Zhalge's Demise

They hovered in mid-air, their cold light casting a sickly green glow over everyone's faces. Then, as if drawn by some invisible force, they drifted toward Zhalge's massive, collapsed body.

The soulfire landed on his dark green skin. Instead of igniting an open flame, it seeped into his body like water soaking into dry sand.

Zhalge's body began to burn—burning from the inside out. Beneath his skin, streaks of eerie green light spread along his blood vessels and meridians, looking as if someone had traced his skeleton in fluorescent paint.

Rounds of angry, painful roars from the monster echoed through the corridor.

Elliot withdrew his finger, letting the remnants of the scroll flutter to the ground.

His face was several shades paler than before casting the spell, and a few strands of his black hair draped over his shoulder had turned gray, though it was barely noticeable under the eerie glow of the soulfire.

Then, the massive body suddenly convulsed. At the gash on his nape that Rayne had sliced open, the dark green flesh was squirming at a visible rate, trying to reconnect the severed joints.

“...It's still healing.”

Rayne's hand returned to his sword hilt, seemingly having made up his mind.

Elliot did not retreat.

“This spell ignites the magicules inside him. Just buy a little more time. Once the magicules inside him burn out, he won't be able to heal anymore.”

Zhalge pressed his arms against the ground, trying to haul his massive body out of the pit. The gash on his nape was still healing, but the green light was already seeping down his spine.

Balen was the first to charge forward.

Re-bracing his buckler, the stout dwarf wedged his body into the pile of rubble to Zhalge's left, angling the shield toward the arm that was still trying to push off the ground.

“You still want to get up? It took two of my custom dynamites to blast you into that pit! If you dare crawl out, I'm going to have a serious word with you!”

Curse flowing from his mouth, his shoulder slammed into his shield.

Gerak circled around from the right, dragging his hand axe. Taking advantage of the moment Zhalge exerted force on his left arm, Gerak swung his axe, chopping right into the wrist joint.

The tendon severed, and the arm went limp, causing Zhalge's entire upper body to crash back down to the ground.

Gerak retreated immediately after the strike, giving the creature no opportunity to grab him.

Zhalge's roars were no longer as powerful as before; they sounded more like the ragged gasps squeezed from a broken bellows.

The soulfire had already burned down his spine to below his lumbar vertebrae. Wherever the green light passed, his dark green skin began to crack, spewing a vast amount of grayish-white magicule residue from the fissures.

His legs were still trapped in the pit, and his healing speed was visibly slowing down. The gash on his nape that Rayne had sliced open had originally closed up most of the way, but now it split open by another two inches, the charred flesh at the edges curling back, unable to close again.

“He's almost done for!” Elliot shouted, his voice carrying a rare hint of urgency. “One last blow! Don't give his magic core a chance to restart its circuit!”

Rayne did not hesitate any longer. Forcing himself up, he held his longsword horizontally, a thin layer of golden light reigniting on the blade.

This time, he didn't charge it for the full fifteen seconds—only six. The tip of his sword plunged into Zhalge's spine, the golden light penetrating down through the gaps in the vertebrae, severing the connection between the thoracic and lumbar spine.

Zhalge's spine let out a sickening crack. His upper body convulsed violently before completely collapsing.

He trembled in the pit, like a mountain collapsing from within.

The green light of the soulfire spread from his spine to his skull, and from his ribs to his knuckles, illuminating his entire skeleton in an eerie green.

The two pale blue flames in his eye sockets flickered violently, growing weaker and smaller, until they shrank to the size of pinpricks and went out completely with a low, sigh-like thud.

Zhalge was dead!

Silence fell over the corridor for a brief moment.

“Hahaha! Praise the great God of Machines! We fucking did it!”

Balen placed his shield on the ground to sit on and let out a long, satisfied sigh.

“An Elite-tier magical beast... Hahaha! A monster that even a Gold Rank adventurer party might not be able to handle!”

The usually taciturn Gerak excitedly threw his arm around Elliot next to him.

“It's all thanks to your powerful spell! Doesn't this mean we can directly promote to Gold Rank adventurers now?

“Hahaha! Who would believe it? A party that hasn't even fully earned their Silver Rank titles, suddenly leaping to a Gold Rank party!”

Elliot pushed the enthusiastic beastkin away with some exhaustion. “It had little to do with me. It was the result of everyone's joint efforts.”

Misha said nothing.

She tapped her staff lightly on the ground. A gentle, pale-gold halo bloomed from the tip, spreading silently like ripples on water. The light washed over everyone, soothing their various wounds.

Rayne pushed himself up using his sword hilt, looking at the celebrating party with a gratified smile.

But soon, his peripheral vision caught something unusual at the end of the corridor.

Under the dim light of the moss lamps, a few short, green-skinned figures peeked out from the corner. They clutched rusty blades and sharpened wooden sticks in their hands. There weren't many of them—just four or five—led by a hobgoblin.

They couldn't see what had happened in the corridor yet, but smelling the thick scent of blood in the air, they were hesitantly creeping forward on their tiptoes.

Though these few goblins posed no threat, caution was the most fundamental trait of an adventurer.

He was about to call out to warn the others, but then he noticed that behind those goblins, a humanoid slime was holding a dagger, silently taking out a goblin at the rear of the group.

Within moments, all six goblins collapsed silently to the ground.

The humanoid slime squatted beside the hobgoblin's corpse, wiped his dagger clean on his tattered clothes, and then pulled back his cloak's hood, revealing a face so caked with sweat and dust that his expression was unreadable.

“Lu Mao? I didn't expect him to have this kind of disguise-type magic item,” Rayne thought, quietly withdrawing his gaze. He then called everyone over to start searching Zhalge's corpse.

Speaking of goblins, they were quite a peculiar type of magical beast.

Generally speaking, after a magical beast died, the magicules inside its body would condense in a specific location, forming a unique biological material.

For example, after a cyclops died, its magicules would condense in its eyeball, forming a special material that possessed the basic properties of emitting light and reacting to magicule density.

Based on this characteristic, many guilds used crystal balls made from these cyclops eyeballs when recruiting talent to judge the magicule content in a candidate's body and determine their rank.

If the magicules did not combine with any specific body part, they would condense on their own into a magic core.

However, forming a magic core required extremely high-purity magicules. Generally, only magical beasts of Elite Rank or above had a chance of forming one.

Aside from these special magicule-infused materials, many magical beasts themselves were highly valuable.

A famous example was dragon scales. Their hardness and high resistance to both physical and magical damage made them widely used as materials for forging weapons and armor alike.

The most common was slime gel formed after a slime died—flammable, harmless, edible, and possessing adhesive properties, it was widely used in various fields, making it highly practical and cheap.

As for goblins, they didn't have a single body part that could be considered valuable, nor did their magicules condense in any specific spot after death. Killing goblins yielded almost no substantial material rewards, and even their meat contained trace toxins, rendering it utterly worthless.

Furthermore, goblins possessed a certain level of intelligence, committed all kinds of atrocities like rape and pillage, had a highly socialized structure, and reproduced at an extremely rapid rate, making them a highly troublesome species.

With the combination of low rewards and high risks, almost no one was willing to go out of their way to deal with them.

Over the years, the goblin population had gradually grown, even producing quite a few goblins of Elite Rank and above. They seemed on the verge of becoming the most populous race next to the four major races: humans, beastkin, dwarves, and elves.

...