After the introductory virtual lesson, Fatty Wang wriggled his round body through the crowd, slung an arm around Lin Yuan's shoulders, and waggled his eyebrows.
"Yuan, come on! A succubus tavern just opened in StarNet's Fifth District."
"I heard they've got perfect, life-size holograms of high-grade succubi. Those waists? Unbelievable!"
"Your young master here is buying today. Let me broaden your horizons and help you loosen up."
Looking at Fatty's expectant face, Lin Yuan firmly shook his head.
"Not going."
"Did water get into your brain?" Fatty stared at him. "We've only got a few days of beginner protection left. Everyone's trying to blow off some steam."
"You started in a wasteland. Keep staring at that burned dirt every day, and you'll drive yourself insane!"
"The Abyss isn't giving us a vacation." Lin Yuan's tone was flat as he moved Fatty's arm aside. "Any time I'd waste in a tavern would be better spent letting my followers swing their blades a few more times."
Fatty's mouth twitched. Eventually he managed, "No wonder you're single! I'll go have fun myself. You stay in your wasteland and play in the mud!"
White light flashed, and he logged out.
Without any change in expression, Lin Yuan left the virtual hall.
He removed his holographic interface and opened the trading network on his wrist terminal.
He knew his current limitations perfectly well.
His hundred Petrified Goblins' progress through brawling with [Crude Body Tempering] had reached a bottleneck.
Fighting their own people lacked genuine pressure from the threat of death.
Without mortal danger, they couldn't force out more potential, much less produce War Faith.
Ordinary gods had straightforward ways to strengthen their followers.
Spend tens of thousands of faith points on Basic Marrow-Cleansing Potions, or buy Silver-grade Combat Skill Cards and forcibly impart the skills.
Lin Yuan had only a few hundred faith points in his account. He couldn't afford the dregs of those potions.
He could only solve the problem through the rules of the wasteland.
He opened the black-market channel and entered the "Introduced Species" section.
His search criteria: extremely rapid reproduction, highly aggressive, adapted to deadly toxins, inexpensive.
The system's loading ring spun, automatically excluding ninety-nine percent of normal creatures.
At last, a dozen listings appeared, each marked with a red skull warning.
Lin Yuan scrolled straight to the bottom and selected an F-rank species classified as an ecological disaster.
[Abyssal Corrupted Cockroach Egg Case].
Description: A companion species found on the Abyss's margins. Omnivorous, with terrifying reproductive capacity. Eats all visible vegetation. Highly acidic excrement severely damages soil structure.
Warning: Introduction into normal Divine Domains is strictly prohibited! Once established, removal costs exceed ten thousand times the purchase price!
Price: 10 faith points per kilogram.
The forum was full of people cursing this garbage species.
A few months earlier, a commoner god had refused to heed the warnings and bought one kilogram for his grassland Divine Domain.
Three days later, his prized Centaur kin had been stripped to skeletons by the insect tide.
Looking at the ugly egg cases in the hologram, Lin Yuan's eyes gleamed.
An ecological disaster to others. The perfect whetstone to him.
His Wasteland Divine Domain had no clean water to protect. Its soil was already cracked and carbonized. Its only plants were the equally poisonous Ash Spore Mushrooms.
The cockroaches' acidic excrement could even help neutralize the fire toxins in the scorched earth.
Lin Yuan transferred two hundred faith points and bought a full twenty kilograms of egg cases.
Space rippled in his bedroom.
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A black sealed bag hit the floor.
He closed his eyes, and his consciousness left his body.
Below him, Ash Spore Mushrooms had already spread into a dark-gray fungal carpet covering several hectares.
The Petrified Goblins were well fed, wrestling in twos and threes.
Lin Yuan opened his storage space and poured out all twenty kilograms of Abyssal Corrupted Cockroach Egg Cases.
Dense black egg cases followed the drifting embers down to the scorched earth along the fungal carpet's edge.
He linked his will to the Divine Domain core, spent three hundred faith points, and adjusted the flow of time.
A few days in the main world stretched into three months inside the domain.
From high above, Lin Yuan watched the ecological changes unfold.
Less than three days after the egg cases landed, the first Corrupted Cockroaches hatched.
Pitch-black and more than half a meter long, they had hard, decaying carapaces and mouthparts lined with sawlike teeth.
They followed the scent to the Ash Spore Mushrooms.
The swarm flooded the fungal carpet and began to devour it.
The mushrooms' natural neurotoxins barely affected them.
Once fed, the cockroaches quickly mated and laid eggs.
The first week: thousands.
The first month: tens of thousands.
By the third month, they numbered an astonishing several hundred thousand.
Vast black tides of insects surged across the wasteland.
They ate mushrooms, but when hungry enough, they even gnawed deep pits into the scorched rock.
The Petrified Goblins' peaceful days were over.
Their mushroom farm was the lifeline that kept them alive.
The day the cockroach swarms invaded it in force, the goblin tribe was compelled to fight back.
War erupted.
No formations. No tactics.
A hundred Petrified Goblins swung their petrified flails and charged into the black insect tide.
On the first day, the goblins faced a bitter fight.
The cockroaches' shells were extremely hard, and their mouthparts could bite through the goblins' rocky skin.
Several frailer goblins were engulfed. Not even their bones remained.
That overwhelming sense of danger fully activated the [Bloodboil] trait.
Their eyes turned crimson. The dark-red blood threads between their stone plates swelled wildly.
Their strength erupted, doubling.
Flails smashed cockroach shells. Green acidic fluids splattered everywhere.
Wounded goblins seized dead cockroaches, tore off their limbs, and gnawed their flesh raw.
Through relentless battles of life and death, [Crude Body Tempering] worked around the clock.
The weak fell beneath the insect tide, becoming fertilizer for the scorched earth.
The survivors underwent drastic physical changes.
Their height rose from a hundred and thirty centimeters to more than a hundred and sixty.
Their gray-black rock armor grew thicker, while sharp stone barbs emerged from shoulders and elbows.
The goblin race's inborn cowardice vanished from their eyes, replaced by bloodlust and madness.
Now, three months later, Lin Yuan surveyed the land. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Of the original hundred Petrified Goblins, only sixty remained.
But those sixty survivors had been utterly reborn.
They were no longer a disorganized rabble fighting individually.
Within the wasteland basin, a thirty-goblin hunting party advanced quietly.
They had threaded the cockroaches' hardest backplates together with insect tendons and strapped them over their chests as crude armor.
Instead of flails made from wooden clubs, they now carried pale bone blades honed from giant cockroach forelimbs.
Their target was an enormous creature ahead.
A gigantic Rot-Armored Cockroach King, mutated after ingesting too much mushroom toxin.
It was more than five meters long. Its back carapace gleamed with a dark-green metallic sheen, and venom dripped from its opening mouthparts, corroding the scorched earth.
Sensing approaching life, the Rot-Armored Cockroach King shrieked. Its body crushed rocks as it lunged straight at the hunting party.
The goblins didn't retreat.
Their captain stood nearly a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, its body covered in dark-red scars.
With a savage battle cry, it activated [Bloodboil] first.
All thirty goblins went berserk together.
They spread rapidly and encircled the creature from both sides.
Bone blades struck the king's shell, throwing off bright sparks.
Its thick forelimb swept across them, catching two goblins square in the chest and hurling them away.
They rolled for more than ten meters, much of their chest armor shattered.
But they sprang up and charged the giant insect's flank again, heedless of their injuries.
The captain seized its chance.
It stepped onto the king's hind leg and launched itself upward.
Gripping its bone blade with both hands, it used the force of its fall to plunge the weapon into a vulnerable gap around the creature's neck.
Dark-green venomous blood gushed over the captain's head.
It hissed corrosively, yet failed to penetrate the goblin's advanced Stoneskin.
The king rolled and thrashed, crushing swathes of rock, until it finally stiffened and died.
The vicious close-quarters fight was over.
With only a few lightly wounded, the hunting party had slain a king-class mutant above its own grade.
The captain withdrew its blade, neatly sliced open the king's abdomen, and tore out an enormous venom gland.
It walked to the basin's center.
A crude altar of scorched rock stood there, bearing a large stone shaped like the face of Lin Yuan's consciousness.
The captain laid the venom gland and the most intact piece of carapace on the altar.
All thirty goblins dropped to one knee in unison.
"Blood and battle without end!"
"All glory to our Lord!"
Their fervent cries tore through the wasteland storm and rose into the clouds.
Lin Yuan hovered above them.
[Log: Your followers' minds and bodies have ascended through bloody battle!]
[Log: Your followers have produced an advanced faith resource—War Faith!]
[Notice: Your Divine Domain's ecological chain has formed an initial closed loop. Stability of wasteland laws increased by 10%!]
Dark-gold faith rose from the goblins' heads, crossing space to gather within Lin Yuan.
In reality, his bones cracked as they reshaped. A sense of strength swelled exponentially through his body.