Lin Yuan studied the dark-red branch in his hands.
Veins beneath its surface pulsed rhythmically, conveying unmistakable signs of life.
Without delay, he linked his consciousness to the core and cast the branch into his Wasteland Divine Domain.
Destination: beside the Abyssal Blood Pool.
The scorched earth split.
The branch fell into soil littered with bone and blood.
The moment it touched that bloody vitality, the shriveled wood suddenly drove itself deep into the ground.
A dark-red trunk broke through the earth, growing before his eyes.
Its bark bore an uncanny texture like muscle.
Lin Yuan hovered above, looking down.
Lei Yan's words had given him tremendous inspiration.
Ordinary gods raised their followers like sheep, fussing over their well-being, terrified they might go hungry or cold.
They poured in every kind of Environment Card and Shelter Card, practically trying to build a utopia.
They even calculated their followers' happiness index every day, afraid depression might stop their faith point production.
But this was a wasteland.
Resources were scarce. Poison gas filled the air.
Hothouse cultivation here would be downright brain-dead.
In a Wasteland Divine Domain, followers had to be like venomous creatures shut in a jar to fight until only the strongest survived.
Lin Yuan raised his hand and reactivated the hourglass's remaining two years of accelerated time.
Illusory golden sand poured down through the sky.
As time accelerated, he delivered the coldest oracle since his world's creation.
"My kin."
His immense voice thundered across the basin.
Eight hundred Petrified Goblins knelt in unison, foreheads pressed hard against the burning earth.
"From this day forth, your god will no longer grant you safe shelter."
"The wasteland does not feed waste. The old, weak, sick, and crippled who cannot endure the blood pool's baptism shall be dragged beneath the divine tree upon death, to become nourishment."
"Only the strong deserve to live. Only those who survive deserve to eat their fill."
The oracle fell without mercy. Only the naked law of the jungle remained.
The goblins offered no resistance.
They were simple-minded creatures that revered violence to begin with.
At his words, an even fiercer fervor ignited in their eyes.
Time accelerated wildly.
The Abyssal Carrion Tree grew at a terrifying pace.
Its roots drove deep into the soil around the blood pool, greedily drawing nourishment from dead mutant cockroaches, goblin excrement, and even the goblins' own remains.
It rejected nothing.
Soon, an enormous fifty-meter tree towered above the ground.
Between its dark-red leaves grew fist-sized "Abyssal Flesh Fruits," rich with the scent of vital blood.
The closed ecological loop was officially established.
The weak died in battle. Their corpses were dragged beneath the tree as fertilizer.
The tree absorbed that nourishment and produced fruits dense with vital blood.
The strong ate the fruits, then tempered themselves in the blood pool to become stronger still.
To compete for flesh fruits and places closer to the blood pool, the goblins fought a savage internal war.
Every day, companions broke one another's bones and tore open one another's throats.
A single dropped fruit could trigger a brawl among a dozen goblins.
A powerful goblin set its sights on the half fruit another had just snatched.
Without a word, it thrust a bone spear through its companion's shoulder.
The impaled goblin didn't flinch. Opening its acid-dripping mouth, it bit off several of its attacker's fingers.
In the end, the stronger goblin smashed its opponent's skull apart with its fists.
It grabbed the brain-spattered fruit and swallowed it in one bite. Then it dragged the corpse one-handed to the Carrion Tree's roots and tossed it down.
The roots coiled around the body like living creatures. Within seconds, they sucked it into a dried husk.
Newborn goblins grew rapidly through slaughter. Aging individuals were culled and reduced to rot.
The population no longer exploded.
Through this brutal survival of the fittest, goblin numbers held at a saturated limit of one thousand.
It wasn't that they couldn't breed more.
The basin's entire resource output was just enough to sustain a thousand apex predators.
The five-year evolution period ended.
The golden hourglass in the sky shattered completely and dispersed into motes of light.
Lin Yuan's full consciousness returned to the domain.
His heart skipped a beat at the sight.
The basin had become a rough, vicious fortress of war.
Enormous scorched rocks had been crudely piled into towering walls.
Sharp mutant cockroach forelimbs bristled along the ramparts, hung with dried scraps of flesh.
Inside the walls, exactly one thousand monsters stood ramrod straight in orderly formations.
They had left the category of "Petrified Goblin" far behind.
Every one stood over two meters tall.
Repeated tempering by the blood pool and flesh fruits had triggered genetic mutations in their stone skin.
Their entire bodies were now covered in jet-black obsidian scales reflecting a cold gleam.
Sharp barbs grew from shoulders, elbows, knees, and other joints.
[Race Renamed: Obsidian Goblin (Variant)]
[Average Grade: 8-star Black Iron / 9-star Black Iron]
[Traits: Extreme Bloodthirst, Stoneskin Armor (Advanced), Pain Suppression, Acid Corrosion, Bloodboil Berserk]
High Black Iron, every last one!
These Gray Goblins, once labeled "nonrecyclable garbage," had broken through the barriers of life itself under this wasteland and Lin Yuan's stitched traits, becoming an engine of war.
But the figure standing at the very front delighted him even more.
It was over four meters tall.
Its body was substantially larger than an ordinary Obsidian Goblin's.
Dark-red flames continually vented from gaps between the obsidian scales on its back.
It held no weapon.
Thick blood scabs covered its enormous fists.
The air around it warped with heat.
The other goblins regarded it with absolute reverence, not daring to come within three meters.
In five years of frenzied slaughter, this creature had torn more than a hundred challengers apart bare-handed and climbed over the bones of its own kind to become the unchallenged victor of that deadly breeding ground.
A hero unit that had surpassed its race's limits.
Lin Yuan opened the beast's detailed panel.
[Name: Unnamed (Hero Unit)] The source of this chapter is g.com.
[Race: Obsidian Goblin (Variant)]
[Grade: 1-star Bronze]
[Trait: Command (Exerts bloodline suppression over lower-grade members of the same race, forcibly boosting nearby allies' morale and granting immunity to low-grade mind control.)]
[Pain Immunity: Completely severs pain signals. Provided the brain is not destroyed, fights to the final drop of blood.]
[Hyper-Regeneration: Provided the heart remains intact, severed limbs can be rebuilt in an extremely short time.]
[Acid Corrosion: Bodily fluids are highly acidic.]
[Absolute Strength: Physical strength exceeds ordinary creatures of the same grade by 300%.]
[Bloodboil Berserk: Briefly boosts strength by 500%.]
Lin Yuan was thoroughly satisfied with that long list of traits.
He lowered his consciousness until he hovered directly over the enormous creature.
It raised its head. The bloodthirsty red light in its eyes subsided, and its great body dropped to its knees.
Both knees struck the scorched earth, gouging two deep pits.
"Great Lord." Its voice was hoarse, its pronunciation clumsy.
"From this day forth, your name is Tyrant."
Lin Yuan's voice rang throughout the basin.
"You shall command Wasteland Legion No. 1. For your glory and mine, crush every obstacle in our path."
Tyrant lifted its head and pounded its chest with both fists, releasing a deafening roar.
"ROOOAR!"
A thousand Obsidian Goblins raised their weapons together and howled at the sky.
The sound swept away the ash above the basin.
His Wasteland Divine Domain had not merely solved its ecological shortage.
It had completed its transformation from a primitive tribe of cannon fodder into a war machine.
Lin Yuan withdrew from the domain.
His bedroom remained dimly lit.
He glanced at his wrist terminal.
An eye-catching countdown flickered in the screen's upper-right corner.
[Time Until Divine Domain Defense Simulation: 23 hours, 45 minutes.]
Only one day remained.
He opened the class chat and academy forum.
They had already exploded with activity.
Newly awakened students across the academy wailed about how to survive a few extra minutes in this military-run meat grinder.
"Help! My slimes can't even digest a hard bone. If we run into Abyssal Demon Wolves tomorrow, won't they just pop in the wolves' mouths like juicy meatballs?"
"Anyone got spare iron ore? Paying top prices! I need to hammer out some heart-protection plates for my Orcs!"
"Quit struggling. Go sign yourselves over to Monitor Li Xiuqi or Zhao Tianze. Being an expert's dog will at least earn you participation points."
Lin Yuan swiped away those grimly entertaining posts.
He leaned back in his chair and drew a deep breath. His hand tightened unconsciously.
His knuckles cracked sharply.
A faint wisp of dark-red vital blood energy actually flickered at his fingertips.
The feedback from a thousand Obsidian Goblins and the Bronze-grade Tyrant had pushed his real-world physique to a level even he couldn't quite gauge.
"A thousand second-tier troops, every one equipped with combat traits."
His eyes were calm.
It was time to test what this army could really do.