Rounding the corner of the long corridor, the layout ahead was noticeably different.

In a wide open space, a set of traps was laid out in plain sight — a freezing pool with ice-sealing cold, and fire nozzles shaped like beast mouths. Clearly, navigating this area required avoiding the triggers.

Setting off any of these mechanisms would have severe consequences.

Even the Death Reaper Mantis — let alone anyone else — would only set them off by being careless. You’d have to be genuinely incompetent to walk into something this obvious.

The most telling detail was the floor. At regular intervals, shallow footprints marked the stone — the Cyclops’s, left from when it had passed through. They showed signs of attempted concealment, the creature having tried to walk on tiptoe, leaving only the faintest impressions. Easy to miss without careful observation.

The Death Reaper Mantis traced the footprints slowly through the air.

She noticed she was leaving a faint trail of her own in her wake — even hovering with nearly still wings left a visible line of passage.

She considered this. Did anything living that passed through leave a trace? The traces seemed to serve no useful purpose, only to expose the traveler. Why would that be the case? The Spirit Beast Hall’s trials would not include anything pointless — there had to be a secret reason.

Moving carefully for several dozen meters, turning through a twisting passage, the Death Reaper Mantis triggered nothing and saw no sign of the Cyclops. But what she found ahead stopped her.

Two corridor entrances.

And both of them showed traces — the Cyclops’s footprints, and her own flight trail.

This doesn’t make sense. Even if she had looped back to the start, she had only passed through one corridor. How could both entrances show marks from both of them?

One had to be false. But which?

She settled into thought again.

“RAAAHH!”

From one corridor came the Cyclops’s roar — followed immediately by something large and dark flying toward her at speed. She dodged on instinct. Boom — a massive boulder hit the ground where she had been. Before she could fully process it, a second dark shape came flying even faster.

The mechanism that had launched the boulder — once it exceeded a certain weight load, it would automatically seal the outer door. That thought flashed through her mind. She reacted immediately, condensing a ball of energy in her small hand.

She shot it at the second incoming object.

In the shadows ahead, the Cyclops’s ugly face twisted into a satisfied leer.

The clever little creature was finished. No matter how careful she was, without experience with the Hall’s mechanisms, how could she possibly know its cruelties?

The faint light from the released energy ball illuminated the Cyclops’s face — and revealed the truth of the second dark shape. It was a wooden box. One the Cyclops had moved beforehand. Given how fragile wooden boxes were, a Sky-rank magical beast sneezing too hard would shatter one — let alone an energy ball striking it directly. Watching the hit connect and the outcome become inevitable, the Cyclops immediately retreated at speed — a thousand times faster than its careful, stealthy approach.

Once the energy ball shattered the box, the explosion would destroy the dozen or more wooden boxes the Cyclops had secretly stacked and thrown ahead — triggering the visible traps. The combined force would critically wound the small creature, and with each box carrying a thirty percent chance of calling down a lightning strike, at least one hit was mathematically certain.

As a final touch, the Cyclops released all the boxes it had been secretly storing — twelve or more, sent flying in a coordinated cascade.

If twelve boxes went up simultaneously — even at thirty percent odds each — the lightning was coming.

The Cyclops permitted itself a moment of deep satisfaction. This was why Toad King had specifically chosen it for this task. Because it was smarter. Who could have imagined that behind that ugly, dim-looking exterior, its mind worked with this kind of precision? This corridor had claimed more newborn war beasts than it could count.

The Spirit Beast Hall was its perfect hunting ground.

Boom!

An earth-shaking explosion erupted ahead. The heat and shockwaves, and the flying debris, reached all the way back to the doorway of the Cyclops’s shelter.

Done.

It restrained the urge to look immediately, let all the secondary explosions and lightning strikes play out, waited through the sounds of roaring beasts — and only when everything had gone quiet did it step out, whistling to itself. Simple deduction: energy ball hits box, explosion triggers the stacked boxes, stacked boxes trigger visible traps, traps critically wound the target, lightning strikes seal the deal, and the wild beasts summoned by the thirty percent probability clean up anything left. Wild beasts auto-teleport out when the target is dead — that explained the sudden silence.

No need to look. The Cyclops already knew.

The small creature was dead. Killed by its own cleverness working against its clever design.

How many war beasts had it destroyed in this mirror corridor over the years? A hundred? Two hundred? The Cyclops had genuinely lost count. Right now it only wanted to find Toad King and collect the hundred high-quality magical cores it had been promised. With that reward, it could break through from Sky-rank Level 4 to Level 5. More strength, more security, more presence in Beast Valley.

Ha ha ha…

It stepped out to survey its handiwork, savoring victory and its own superior intelligence.

At peak satisfaction, its laughter cut off like a blade.

An impossible sight greeted its single eye.

The small creature it had killed was standing there, completely unharmed. Beneath her feet sat a neat stack of twelve wooden boxes. The triggered mechanisms around her were still active. One boulder had been reduced to dust — and nothing else had changed at all.

How?

It had clearly watched the energy ball connect with the wooden box.

As if reading the Cyclops’s confusion, the Death Reaper Mantis’s small face wore a smile identical to her master Yueyang’s.

She condensed another energy ball in her hand — this one producing only the faintest glow. In that dim, harmless light, the Cyclops suddenly understood why she had formed the energy ball in the first place. Not to attack. To illuminate. The gentle light had shown her the second projectile was a wooden box, not a boulder — before she had thrown anything.

So why had she shot the energy ball at it anyway?

The Death Reaper Mantis provided the answer.

A small finger-tap, and a wooden box floated up to hover in midair. The energy ball shot forward — hit the box — and instead of exploding, deflected. The box launched the ball at a new angle like a billiard shot, and the ball careened around the corridor, bouncing and redirecting — never once striking a mechanism, navigating everything with impossible precision. Finally it returned to her hand as though it had never left.

The Cyclops understood now.

The ball had been under her control the entire time.

She had never let it explode. Never let it break a box.

But then — if no box had broken, where had the explosion come from? The thunder? The roaring beasts?

The Death Reaper Mantis smiled again.

She reversed her body, kicked the hovering energy ball hard toward the ground where the boulder had been — and it blew open the stone floor, scattering debris toward the Cyclops’s feet. The shockwave expanded — but moved like ripples on water, dispersing against every surface without impacting any mechanism, generating only secondary waves that spread further without consequence.

That was where the rubble and shockwaves had come from.

The Cyclops raised its eye. The Death Reaper Mantis was flicking her finger — each flick producing a loud explosive crack inside a contained shockwave field she controlled. Enormous sound. Zero actual impact. Lightning-like flashes from pure energy — not from any broken box.

The massed roaring of beasts — that came from a small golden whistle she produced and blew once, producing layered beast cries from every direction.

“That’s the Gold Beast-Command Whistle — that belongs to the Poison Wasp King. Where did you—” the Cyclops started.

The Death Reaper Mantis only smiled and said nothing. Her expression made the Cyclops feel, inescapably, like the greatest fool in the valley.

Of course. The faction leaders’ endless scheming against each other was Beast Valley’s eternal theme. It had been a pawn of Toad King all along — that was why the reward had been set at a hundred magical cores. A promise that was never meant to be paid. The Cyclops tasted bitterness. When faction leaders fought, their pawns never won regardless of the outcome.

It started to speak — to withdraw from the fight entirely —

And then it saw the killing intent blazing in the Death Reaper Mantis’s eyes.

She’s angry. Not good.

The Cyclops had been confident going in. After watching what she had just done, that confidence was gone. Her true capability far exceeded every estimate. Fighting her in this mirror corridor now — the outcome wasn’t certain.

Leave. Whether it won or lost, there was no good result here. The only sensible move was to go.

Relying on its familiarity with the terrain, the Cyclops moved fast, weaving past the visible mechanisms, sprinting toward the far end of the mirror corridor and the exit back to the main hall.

When it rounded the last corner, ready to step out —

Two corridor entrances faced it. Again.

It had been heading away. How?

Had the small creature reversed the mirror corridor’s routing while it was distracted?

Crack. Crack.

The Cyclops paused one step — and heard something break under its foot. It looked down. A wooden box had somehow appeared beneath it and was now in pieces. And as it jerked its head up in alarm, debris rained down from above — another wooden box suspended overhead had just been head-butted into splinters.

No —

It had tried to trap its enemy. It had been out-trapped by its own trap.

An energy ball came from nowhere — not deflecting like it had off the box, but delivering a direct concussive force that sent the Cyclops stumbling backward three steps. When it found its footing, it was standing on a beast-mouth fire nozzle.

A pillar of flame erupted directly into its face.

The Cyclops’s single eye burned out immediately.

Blinded, enormous body in flames, it stumbled and crashed through the corridor in agony —

Every single mechanism it had laughed at for being too obvious — the ones any sensible creature would never trigger — it stepped on every last one. Flame, poison smoke, lightning, frost — all of them, in sequence. Not one avoided.

At the corridor’s exit, the Death Reaper Mantis stood with her back turned, smiling, delivering the most elegantly dismissive farewell possible to the creature that had tried to trap her and ended up in its own trap.

She raised the golden whistle and blew once.

The wild magical beasts that had just been randomly teleported in heard the sound — and immediately lost all reason, eyes going red, charging in a frenzied stampede directly toward the Cyclops.