could kill her. It was a frozen dairy unit. The kind that kept milk products at temperatures that turned breath to vapor.

The two Giant-Eyed Ape-Rats hadn't noticed her yet. But they had clearly decided to linger near the meat counters and feast; they had no reason to leave anytime soon. Xinxia had half an hour at most before the cold finished what the Ape-Rats hadn't started.

She was already shivering.

To keep her body heat from registering to the cold-blooded creatures' senses, she'd chosen the coldest hiding spot available. Frost had crusted along the cooler's edges all around her.

Watching Xinxia — alone, helpless, curled and trembling in that vast empty supermarket, fighting just to stay alive — Mo Fan felt something fracture inside him.

He had promised her. *No matter what.* And she was still suffering like this.

He bit down hard, and didn't realize until later that he'd bitten through his own lip.

His fists were clenched white.

Every second he waited was another second Ye Xinxia edged closer to the edge.

At last, Mo Fan dropped into the chair and squeezed his eyes shut.

"Little Loach," he said quietly — or perhaps he was saying it to himself as much as to the Pendant — "I let you absorb every drop of the Earth Sacred Spring. Now I'm going to push with everything I have. Give me every last ounce of power you can."

He had attempted the breakthrough to Intermediate Level multiple times in the underground chamber before. And failed every time.

Now he was going to try again, drawing on what the Loach Pendant had stored.

The Earth Sacred Spring had indeed been consumed — that part was true. Mo Fan hadn't lied about that. It simply wasn't Mo Fan himself who had drunk it. The Loach Pendant had absorbed every last drop.

In the next few minutes, Mo Fan would make one final push at his breakthrough.

This time, failure was not an option.