CHAPTER 4: AN UNIDENTIFIED ENTITY (POV: THE LONE WOLF)

Rip.

Decisively, I yanked the hem of my rain-soaked black shirt, tearing it into a long strip of cloth to bind the deep claw mark on my flank. The stinging ache failed to make my brows knit even once. Five Rogue wolves lay motionless at my feet, their blood mingling with the rainwater to form dark crimson puddles. This trash had actually dared to venture into my hiding spot to cause trouble, forcing me to personally track their scent and eliminate them over the past three days in this abandoned industrial zone. Thanks to the encrypted signal and undercover arrangements from my older brother, the Alliance’s cleanup crew would soon arrive to sweep the scene. The trash thought they could ambush me? Laughable.

I leaned my back against the brick wall, allowing my body’s accelerated healing rate to close up the wound. Suddenly, my hyper-acute hearing picked up a chaotic jumble of sounds from the rocky slope not far away: the cursing of human males, the clicking of a switchblade, and the desperate, ragged gasps of a girl.

Through the sheet of rain and the dense darkness, I saw three men cornering a petite girl against the edge of the waste pool cliff. Her appearance was pathetic, trembling. Coldly, I retracted my gaze. The rule was clear: Werewolves do not interfere in human affairs. If she couldn't protect herself, that was her fate.

"Don't... stay back!"

A resentful shriek rang out, followed by a dry thud. Boom! A bolt of lightning sliced through the sky, and I saw the girl lose her footing, slipping and falling straight into the pitch-black pool.

I was about to turn away, but the exact instant her body submerged, a small, freezing, and razor-sharp pulse of energy suddenly radiated from deep within the pool. It wasn't as explosive as a blast, but rather like a cracking sound—an infinitesimally small fracture appearing on an ancient fortress wall. That current of energy brushed against my chest, causing the inner wolf within me to instantly stir.

My pupils constricted, shifting into a brilliant crimson in the dark. A bloodline seal? That girl was no ordinary human. The energy leaking out right now... it was profoundly bizarre, exuding a vague pressure that I had never sensed from any clan before.

The inner wolf inside me suddenly roared violently, urging me to verify that source of energy. A rare predatory instinct made it impossible for me to look away.

In a mere blink of an eye, I stood at the top of the slope. The three thugs turned around in utter terror. Before they could even register my presence, I threw my head back, letting out a roar that ripped through the sheet of rain.

HOOOOWWLLL—!

The howl, carrying the supreme dominance of a natural-born Alpha, drained every drop of color from the three humans' faces. Dropping their switchblades, they bolted headlong for dear life into the night.

Without a second thought, I plunged straight into the pool.

I dove down into the dense, black water. The moment my body submerged, a bone-chilling cold pierced straight through my flesh. This waste pool was viscous and freezing under the torrential storm. For an ordinary human, immersing oneself at the bottom of this deep abyss in an exhausted state would swiftly result in suffocation and death.

Yet what captured my attention at this moment wasn't the danger of the pool. It was the light.

At a depth of several meters beneath the pitch-black water, a pale silver glow was quietly radiating amidst the darkness. It was as fragile as a candle flame in the wind, yet unbelievably resilient, slicing through the contaminated water to assert its presence.

The girl lay motionless at the absolute center of that light source, her body completely relaxed as if drifting into a deep slumber, showing none of the humans' involuntary thrashing or drowning reflexes.

Slender threads of light wrapped around her silhouette, weaving together to form a transparent protective shroud. The dense, filthy water constantly collided with the barrier only to be deflected away, unable to touch her clothes or her skin. It was this exact anomalous cocoon of energy that kept her suspended, completely isolating her from the devastation of the waste pool.

This was not Werewolf magic. It possessed absolutely none of the vibrational frequency or wild feral nature of our race. Nor did it belong to any witch coven or mythical creature I had ever known.

That energy was both alien and ancient, carrying an invisible sense of oppression—proud and indescribable.

The inner wolf within me suddenly retracted all of its ferocity. It didn't growl, nor did it get agitated; it merely held its breath, watching intently through my crimson eyes. It was a silent, highly defensive reaction that I had never seen from it before.

The luminous veins beneath the girl's skin continued to spread along her blood vessels. Weak pulses of energy vibrated through the water like a second awakening heartbeat, beating steadily and rhythmically inside her body. For some unknown reason, a bizarre thought suddenly flashed through my mind: If I had arrived just a few minutes later... perhaps that energy would have transformed into something entirely different.

Reaching out, I clamped my hand around her waist, using the power of my legs to kick hard and propel us straight to the surface.

Splash!

I hoisted the girl up onto the freezing stone bank. Her body was thin, feather-light, and as ice-cold as a corpse. In a brief moment as she stirred slightly, her blurred, empty eyes—overwhelmed by sensory overload—slit open, and a brilliant flash of silver light flared within her pupils before she blacked out completely.

Boom! Another bolt of lightning split the sky, its fleeting flash washing away some of the mud on the girl's face. She looked very young, her face terrifyingly pale, her lips almost entirely drained of color.

I knit my brows slightly.

A young girl appearing all by herself in an abandoned industrial zone in the dead of a rainy night was already anomalous. But what baffled me the most was why someone harboring such a bizarre source of energy would be left abandoned in a place like this.

My ears twitched. The sound of an approaching engine was racing toward us.

Through the sheet of rain and the blurred darkness, a patrolling police cruiser sped over with its sirens wailing, its flashing red and blue lights cutting continuously through the night. It seemed the chaos tonight had finally drawn the attention of human law enforcement.

"Dammit," I muttered in a low voice.

If the police cordoned off this area before the Alliance’s crew arrived to handle the Rogue corpses, things would become incredibly troublesome.

Scooping her waterlogged body up into my arms, I darted swiftly into a dark, blind spot behind the ruined wall of the rusted warehouse row. I pressed her back tight against my chest, one hand securing the back of her neck to press her head close to my shoulder, completely shielding her from the flickering lightning and the sweeping searchlights of the patrolling cruiser scanning the perimeter.

Within the cramped, dark space reeking of rusted iron, the crackle of the police radio echoed from a distance outside the barrier. My hyper-acute sense of smell was instantly besieged by a chaotic combination of scents emanating from the girl's body—the freezing chill of rainwater, the sticky, cloying sweetness of milk tea clinging to her tattered hoodie, and deep beneath it all, that warm, ancient vibrational frequency softly breathing under her skin.

Her heart hammered continuously beneath the soaked fabric, weak yet resilient. Lowering my head, I leaned in close to look down at the wrist of the unconscious girl cradled in my arms. Beneath her pale skin, those blue-gray veins of light from earlier had completely vanished, returning her to the disheveled, obscured appearance of an ordinary human.

The inner wolf inside me suddenly froze rigid. For the first time in years, I sensed a stark, crystal-clear emotion radiating from its soul.

It wasn't excitement.

It wasn't curiosity.

It was vigilance.

An instinctive wariness, as if standing face-to-face with a natural predator capable of wiping it out—a primitive dread toward an entity that existed far beyond our comprehension and threatened the very survival of our race.

The thing sleeping soundly inside this girl's body...

What on earth was it?