The off-road vehicle’s tires screeched to a halt on the access road outside the industrial park.
Luo Yang didn’t turn off the engine. He rolled down the window, letting in a gust of wind heavy with the scent of rust and rotting meat, mixing into a nauseating, metallic sweetness that made his throat tighten.
He leaned over the steering wheel, his eyelids heavy as lead. The golden tree within his Sea of Consciousness had yet to regain its original luster.
In the passenger seat, Yan Zhi was looking at him with her head tilted.
“You look very tired.”
“No kidding.”
Luo Yang rubbed his face, took off his glasses to wipe them with the hem of his shirt, and set them back on the bridge of his nose.
“After fighting two tough battles in a row, anyone would be exhausted.”
He pushed open the car door, his boots crunching against the cracked asphalt.
The streetlights on the outskirts of the industrial park had long since been shattered, leaving only a few tilted lamp posts standing.
In the distant factory ruins, flickers of dark purple fire occasionally flared up, casting flickering light and shadows across the scattered metal debris.
A dozen Level 1 mutant beasts were rooting through a scrap pile dozens of meters away. Their scrawny backs were covered in sparse bone armor, and they were gnawing on something dark and indistinguishable, making a tooth-gritting chewing sound.
Those were human remains—likely victims who hadn't been evacuated in time.
Luo Yang withdrew his gaze, his fingers lightly stroking the hilt of the blade at his waist.
“A-Zhi, stay close.”
Yan Zhi slid out of the passenger seat, her white shoes stepping onto the broken bricks. She habitually grabbed the hem of his shirt.
One Level 1 mutant beast looked up from the scrap pile, its cloudy yellow eyes rolling. A low growl, like a dog guarding its food, rumbled in its throat.
It was roughly the size of an adult wolfdog. The bone armor only covered its forelimbs and head; the exposed skin on its belly was a sickly blue-gray, with every rib visible.
Luo Yang gripped the hilt with his right hand, and Night Owl cleared its sheath.
The blade of the fourth-tier weapon glinted in the firelight, its anti-slip patterned grip tape fitting perfectly into the gaps of his fingers.
He didn't infuse it with blood energy, relying purely on the blade’s inherent sharpness and his own wrist strength as he swung.
The edge sliced through the Level 1 beast’s skull. The sound of the bone armor cracking was like stepping on a walnut.
The beast’s torso stiffened for half a second, its forelimbs still in a crouching position, even as its head was split in two.
Green bodily fluids flowed down the blood grooves of the blade.
Luo Yang flicked the residue off the sword and continued forward, stepping over the carcass.
These were just Level 1 trash; their bone armor was so thin it was almost translucent, and their movements were as sluggish as a drunkard's.
They had likely been driven to the outskirts by higher-level beasts to serve as cannon fodder. They didn't even know the basics of coordinated hunting, only how to swarm forward in a mindless mass.
Luo Yang was being “economical” with his strikes. Every cut used only the explosive power of his wrists—no twisting his waist, no lunging, and not a single unnecessary step.
The angle of the blade’s entry was as precise as if measured by a vernier caliper, specifically targeting weak points.
Night Owl’s edge cut through Level 1 mutant beasts like a knife through tofu. After taking down seven or eight of them, Luo Yang didn't feel like he had exerted much effort at all.
Yan Zhi followed behind him at a steady pace, occasionally tilting her head to avoid splashing fluids.
She showed no reaction to these Level 1 beasts; her expression was the same as if she were looking at an empty cola bottle.
“Why don't they run?”
“Because their brains aren't up to the task.”
Luo Yang delivered a backhand strike, lopping off the forelimb of a beast trying to ambush him from the side. Immediately after, the tip of his blade plunged into its eye socket, twisted half a turn, and pulled out.
“Or because there’s something bigger inside keeping them in line. They don't dare to run.”
“Like those snow lions?” Yan Zhi asked.
“Similar, but different this time.”
“The Snow Lion King was on the field directing them, playing an RTS game with the lives of its kin. These Level 1 runts probably don't even know what’s inside; their instinct is just telling them they can't leave.”
Luo Yang slashed to the left and right. The heads of two beasts were severed cleanly from their necks.
Before the corpses even hit the ground, he had already passed between them, his pace never faltering and his breathing as steady as if he were taking a stroll on a school track.
However, he could feel the tissues around his nerves twitching. The aching soreness accumulated from physical fatigue made him want nothing more than to collapse and sleep right there.
His eyes felt hot, the back of his head felt heavy, and phantom lines of light occasionally flashed across his vision.
He knew this was the price of sleep deprivation combined with continuous combat, but he had no time to worry about that now.
The further they went, the stronger the smell of rust became, joined by a pungent scent of acidic rot.
The cracks in the ground grew deeper. In some places, the very foundation of the road had been overturned, revealing the yellow earth beneath.
Abandoned forklifts and ore transport trucks lay overturned haphazardly in the middle of the road.
Large gashes had been torn into the vehicle bodies, with jagged silver-white metal shards curling outward at the edges of the tears.
Those were made by the claws of a mutant beast. The power and precision required were certainly not something a Level 1 or Level 2 creature could achieve.
Luo Yang’s grip on his blade tightened. He pulled his phone from his pocket; the screen was still dark, and he hadn't received any new messages.
He shoved the phone back and pressed on. Ten minutes later, the silhouette of the industrial park’s center emerged through the firelight.
The ore processing plant had been leveled. Not metaphorically or hyperbolically—it was literally flattened.
Three-meter-high reinforced concrete walls had been reduced to fist-sized fragments, scattered across a hundred-meter radius.
The two blast furnaces that should have stood in the center of the plant were snapped in half. The steel frames on the furnace bodies were twisted like pretzels, and dark red embers still smoldered at the breaks.
The asphalt layer of the ground had been peeled away in sheets, exposing the charred soil beneath.
Raw blood ore, semi-finished products, and even fragments of refined blood spirit stones were scattered everywhere.
The dark red crystals glinted coldly in the firelight, looking like solidified droplets of blood strewn across the ground.
Luo Yang stepped over a piece of semi-finished blood ore, his gaze moving past the devastation to land on the far end of the factory ruins.
A person was sitting there.
Qian Yao, the forty-year-old Section Chief of the Third Combat Section, was currently slumped on a tilted concrete slab.
He was leaning against a section of broken wall, his legs stretched out straight, his boot soles covered in bloody mud.
He held two ion short blades in his hands. These were third-tier weapons with silver-gray blades. The energy indicator lights at the hilts were still flickering, though the frequency was highly unstable.
The blades were coated in green and silvery-red mutant beast fluids, which dripped slowly from the edges.
Luo Yang sheathed Night Owl and hurried forward, his boots making a series of sharp crunches as they crushed the broken bricks.
Only when he got close did he see the extent of Qian Yao’s injuries.
His deep blue service uniform had been torn into seven or eight gashes, the most severe one running diagonally from his left shoulder to his right ribs.
The edges of the tears were charred and curled; the skin beneath had been scorched by high temperatures, leaving the flesh a bloody, mangled mess that had only just managed to stop bleeding.
The right leg of his trousers was gone from the shin down, revealing a laceration on his tibia so deep the bone was visible.
Fortunately, the bone wasn't broken, but a large section of the surrounding muscle tissue had been torn away.
His face was relatively clean, save for a gash on his forehead running from his hairline to his brow bone. The blood had already dried, matting half of his eyebrow into a dark red crust.
Luo Yang knelt down and waved a hand in front of him. Qian Yao looked up; his pupils were focused, but his reaction was a beat slow.
“Luo Yang?”
His voice was incredibly hoarse, his final syllable trembling.
“It’s me.”
Luo Yang clicked Night Owl back into its scabbard and knelt on one knee. He pressed a hand above the wound on Qian Yao’s right leg, infusing blood energy to temporarily stem the bleeding.
“How long did you hold out?”
“I don't know.” Qian Yao took two ragged breaths, his neck slowly turning toward his side.
The corpse of a mutant beast lay there.
It was a full two sizes larger than a normal bone lizard, measuring nearly four meters from head to tail.
Its bone armor wasn't the usual grayish-white; instead, it had a pale blue, semi-transparent quality. The surface was covered in intricate dark patterns that looked like energy circuits etched directly into the bone.
Most striking were the bone protrusions on either side of its head, extending from the eye sockets to the back of the skull, shaped like curved sabers.
A Wind Spirit Lizard.
This was an evolutionary branch of the bone lizard, a Level 3 mutant beast.
The bone lizard species had high evolutionary potential; regardless of their initial level, there was a chance for mutation at any stage.
The Wind Spirit Lizard was one such direction. It retained the bone lizard’s close-quarters combat prowess while gaining the ability to manipulate air currents to accelerate its movements.
The trade-off was that its bone armor became weaker, losing some of its defensive capabilities.
Currently, this Wind Spirit Lizard had two Cloud-piercing Spears embedded in its head—one thrust through the right eye socket, the other driven through a gap in the jawbone.
The two blades crossed inside the cranial cavity, pinning the entire head through and through.
Luo Yang recognized the fatal wound, but those spears must have been pulled from elsewhere.
The wounds on the Wind Spirit Lizard were far from limited to those two. It had been slashed at least a hundred times from head to tail.
The pale blue flesh exposed by the shattered bone armor was shredded, and some wounds even revealed broken ribs beneath.
“One against seven.”
Qian Yao coughed, pink bloody foam spilling from the corner of his mouth.
“I brought seven brothers in here. We wanted to take a shortcut to support the alloy factory on the far east side of the park; most of the Third Section is being swarmed by aberrations over there.”
He gestured with his chin toward a spot nearby. Luo Yang followed his gaze.
Seven bodies lay among the ruins.
Some were lying on their backs, some were curled up in piles of broken bricks, and one had his torso pinned under a collapsed steel frame, with only an arm showing.
The fatal wounds on each body were different, but they were all concentrated on the chest, abdomen, and head. They hadn't run; they had fought to the very last moment.
“I didn't expect this Wind Spirit Lizard to be hiding near this plant. It moved the moment we entered, flipping the entire factory building.”
Qian Yao’s voice grew lower, his breathing heavier.
His chest heaved violently, each breath forcing more blood to seep from his mouth.
“I told them to retreat. No one moved. They all said, ‘Section Chief Qian, you go first, we’ll cover the rear.’”
Qian Yao paused for a long time. When he spoke again, his tone was as steady as someone who hadn't just crawled out of a death match.
“And then they all died,” he said. “Only I’m left.”
Luo Yang didn't respond.
He looked down at the bone-deep wound on Qian Yao’s leg. His blood energy was still flowing in, but the edges of the wound were turning white; the surrounding tissue was already dying.
“Your leg has to go.”
Luo Yang spoke bluntly. “If we send you back now, we can still save it from the knee up.”
“I know.” Qian Yao slid his two ion short blades back into his tactical sheaths.
“But we both know there’s no time to send me to the rear right now.”
Luo Yang turned to look back at the path they had come from.
One? Ten? No.
As far as the eye could see, there were at least a hundred mutant beasts.
They were emerging in packs from various parts of the industrial park, prowling along the edges of the factory ruins.
Their formation was scattered, but their pace was converging. All the beasts were moving in one direction—the southwest corner of the plant.
That was the direction they had just come from.
Their retreat had been cut off, and the closure was happening fast.
The movement patterns of every single beast vaguely overlapped without interfering with one another, as if they were being precisely controlled by something.
Luo Yang’s hand settled onto the hilt of Night Owl.
“Old Qian, stay frustrated for a bit longer. Once I’m done cutting through that pile of trash at the entrance, I’ll come back to carry you out.”
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