The wind, seventy degrees below zero and laden with diamond dust, slashed at his face like shards of glass cutting through flesh. Xiao Chen huddled in a ventilation shaft, his beast-hide clothes so stiff they could chip ice. Every breath brought the pain of his lungs freezing and cracking. If he couldn't last through tonight, he would become a half-buried corpse in the snow, his name lost with him.
Then his heart suddenly exploded.
It wasn't a spasm from freezing. Scalding magma surged from his chest to his limbs. Something in his veins, frozen purple-black, was thrashing and tearing, desperate to break free. His bones creaked as if a giant hammer were reshaping them. A fine itch crawled beneath his skin, and in an instant, an icy blue layer of scales grew over it. Amid the agony, he heard a cold prompt: [Devouring Evolution: Devour your prey, and you can become it].
But this evolution was a deadly gamble. He gnawed at the heart of a giant ice lizard. The moment his fingertips touched its faint, resilient warmth, the System displayed a line of text: [Drink at least 200 ml of magma to activate low-temperature resistance]. Gripping a sharpened steel bar, he charged into a volcanic fissure and watched magma bubble in a metal flask. As his Adam's apple bobbed, he thought: What kind of evolution is this? It's throwing your life into a fire to boil.
The worst was yet to come. When he finally endured the magma's scorching heat and opened his eyes, he saw the sky split apart above the volcano. A vertical pupil larger than half a city stared down at him, nebulae slowly turning within it. It had no emotion, yet the sight froze the blood in his veins. [Higher-Dimensional Consciousness Projection: Target marked], the prompt exploded in his mind, and only then did he realize that, to a higher being, he was nothing but an insect.
At least he was no longer alone.
