The THORNED ROSE IN THE SERPENT’S GRIP

Lily Carter, heiress of a Silicon Valley powerhouse, went bankrupt overnight and was imprisoned by Silas Voss, ruler of the Serpent Empire, in a glass water tank, reduced to “private property” labeled No. 009. Under threat of death, she was forced to sign a lifelong master-servant contract—only to discover that Silas was a high-ranking serpent who needed her scent to suppress his full-moon frenzy. Even more astonishing, Lily awakened the Medusa bloodline that had been extinct for a thousand years. Wherever her golden vertical pupils looked, serpents knelt and all things turned to stone. From tank slave to bloodline queen, she overpowered every elite at the Black-Gold Gala, tore up the contract, and claimed both Silas and his empire for herself. The true mastermind was Zane, one of the seven seats of the Council of Elders. This three-hundred-year-old monster had imprisoned Lily’s grandmother Iris and drained her blood for thirty years, and used the Medusa bloodline to launch “Project Ark,” creating experimental subjects such as Lily’s brother M-01 and sister Aria. To save her parents, her grandmother, and her aunt Vera—who was treated as a “blood source” and had her blood extracted—Lily and Silas went from enemies to lovers bound in life and death, forging a symbiotic blood pact. In the final battle at the Serpent Tomb and the main headquarters, Zane transformed into a hundred-meter giant serpent. Silas burned out all his serpent blood to protect Lily and turned himself to stone. In the end, Lily used the heart scale of the Primeval Medusa to reforge her lover’s life, led the awakened Medusa army, and secured the Human-Serpent Equality Act with humanity. A year later, the “new rules” of human-serpent coexistence took root in Silicon Valley, and that glass water tank was permanently preserved, inscribed with “The rules were changed here”—bearing witness to a Medusa queen who, from the abyss, rewrote the laws of the world with her own hands.