The Underground Tunnel of Terror, The Werewolf's Courage Protects the Heart and Breaks the Illusions

Bo Yu's pupils constricted into two vertical slits in the absolute darkness, his nostrils filled with the fetid, decaying scent of moss.

As he reached for the second sticky spider silk, a faint crackling noise came from above—hundreds of fist-sized ghost-faced spiders were awakening from the crevices in the rocks, their crimson eyes joining together in a blood-red river of menace.

"Tick-tock."

The sound of military boots crunching through standing water reached his ears, and Sun's modified mechanical eye glowed with a cold blue light from thirty meters away.

The buzzing of the particle vibration knife exploded against his eardrum. The fur along the back of Bo Yu's neck immediately bristled. He reached up and grabbed a stalactite from the wall, breaking it into three sharp darts in his palm.

"Little wolf cub knows how to pick his toys." Sun's mocking laugh crackled with static as four modified soldiers surrounded him in a fan formation, their night vision goggles flashing with eerie green fluorescence. "Dr. Liu's new creations are in need of living test subjects."

Bo Yu crouched low and took a half-step back, his military boots landing precisely on a sunken piece of basalt.

The entire tunnel suddenly trembled. Twelve bronze chains descended from the ceiling, their ends jingling with copper beast head bells that rang sharply.

He smelled the mandrake pollen drifting from the bells—the same scent that had been used as incense on Old He's tea table.

"Fall back!" Sun roared too late, as the soldier on the far left snapped the chain.

In an instant, the rock wall flipped, and eighteen honeycomb-like holes spurted out dark green venom that hissed as it corroded the air, mingling with the scent of burning flesh.

Bo Yu twisted in mid-air, using the stalactite as leverage to swing deeper into the tunnel.

The venom splashed onto his combat suit, causing white smoke to rise. He tore his shirt off, revealing the pale back that now bore the constellation of the Big Dipper—scars from where Tang Yao's fingers had brushed just the night before, now burning with heat.

"Tian Shu belongs to the greedy wolf," Bo Yu muttered, dragging his bloodstained nails across the scar. Blood beads rose from the wound and hovered in mid-air, arranging themselves into a miniature star map.

When Sun's vibration knife swung toward him, the hovering blood droplets exploded, forming a blood mist that clouded the mechanical eye's imaging system.

In the dark red mist, the sound of bones shifting rang out as Bo Yu's knuckles swelled three inches, his canine teeth piercing his lower lip.

He followed the direction of Tang Yao's blood scent, charging forward, but as he rounded a corner, he collided with a spiderweb matrix—these metallic-sheen webs were clearly nano-materials from Dr. Liu's lab.

"Surprised?" Dr. Liu's sultry voice echoed from a hidden speaker on the rock wall. "These little guys' venom glands have been enhanced with the blood sample your little lover provided."

Bo Yu's temple pulsed painfully. His right claw ripped through three layers of webbing uncontrollably.

As the paralyzing venom seeped into his wounds, he smiled, showing his sharp teeth. "Did you forget...?" He rolled to the side, narrowly dodging the incoming tranquilizer dart, "The wolf venom serum is the antidote to all poisons?"

The sound of a test tube shattering in the distance gave Bo Yu the perfect opportunity to throw his venom-coated claw.

The nano spider silk dissolved on contact with the poison, trapping the pursuing soldiers in a sticky web.

Sun's mechanical arm suddenly reversed 180 degrees, the blade grazing Bo Yu's ear as it sliced through the air, and the silver hair that fell was immediately drawn to the electromagnetic field.

"The game should be over." Sun pressed a button on his gauntlet, and the particle knife overloaded, turning into a searing white blade.

But Bo Yu was faster—he kicked off the rock wall, using the rebound force to pounce at Sun, his claws digging deep into the energy slot of the mechanical arm.

The cool blue electrolytic fluid sprayed into their faces, and Bo Yu, in the scent of blood, tasted the faint sweetness of honeysuckle.

That scent made his pupils contract sharply, his claws driving through Sun's bulletproof armor, but something cold blocked him just before reaching the heart.

Moonlight spilled through a suddenly cracked ceiling, illuminating the wolf-head tattoo on Sun's collarbone—a tattoo that bore a striking resemblance to the scar on Bo Yu's back.

The sound of gears grinding echoed from above, and the entire mountain seemed to tilt. The ancient bronze chains slowly formed a sacrificial formation, bringing the Big Dipper constellation together.

Bo Yu's claws scraped sparks along the rock wall, and the gunfire from the pursuing soldiers caused dust and debris to rain down from the tunnel ceiling.

His combat suit had already been corroded into ragged strips by acidic liquid, and the moonlit pattern on his exposed skin flickered erratically, like a neon sign on the verge of losing power.

"Left!" His sixth sense suddenly flared with pain in the back of his head, and he kicked off a stone pillar to propel himself further.

The spot where he had stood a moment ago collapsed with a deafening crash, and the bronze spears beneath flipped, gleaming with blue light—these Warring States period killing traps had been retooled into trigger-activated electric nets.

Sun's mechanical eye flickered red from fifty meters away, and his modified vocal cords let out a metallic screech. "You can't outrun the thermal imaging!"

Four miniature drones emerged from the ventilation shaft, their laser targeting systems weaving a scarlet web.

Bo Yu suddenly stopped, letting the laser beams sear his back.

He angrily ripped away his blood-soaked bandages, and the blood mixed with wolf venom dripped onto the trigrams on the floor.

As the drones dove toward him, he spun and kicked a seismic brick. The entire floor suddenly flipped, trapping the mechanical squad in a toxic spike board blender.

"Cough..." Bo Yu knelt, spitting up black blood. The blood dripping from his fingernails had turned silver-gray instead of the usual red.

The backlash of excessive wolf venom began to corrode his internal organs, and he could hear his cells screaming under the moonlight.

But the scent of Tang Yao's blood grew even clearer, like a golden thread pulling at his fraying nerves.

A clicking sound echoed from the rock wall, and twelve bronze beast heads appeared from the darkness.

Bo Yu's vertical pupils shrank—these beast heads were positioned in such a way that they perfectly matched the worn-out mountain god's map at Old He's house.

When Sun's particle knife swung toward him again, Bo Yu deliberately used his shoulder blade to block the blow, using the momentum to crash into a taunting wind beast head.

The thousand-year-old bronze rust fell off with a hiss, revealing a control panel full of buttons behind a hidden compartment.

Bo Yu's claws sank into the control panel, and amid the electric sparks, he heard Dr. Liu's shrill scream: "Stop! There's a self-destruct device below!"

The entire tunnel suddenly trembled like a dying giant beast, and the traps that had claimed countless lives fell silent.

In the rumble of the collapse, Bo Yu leaped into the drainage tunnel, the foul water sweeping him downstream.

When the moonlight finally touched his face again, he realized he was holding half a bronze fragment—the inscription from the control panel was burning in his palm.

"Help... me..." A faint cry for help mixed with the wind, and Bo Yu's wolf ears perked up.

The sound passed through three turns and two waterfalls, carrying the familiar frequency that sent a shiver through his blood.

He struggled to crawl out of the mud but stepped on a smoking communicator on the rocky shore. The screen blinked with thirty-seven missed calls— all from Secretary Liu's encrypted channel.

The sound of footsteps from the pursuing soldiers echoed three hundred meters away, and Bo Yu smelled the unique sulfur scent of new-type incendiary bombs.

He tore off the wolf tooth necklace from his neck and pressed it into his wound, using the pain to refocus his pupils.

When the first incendiary bomb lit up the sky, he had already leaped onto a ten-meter-high cliff. But as he climbed, he felt the man-made railing—there was a brand-new scaffold on this desolate cliff.

The cry for help suddenly became clearer, and Bo Yu's canine teeth pierced his lower lip.

After passing the seventh zigzag turn, he broke through a thicket of spider webs and suddenly stepped onto a hard, flat surface.

It was a bronze tile engraved with the sixty-four hexagrams, and the blood seeping from the cracks formed tiny streams.

Bo Yu's claws scraped the surface, uncovering half a star map— the position of the Eastern Azure Dragon, marked with a red arrow.

The mountain wind carried the sour scent of rotting wood, and a muffled bell toll sounded from afar.

Bo Yu's moonlit pattern suddenly flickered wildly, and the scar on his back and the bronze fragment in his hand resonated, shaking so violently that he almost couldn't hold the burning metal.

The spotlights from the pursuing soldiers cut through the night, and Bo Yu sprinted toward the place where the blood scent was strongest.

His shadow stretched and distorted on the rock wall, and under the moonlight, his werewolf outline overlapped with the shadow of some ancient building's spire...