The Primal Blood Demonic Dragon

Night had passed like view of a river in flood. Slow, enjoyable yet suffocating and silent despite the ripples. Gin remained rooted where he lay, the rough bark of the tree trunk behind him cool against his furred back, tail stretched straight, body relaxed in shape but taut within. Hours slipped by. The only motion from him was the quiet expansion and contraction of his spiritual sense.

He watched it all without a wink of sleep.

The twin canopies. The entwined beasts. The flickers of mating energy rising and falling like waves guided by a star he could no longer see behind thick clouds. His awareness danced lightly through it all, not out of duty but of desire. There had to be a thread, a trigger, a whisper something.

But there wasn’t.

No core presence. No unnatural field. No illusion formation formed naturally.

Nor this is a forest area filled stimulant plants.

Or is it?

Everything was real.

And that was what made it worse.

The way Lucy gritted her jaw in the middle of that shared rubbing genitals with each other. The way Mira’s pulse surged and folded as she controlled water within her own limbs, refining every pressure, every counter movement not as an attacker or cultivator but as if soothing a fever within Lucy’s body. Yet her own was no less inflamed.

Xingning’s wind was not lashing tonight. It flowed like breath over scales. Jean’s scales, in her winged-lizard form now half-melded with the physique of a primal female. Their rhythms were light, almost musical but undeniably primal, the kind that beat within bone and blood.

Gin shut off his sense of them after a while.

He didn’t want to. But he had no choice but to think with clear mind, with any distraction.

It was too much. Not in intensity but in repetition. Predictability. A pattern too clean in the the wilderness.

His gaze turned outward instead, roaming the smaller creatures-the twin harebeasts now trembling after their second coupling beneath a fern. The sharp-antlered deer whose antlers locked in silence as their bodies pressed together. Even two burrowing rootlings who had never shown courtship behavior before now nestled side by side, their auras flickering in tandem.

Gin’s paws pressed into the soil.

Something had changed.

But what... and why?

Morning arrived. Day four began without warning or light.

The forest remained gray.

There were harmless birds but none sang. Branches moved but only when touched. No wind blew. The world felt... paused. As if time have stopped flowing.

The others stirred one by one, bodies glistening with remnants of their nightly release. But no one said a word. No one remarked on the night. Mira braided Lucy’s hair. Xingning laughed softly at something Jean murmured in her smooth, detached tone. Alice walked beside Gin in her usual silence, fingers occasionally brushing his back, as if grounding herself with his warmth.

And the beasts?

Fewer again.

His spiritual field remained shallow. Barely two or three sensed in half a league. And the ones they passed stayed in pairs. Not a single predator showed interest in them. Not even a watcher. The air held no sense of threat. Only absence.

Gin moved with them but remained distracted. His mind went back to matter of distance again.

It should not be this far.

He knew it. Even with Lucy’s speed slowing the group, they should have reached the coast by now. They had passed too many landmarks, too many turns and ridgelines. They had gone beyond the bounds of the region where he had awaked. The math did not add up. Not anymore.

He checked the sun repeatedly, verifying direction. The slope of terrain. The position of moss on stone. All correct.

Still the cave eluded them.

And the silence within the land deepened.

By dusk, the others began weaving their night canopies again. Mira molded a dome of living vines with her own water, their fibers pulsing with moisture. Lucy reinforced it with woven bark surprisingly precise handiwork from someone with no energy manipulation. Across the small glade, Xingning tapped her fingers against the air, forming a mesh barrier of solidified wind, while Jean added layers of leaves to soften the pressure from within.

Alice sat nearby, quiet, carving symbols into a flat piece of wood with one nail. Her expression showed no concern. None of them showed concern.

Only Gin watched the land around them like it might turn to ash. World might go upside-down with a bang.

He stayed low, unseen under the curve of a root, spiritual sense weaving a tight perimeter.

The fourth night began just like the third.

Within the first half hour, the canopies were sealed.

Soon came the friction. Pressure. Mutual bodily energies rubbing literal, metaphorical, rhythmic. Mira and Lucy. Jean and Xingning.

And then, as if drawn by some unseen tide, the beasts began again.

Pairs moved from one copse of trees to another. Soft hoots, grunts, murmurs filled the air. Two twin-tailed coyotes, both visibly female, wrestled briefly then collapsed into one another’s warmth. Even creepy-crawly insects, bugs with low cognitive awareness nested together in formations never before observed.

Gin had already seen it. Expected it.

But it didn’t ease the coldness curling in his chest.

He waited an hour.

Then another.

He scanned. Searched for threads of external power. For any remnants of natural stimulant plant or any organism releasing form scent trails. For resonance inconsistencies in the soil, the leaves, the energy-rich roots. Anything.

Nothing.

Nothing but silence and rutting.

The wildness had become tame in the most twisted way possible.

It was no longer the wilderness it was some reflection of it. Some mirror with only instinctual pleasure seekers, stripped of chaos.

And he couldn’t take it anymore.

The wolf rose slowly from his spot, shaking loose the dirt. The air shifted slightly at his movement but no one reacted. No beast growled, no companion stirred.

He stepped through the glade with light steps but his paws pressed firmer than before. Intent carried through his posture. It wasn’t a hunt. It was intervention.

The forest watched him in stillness.

He crossed toward the first canopy. Mira and Lucy’s.

Its structure glowed faintly with water energy threaded through vine and bark. Not a defensive formation but one of privacy, resonance modulation and spiritual insulation. Gin could still sense inside but any noise or influence from outside would be muffled, dampened to nearly nothing.

Even now, their fleshy slits clashed and merged. Two incompatible bodies grinding not just physically but energetically, trying to soothe a burn no medicine could cool.

He stepped to the edge.

Growled.

A deep, low-throated call. Not a snarl but a command-Stop. Wake up. Listen.

No response.

He raised his voice. A louder growl. Twice, three times, shaped into sharp barks that should have made Mira freeze mid-motion.

But nothing happened. No pulse of acknowledgment. No shift.

The rhythm continued inside.

He stepped closer. Fur brushing the vines. The canopy trembled slightly at his presence but the seal held.

He howled.

It wasn’t the howl of a beast seeking a mate nor the calling of a pack. It was the call of a companion. Of a guardian spirit summoning attention to an encroaching danger.

Still no reaction.

Inside the veil, Lucy arched in motion, body moving with mechanical intensity. Mira’s energy surged around her, enclosing her in water pressure that neither suffocated nor healed. Their eyes remained shut. They weren’t asleep but they weren’t aware either.

It was as if...

They were dreaming but with eyes wide open.

Gin’s heart pounded.

He growled again, louder this time, straining his vocal cords beyond what this wolf form allowed. The sound twisted near the end. Raw. Almost pained.

Still they moved?

No.

As if he were not even there.

Gin took a step back, breath fogging before him despite the warmth.

He could have clawed open the canopy. Could have barged through the living shelter, disrupted the tangle of energy and sensation within. But something made him pause.

Not fear.

Hesitation.

What if he was wrong?

What if this was not interference, but adaptation? What if something truly was changing in this land and only he trapped in this form, stuck in observation had failed to evolve with it?

He shook his head violently, rejecting the thought.

Something was wrong. This was not harmony.

It was compulsion.

And he was done watching.

Gin stepped forward once more, paws pressing into the earth.

The vines trembled slightly as his breath brushed against them.

He lifted his paw, extended it toward the canopy veil.

Then stopped.

He stood there, heart thudding in rhythm with the muffled gasps and muffled energy clashes behind the veil. He watched them moving their hips opposite of each other’s rhythm. Wet portions locked together leaking drops of liquid with their flow.

And waited.

A second passed.

Then two.

Then he growled again-softly this time. Almost sorrowful.

But the night remained as it was.

Unbroken.

________________________________________

To Be Continued.