In the dim basement, the white wolf stood over the man's tragic remains, an fleeting look of glee flashing across his face. Only a hollow skeleton covered in tightly shriveled skin was left of the proud cultivator. The sight was momentarily pleasing to his dark desires, until it violently reminded the wolf of his mother's and sister's identical deaths. A blinding anger took over his senses, and the wolf attacked the skeletal remains with all his might, pulverizing the brittle bones into a fine dust that completely filled the basement air.
The wolf was thoroughly shocked by his own power. He had not expected to become so physically strong so soon. As he fully realized his new strength, a deep wave of sadness welled up in his heart for the family he could not save. The wolf quickly suppressed the vulnerable feeling and prepared to leave. He picked up the dead man's discarded clothes with his jaws and hid them at the bottom of a dirty wooden box in the far corner.
The only evidence left of the crime was a thick pool of dark blood on the stone floor. The wolf didn't want to clean the floor with his tongue, having already sated his thirst. For a few seconds, he looked down at the puddle with a conflicted gaze before surrendering to the pragmatic circumstances. He licked the blood off the cold stone, and within a single minute, the floor was cleaner than it had ever been.
As the wolf walked toward the locked door, he suddenly collapsed to the ground from a sharp, agonizing pain in his head. He clutched his skull with his front paws, his muffled howls filled with pure agony. It felt as though fiery war drums were being beaten relentlessly inside his skull. Fresh blood flowed freely from his ears and nostrils, and his yellow eyes bulged as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. For two grueling hours, the wolf lay trapped in the basement howling in a pain that would easily send a grown man to an early grave. He hovered on the brink of passing out but held a terrifying feeling that if he lost consciousness now, he would never wake up again. This primal fear forced the wolf to maintain his awareness, utilizing a strong will forged by years of thoughts of vengeance. For the entire two hours, he stayed conscious and endured the internal torment.
When the pain finally ended, the wolf lay flat on the ground, breathing heavily. He rested for about thirty minutes to gather his strength before getting up and leaving the basement. Darkness had already entirely replaced the twilight, and the massive mansion seemed oddly empty. The wolf made a few quick preparations before running out of the mansion and into the open city streets. The royal capital had been transformed into a hollow tomb, its streets stripped of life and echoing with an unnatural, suffocating silence. It suggested the populace had been paralyzed by a grim premonition delivered by those in power, warning them that the night was destined to be a maelstrom of political violence rather than a time of rest.
Through the desolate, tomb-like arteries of the city, the wolf moved like a white phantom. The beast streaked toward the imperial citadel, his form a blurred shadow of predatory intent. The palace sat like a stone titan at the city's heart, watching over the impending chaos. With every strike of his powerful paws, his velocity surged exponentially. Whenever he brushed against the ceiling of his own mortality, the wolf shattered that barrier, accelerating into a realm of pure kinetic energy.
Ultimately, the beast dissolved into a jagged streak of silver lightning. Every inch of ground he conquered was left reeling from the pressure of his sudden, violent passage as the sonic shock waves and gale-force winds birthed by his impossible speed lashed out at the world, pulverizing the glass storefront windows into a glittering rain of lethal crystal shards. The pressure even destroyed some nearby buildings made with weak materials, blowing them away and filling the air with thick dust and shattered timber.
In a matter of seconds, the wolf reached the outer palace walls. The white walls were immensely tall and looked thick enough to stop almost any land-bound cultivator, unless they possessed the rare ability to fly. In all his years in human society, he had never seen a cultivator who could fly; he had only heard about them in ancient stories. The wolf looked up at the wall and knew he couldn't break through it by brute force. He ran five hundred feet away from the perimeter in the direction he had come from. Then, turning on his heel, he sprinted back toward the wall at an extremely high speed. As he reached the base, the wolf had turned into a single white line that moved straight up the vertical surface in less than a second, disappearing completely beyond the barrier.