This time, without the barrier of vines, the two spatial blades followed the path of the previous wounds, slicing deeply inward.
Without a doubt, it directly sheared off half the mutant spider’s abdomen.
The mutant spider shrieked in agony, its compound eyes scanning left and right until it finally spotted Shen Tangtang in a patch of grass directly to its right.
Shen Tangtang had happened to position herself right in the enemy’s blind spot.
Grievously wounded and stricken with terror, the mutant spider scrambled frantically on its eight legs toward the depths of the forest.
Shen Tangtang stood her ground, green light flickering between her fingers as an arm-thick vine whipped out to bind the mutant spider’s four hind legs tightly.
The mutant spider decisively sacrificed its back legs, intending to break free and escape.
Several more spatial blades flashed past, and the lower half of the mutant spider’s abdomen was completely severed.
The fleeing mutant spider stiffened for a single second.
With a heavy thud, it collapsed onto the ground.
Shen Tangtang didn’t rush forward to check; a mutant beast’s dying counterattack was the hardest to guard against and the most lethal.
She flicked a few more spatial blades forward, completely severing the mutant spider’s neck before running over. Pressing her hand against the carcass, she stowed it directly into her spatial dimension.
Catching the heavy stench of blood in the surrounding air, she flicked her wrist, causing countless blades of green grass to burst forth from the soil. In moments, the battlefield was swept clean.
Donning her gloves, Shen Tangtang walked over to pick up the rice-dumpling-wrapped mutant rabbit leg and tossed it back into her space.
Following the path the mutant spider had taken, she tracked it backward. The deeper she went, the more humid it became, devoid of any sunlight. Sparse patches of grass grew on the pine-needle-covered ground, looking almost as they had before the mutation.
Huh?
Shen Tangtang looked with surprise at rows of brownish-yellow giant mushrooms ahead of her, each the size of a washbasin, growing side by side.
Carefully slicing off a piece, she placed it onto her detector. Two seconds later, a mechanical voice chimed in.
[The detected item is a valley-mature mushroom (gu shu jun). Radiation level: 0%. Edible.]
Shen Tangtang was startled, only then remembering that she hadn’t turned off the detector’s alert sound.
Could food with a 0% radiation level really exist? And it wasn’t even something accelerated by a wood-type ability user.
Yet, looking again at the text on the detector screen, it undeniably read 0% radiation.
Shen Tangtang surveyed her surroundings and couldn’t help swallowing hard.
All of these belonged to her now.
She plucked the mushroom she had just tested—it was truly large and heavy, weighing a solid eight pounds.
Stowing the mushroom into her space and turning off the alert sound, she sliced into a neighboring mushroom.
[The detected item is a valley-mature mushroom. Radiation level: 0%. Edible.]
Yet another mushroom with 0% radiation.
In this radiation-blighted wasteland, this was practically impossible unless something was buried beneath this soil.
Shen Tangtang swallowed hard. This couldn’t be what she thought it was, could it?
Energy stones were so scarce precisely because the pioneers who rose to prominence centuries ago had over-extracted them. Most high-level powerhouses now resided in the ultra-level safety cities, while intermediate safety cities like theirs dotted the globe by the countless numbers.
Six hundred years ago, a massive spiritual energy explosion expanded planet Blue Star by several hundredfold. Flora and fauna underwent explosive growth, wrecking cities, while natural disasters took turns striking. Safety cities, big and small, sprouted like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, human population instantly plummeted by a quarter, and the rapid growth of plants and animals affected various mineral deposits.
Among them, energy stone veins were the most precious and rarest mineral resource.
Shen Tangtang stopped her trembling hands and scanned her surroundings. Aside from noticing that the needle-leaf trees in this area were taller and larger than elsewhere, there was nothing unusual—the only standout feature was these dense clusters of valley-mature mushrooms. Everywhere else, they only popped up as occasional lone specimens. Since she had been in a rush earlier to track down the mutant spider’s lair, she hadn’t stopped to pick any.
With no one else nearby, Shen Tangtang wasn’t in a hurry to harvest all of them.
She only picked the mushrooms she had just tested, tucked them into her space, and followed the increasingly dense spider silk deeper to track down the mutant spider’s nest.
Half an hour later, Shen Tangtang stared at a five-meter-high cavern entrance before her, pitch-black within.
She pulled out a torch she had crafted from pine-oil cloth, ignited it with a fire starter, and stepped inside, one cautious step at a time.
The entrance was choked with thick webs. Walking ten meters in, she spotted various items wrapped in colorful silk cocoons—their shapes suggested they were various mutant beasts—along with two smaller silk balls suspended from the wall.
Scanning all the way through, she didn’t spot any human-shaped cocoons, which gave Shen Tangtang a quiet sense of relief, also confirming that this location was sufficiently remote.
Crunch…
Shen Tangtang lowered her head to check; it was a whitening animal leg bone. Looking ahead, animal bones became increasingly dense, yet the air carried no foul odor.
A surprisingly clean mutant spider.
Shen Tangtang mentally evaluated it.
The hollow cavern echoed with the sound of snapping bone. Anyone else encountering this floor of white skeletons would surely have their scalp tingling with dread.
Shen Tangtang merely walked onward with a calm gaze. Gradually, she began spotting remains resembling human bones, though they were severely fragmented and must have been there for many years.
At that point, the cavern sloped downward, and Shen Tangtang caught sight of a massive spiderweb suspended mid-air. Resting upon it was a mutant spider twice the size of the one she had just killed, lying completely motionless.
Shen Tangtang instinctively slipped into cover, observing closely until she realized the mutant spider’s compound eyes had turned a grayish-white. Was it already dead?
Discovering that it lacked any breath of life, Shen Tangtang couldn’t help exhaling a breath of relief. When she first saw the cavern, she had realized the mutant spider she killed didn’t quite match the scale of this lair.
The variety of mutant beast bones and the combat power of the spider she had just slain didn’t line up at all.
Turns out, an even larger mutant rainbow spider had indeed inhabited this cave, but for some reason, it had already died.
Walking forward slowly, she suddenly discovered that the path ahead dropped off like a cliff. Looking down, it was three stories deep, with blackened animal bones dimly visible at the bottom.
The open space was the size of a basketball court. A cool breeze blowing in from the cave entrance whistled like a tearing void, echoing across the cavern floor. The crunch of breaking bone fragments down below sounded exceptionally sharp amid the surrounding forests of white skeletons. Shen Tangtang rubbed the goosebumps on her arms; this was her first time witnessing such a scene.
Taking a few deep breaths, she pulled vine seeds from her space, activated her ability to accelerate their growth, and slowly lowered herself down along the cavern wall.
The moment her feet touched the ground, her duct-tape-wrapped shoes let out a sizzle sound, puffing out small wisps of white smoke.
Bad luck—scorching hot.
Shen Tangtang gripped the vines tighter and climbed upward by a fraction.
She wedged her torch into a crack in the nearby wall.
Clack. It felt like she had struck something hard.
A few clumps of dirt fell away. Suddenly, a patch of purple stone embedded in the soil was revealed, the exposed portion about the size of a palm.
A vine instantly coiled around her waist to ensure she wouldn’t fall, while she wedged the torch firmly into the dirt beside it.
Tap, tap, tap, clods of earth tumbled downward one after another. Fortunately, the torch remained securely planted in the soil.
She drew a hoe from her space and began digging away the earth, slowly unearthing an oval-shaped stone about the size of a hundred-pound watermelon.