The two walked along the rooftop down into the freight corridor.
Chi Zheng carried the assault boat and walked in front, sensing movement in the water from afar.
“Be careful in a moment. They’ve already come up along the water.” He motioned for Lin Xia to observe the ramp below.
Lin Xia’s expression tightened as he looked toward the defensive line Chi Zheng was pointing at. His eyesight couldn’t compare to Chi Zheng’s, so he could only barely see things tumbling within the turbid waves—dark gray, strip-like objects twisted together like hemp ropes.
It was the water snakes.
Lin Xia felt a bit nervous. How was he supposed to kill water snakes? These things were just too fast!
“Focus your attention.” Chi Zheng’s hand pressed down on Lin Xia’s shoulder, his face drawing close to his ear. Lin Xia felt a bit ticklish and tilted his head slightly, exposing his fair, slender neck.
Chi Zheng’s gaze was involuntarily drawn to it before he composed himself.
“Watch carefully. The head of a mutated creature, the part with the crystal core, will exhibit an energy reaction. It’s different from ordinary parts.”
Lin Xia wanted to say that he didn’t have X-ray vision, but Chi Zheng insisted that he hold his breath and concentrate. Slowly, he actually began to see a few differences.
At first, it was just a blur in the background, somewhat like a camera lens losing focus, completely blurring out the irrelevant parts.
Lin Xia had worked a short-term job at the Alliance Marriage Bureau and could skillfully operate an antique camera. The blurred waves gave him inspiration: even if he couldn’t lock onto the location of the crystal core at a glance, as long as he blurred out the irrelevant factors in the frame layer by layer, wouldn’t what remained be the true target?!
No sooner said than done, he began trying to simplify his field of vision.
The results of doing this were immediate. After the waves blurred, the phantom images mixed within them gradually revealed their outlines. Evolving further into lines and shapes, a few faintly flickering bright spots instantly caught Lin Xia’s attention.
It was the crystal cores! He could actually see them!
Lin Xia’s eyes felt sore and strained, but he didn’t dare blink, terrified that he would lose the frame he had worked so hard to achieve if he wasn’t careful.
He gripped the fire axe in his hand tightly and cautiously approached the waves. The mutated water snakes were clearly paying attention to his movements as well. Upon realizing he was drawing near, the water snakes abruptly stopped tumbling and began to strike the waves with their tails at high frequency, using this to draw Lin Xia’s attention.
One person and one snake—both had locked onto the other as prey.
Chi Zheng stood to the side with his arms crossed, his posture relaxed.
Even without a simple rank tester, he could roughly estimate that the mutated water snakes were at an N2 difficulty level. To him, N2 was like a mouse in a hole—completely non-threatening—but it was a highly suitable target for Lin Xia to practice on.
The attacks of the mutated water snakes were not fatal, but they could swim at high speed in the water, which happened to hone Lin Xia’s real-time reflexes.
Lin Xia’s wading boots had already stepped into the accumulated water.
The rainwater was very cold, and various kinds of garbage floated in the water, restricting Lin Xia’s field of vision to a certain extent.
He was very cautious, constantly waiting for an opportunity. But clearly, the mutated water snakes were not as composed as he was. After a standoff of about ten minutes, the water snake moved first!
It suddenly burst forth from the water like a gray chain, pouncing violently toward Lin Xia’s throat. Before it even flew close, the mutated water snake opened its lower jaw, revealing a mouth packed with dense, serrated teeth. If it truly managed to land a bite, Lin Xia’s neck would instantly snap into two pieces.
This was a new skill the water snake had evolved during the cataclysm; it no longer swallowed prey with its lower jaw, but used its sharp teeth and masseter muscles to chew. Its movements were too fast, its tail and body twisting simultaneously to confuse the prey’s line of sight. Were it not for a visual ability user with advanced dynamic vision, ordinary humans would find it very difficult to lock onto its movements.
Lin Xia was not a visual ability user, so he simply gave up on tracking the snake as a whole, focusing solely on the crystal core portion of the snake’s head. At this moment, this thing was flashing like a pulsar in the universe, regularly emitting a stable signal.
To strike a snake, strike its vitals. With the coordinates of the snake’s head, gripping its vitals was effortless. Just as the mutated water snake’s serrated teeth were about to draw close to Lin Xia’s waist and abdomen, a fire axe descending from the heavens precisely severed its vital point. Before the mutated water snake’s small brain could figure out the situation, the entire snake had already been divided into two, crashing heavily into the freezing rainwater.
Beep—
A prompt suddenly popped up on the broken windshield.
Congratulations to the host for completing an independent kill. Would you like to perform automatic collection?
Lin Xia immediately pressed the confirmation button.
He had used all his strength for that blow. At the moment of the strike, he felt a distinct sense of resistance; clearly, the water snake had not only obtained an evolution in speed, but the toughness of its skin had also increased significantly.
Fortunately, he had decided to strike at its vitals. If he had chopped at the snake’s head or somewhere else, this strike might have missed.
The panel flashed, and a price list automatically popped up.
Collection Subject: Mutated Water Snake (N2)
Collectible Parts:
Snake meat: 1 unit of energy / 1000g
Snake gall: 2 units of energy / piece
Digestive fluid: 1 unit of energy / 50ml
Jaw meat: 1 unit of energy / 500g
The handling fee is the total price $\times$ 30% energy units. The host can choose to deliver physical items or top up the energy account.
By choosing to top up the energy account, the system will cut the handling fee in half.
Lin Xia thought about it, feeling a bit pained by the exorbitant handling fee, and chose to top up directly.
Mainly, the useful parts of the mutated water snake were not very numerous, and the diners at Black Fog Farm wouldn’t think much of N2-level ingredients either.
In the end, the mutated water snake contributed a total of 52 units of energy, leaving Lin Xia highly satisfied.
He was killing mutated water snakes to practice his combat skills, and now there was extra energy to collect—it was truly an unexpected joy. He liked anything he got for free!
“Another one is coming,” Chi Zheng, who was on the side, prompted.
Lin Xia immediately gathered his thoughts.
With his first successful experience, he quickly figured out a set of effective combat methods in the subsequent battles, and his killing efficiency steadily improved.
“Strange, is there something inside our warehouse? Why are the mutated water snakes coming one after another?” Lin Xia asked Chi Zheng during a break in the fighting.
He couldn’t quite understand the logic of the water snakes; it was as if they were being driven to line up and deliver their heads. One died, and then another came over—not a single one even cut the line—and the time intervals were precisely controlled at around seven to eight minutes.
Although… it was very convenient to kill them this way, and he didn’t have to worry about running out of physical strength either. But were mutated creatures all this polite nowadays? Even knowing how to line up—then why did that team get injured before?
Lin Xia was full of doubts, completely failing to notice that a rare trace of embarrassment had surfaced on the stern face of Chi Xiaozheng beside him.
He pursed his lips, remaining silent.
An invisible biological force field rapidly diffused outward with him as the center, like ripples on water. Those water snakes that had originally been lured over by the illusion seemed to suddenly startle awake from a dream, fleeing frantically in all directions.
“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” Chi Zheng said calmly. “Aren’t they gone now? Xiaxia, look over there…” He pointed toward the water surface not far away. “This time what’s coming isn’t water snakes; it’s a school of piranhas.”
Is that so?!
Lin Xia hurriedly stood up to look and indeed discovered that a dense cluster of light spots had appeared beneath the ramp.
The speed of the piranhas was not as fast as that of the mutated water snakes, but a school of fish often numbered in the hundreds or thousands, which was a test of Lin Xia’s concentration.
During his first close encounter with the school of fish, Lin Xia sustained a minor injury. Fortunately, the piranhas’ teeth were not venomous, and the superficial wound healed quickly after disinfection. While treating his wound, Chi Zheng explained the key points of combat to him, telling him to always pay attention to dodging the school’s sneak attacks. After that, the school of fish could only damage his jacket, unable to even scratch his skin.
Am I this strong now?!
Lin Xia felt that the effects of today’s special training were highly significant.
His muscles and neural reflexes were much faster now, and his vision and hearing had also improved noticeably. Back when his fever had just broken, he couldn’t see the crystal cores inside the brains of the mutated crows, but now, in a state of high concentration, he could already distinguish the color and size of the crystal cores!
Special abilities truly could be upgraded!
However, the piranhas were only rated N1 and had no edible parts, so Lin Xia simply refined them all to top up his account.
He and Chi Zheng fought on the ramp for a full six hours, killing from evening until the early hours of the morning, and the savings in his energy account reached a substantial figure.
During this period, the rain never stopped. The two female members of the ability user team each made a brief appearance, but both merely watched from afar for a while before leaving, seemingly very fearful of the constantly rising accumulated water.
“It’s getting late, let’s go back,” Chi Zheng suggested.
Lin Xia nodded.
In truth, he no longer had the strength to speak. Prolonged high concentration had drained him to his limit. A few times he felt a splitting headache and had to pause to rest. But once he recovered slightly, he stepped onto the ramp once more to battle fiercely against the schools of fish and packs of snakes in the water.
Lin Xia had a theory: since his special ability was strengthening as his proficiency increased, then a accumulation of quantitative change would lead to a qualitative change—perhaps he could upgrade his special ability.
Although his special ability was a food stall cart, his physical constitution could also be enhanced. The evidence was that after he killed the Big-Headed Lizard, his brain throbbed with mad pain due to overuse. But once he endured the most uncomfortable phase, he discovered that his energy became more abundant, and his muscular strength improved noticeably as well.
Therefore, in the battles against the piranhas, Lin Xia began to consciously deplete his mental energy and then recover through short rests. After several rounds like this, he could calmly handle the schools of fish that had initially left him in a frantic rush, and no injuries occurred after that.
Lin Xia shared this theory, and Chi Zheng immediately said that he had also upgraded his special ability during combat.
“Before, when I killed that mutated tiger, I had to leap up to chop it. Now I can snap its neck with one hand. So it turns out this is all due to breaking through limits!”
Lin Xia: …
He felt as though that wasn’t quite the case, but the other party insisted that practice makes perfect.
“I killed a few mutated rats at the door of our house before, which was how I managed to comprehend the method for dealing with the tiger.”
Lin Xia: …
Alright, I get it, you’re a combat genius.
So in this wretched world, the factory settings between people truly are full of a goddamned disparity!
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