SEC Chapter 1330 Exploration Team
Chapter 1330 Exploration Team
King Kong stubbed out his cigarette on the wall, took out the half-eaten compressed biscuit from his pocket, and took a bite.
The biscuit was as hard as a brick, but he chewed it twice and swallowed it without even frowning.
"What do you think doctors are doing right now?"
"Let's sew people up in the medical tent. We just sent over two more; one had his lung pierced by a fissioner's bone spur, and the other was possessed by a parasite."
"He'll need to eat after he finishes sewing, won't he?"
"Of course. He's a human, not a god. Humans need to eat."
The group chatted for a few more minutes, their voices low and their tone lazy, like a group of migrant workers who had finished their work on a construction site and were squatting by the roadside waiting for their boxed lunches.
About half an hour after the war ended, Lin Yi appeared at the entrance of the canteen.
He was wearing a dark doctor's coat, stained with blood, some of which had dried and turned dark brown, while others were still fresh and scarlet.
A long line formed outside the cafeteria, with students from Kivotos holding their trays and queuing in front.
Someone recognized Lin Yi and stepped aside to make way for him, and the people behind him followed suit, like dominoes falling from the cafeteria entrance all the way to the food serving window.
Lin Yi stared blankly at the cleared passage for a moment, then nodded and walked in with his tray.
In the cycle of reincarnation, this tranquility itself is the greatest respect.
Lin Yi walked to the food serving window and handed the tray in. Inside the window were several automatic food dispensing machines in operation. The robotic arm picked up a spoonful of rice from the steam tank and placed it on the tray, and then scooped a spoonful of vegetables from the heat preservation tank and poured it next to the rice.
He glanced at the food on his plate and frowned slightly.
The dish is braised beef with potatoes.
The beef was cut into chunks of varying sizes, some as big as a thumb and some as big as a fist. The potatoes were overcooked, their edges becoming soft and mushy. The broth was dark brown with a thin layer of oil floating on top.
This dish looks no different from the braised beef with potatoes at any fast food restaurant on Workers' Street, and it doesn't even look as good as those fast food restaurants.
But Lin Yi noticed the taste, not the appearance of the dishes.
Xia's dishes have a unique aroma, not the taste of seasonings, but something indescribable.
You can tell she made it just by taking a bite, just like you can tell who brewed it just by taking a sip of tea.
But today's braised beef with potatoes didn't have that aroma; it only tasted like something mass-produced on an industrial assembly line.
He carried his tray and scanned the cafeteria, finally finding Su Xiao's seat.
Su Xiao sat in the innermost corner of the cafeteria, with her back against the wall and facing the cafeteria entrance.
The Dragon Slayer lay horizontally on his knees, his right hand resting on the hilt of the sword, and his left hand holding a plate in which he had already eaten half of the rice.
Lin Yi carried the tray over and sat down opposite Su Xiao.
Su Xiao glanced at him, said nothing, and continued eating.
Lin Yi picked up his chopsticks, took a piece of beef, put it in his mouth, and chewed it a couple of times.
The beef was stewed until it was fairly tender, and the taste was average—not bad, but not particularly delicious either.
He swallowed the piece of beef, ate a mouthful of rice, and then looked up at Su Xiao.
"Who cooked today? Where's Xia?"
Su Xiao swallowed the mouthful of rice in her mouth, put down her chopsticks, took out a cigarette from her pocket, and put it in her mouth.
"Take a look at the notification panel of the Paradise of Reincarnation."
Lin Yi glanced down at his panel, which was covered with a dense array of notification messages.
Lin Yi turned off the panel notification sound before the battle started, because dozens of damage messages would flood the screen every second after the aura was activated, and the notification sound would be as loud as a broken router.
He swiped his finger across the panel a few times, scrolling over the combat information until he reached the top and found the ones Su Xiao had mentioned.
[Notification: Hunter privileges are being checked...]
[Verification complete. Permissions have been granted.]
[If an allied contractor has more than 100 merit points, the hunter may disclose the following information to such allied contractors.]
[The following is classified war intelligence.]
[Classified Intelligence 1: The exploration team has arrived at 'Ramesses Star'. 'Ramesses Star' is 85.7% destroyed, and the remaining area will completely collapse within 15-27 calendar days.]
[Classified Intelligence 2: The exploration team consists of three people and must obtain the 'Spirit of the Creeper' within 7 calendar days. Once the exploration team obtains the 'Spirit of the Creeper,' they will transfer the item to the captain's cabin.]
[Hint: The Creepy Spirit is a key item for defeating the 'Otherworld King'.]
[Note: If the exploration team fails to capture the Creeping Spirit, and your side also fails to capture the World Core, the merit reward will be reduced by 50%.]
After reading the prompts, Lin Yi paused his finger on the panel for a moment, then closed the panel and picked up the chopsticks again.
There was one thing he couldn't understand.
After the spaceship landed, Xia disappeared.
Only a few automatic food dispensing machines were running in the kitchen. Xia's white chef's coat was hanging on a hook at the kitchen door, and her apron was neatly folded and placed on a shelf next to her, as if the owner had just gone out for a short while and would be back soon.
The toad has also disappeared.
After the spaceship landed, the three people vanished from the base camp as if they had evaporated into thin air.
Lin Yi now knows where they went.
Ramses, that colossal world that is collapsing, has lost 85.7 percent of its mass. The remaining area can hold out for another 15 to 27 days.
The condensed form of the power of spacetime originated from that world.
Each of those fist-sized transparent crystals on the Beast Continent represents the last breath exhaled by a world before its death.
Xia is a member of the exploration team and is responsible for negotiations.
Number 1045 is a combatant, responsible for acting as a bodyguard.
Toads are knowledgeable and can stabilize the situation at crucial moments.
The Paradise of Reincarnation set their destination on the outer orbit of the Beast Continent. The spaceship flew there first, dropped off the three of them, and then continued flying, landing above the Paradise of Reincarnation's main camp.
As for Luoluo.
Don't overthink it, she really is just a bartender, the kind whose job is to be pleasing to the eye.
She should still be inside the spaceship at this point, wiping glasses behind the bar.
Su Xiao lit the cigarette he had in his mouth, took a deep drag, and exhaled smoke from his nostrils.
From the very first day she entered the Beast Continent, Benny began searching the entire world for the World Core. She searched every inch of the Fallen Zone, infiltrated the rear of the alien army, and even reached the outskirts of the orc camp, but found nothing.
It's not that she didn't try hard enough, but that the core of the world isn't even on Earth.
The core of the world lies with the alien species.
To be precise, it was with the alien king.
Regardless of the form it takes, the result is the same—if you want to obtain the Core of the World, you must first find the Otherworldly King.
If you want to find the alien king, you must first cross the heart of the alien army.
If you want to get through the heart of the alien army, you have to fight your way through those millions of ground creatures.
"So the current situation is..." Lin Yi used his chopsticks to separate the potatoes and beef on the plate.
"The first phase is to seize the condensed body of the power of spacetime. After that, the second phase is to kill the alien king and obtain the core of the world. In between, we will be harassed by the other four paradises and besieged by the alien army. In the meantime, we also have to wait for news from Ramses Star to see if the toads can obtain the crawling spirit."
Su Xiao flicked the cigarette ash into the plate, where it landed on the remaining half plate of rice.
"The Creeper Spirit is the key item for killing the Alien King. Without the Creeper Spirit, we might not even be able to break through the Alien King's defenses."
Lin Yi stuffed a piece of potato into his mouth and chewed it a couple of times. The potato was stewed until very soft and melted in his mouth, the sweetness of the starch spreading in his mouth.
"Other parks must have sent exploration teams as well."
Su Xiao nodded. In a war of this scale, it's impossible for only the Paradise of Reincarnation to send an exploration team. The rules of the Void Tree are fair; if one side opens a breach, the other four sides will also open breaches, only the size and direction of the breaches will differ.
The person sent out by Apocalypse Paradise was most likely the Nameless Saint himself, because no one in Apocalypse Paradise besides him could withstand the environment of Ramses Star.
Death Park sent out Cohen's second-in-command, the woman who always followed Cohen three meters behind on the battlefield without ever saying a word. Her combat ability was not as good as Cohen's, but she was more suitable for this type of mission.
The Holy Light Paradise sent Viola's sister, a woman far more famous than Viola in the Holy Light Paradise circle. It is said that she once single-handedly persuaded an army to lay down their arms and surrender in a certain original world.
The Shepherd himself was sent out by the Holy Land because no one in the Order could make decisions for him, and the Order was in disarray when he was not there.
Whichever exploration team obtains the Creeping Spirit will have absolute initiative in the struggle for the World Core.
Without the spirit of crawling, you cannot even see the face of the alien king.
You have the spirit of crawling, so you can stand in front of the alien king and fight it one-on-one.
This is the gap.
The two stopped talking and focused on eating.
The rice on the plate had gone cold, and the grains had clumped together, requiring force with chopsticks to break them apart.
The broth from the braised beef with potatoes solidified at the bottom of the plate, forming a translucent gelatinous substance.
Lin Yi stuffed the last piece of potato into his mouth and put down his chopsticks.
Just as he was about to pick up his tray and head to the recycling area, the dean walked in from the cafeteria entrance.
He walked over to Lin Yi and stopped, resting his right hand on the edge of the table and taking out a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket with his left hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
"Doctor, go out and take a look. The Dark Demon is throwing a tantrum outside again."
Lin Yi placed the plate on the table and stood up from his chair.
"What's going on?" "The Dark Demon first devoured itself, and then started eating the corpses of the Earthwalkers in the pile of corpses. I don't know how many it has swallowed, but now that thing is so big that you can't even tell what shape it originally was. If you don't go check it out soon, it might swallow the very foundations of the city walls."
Lin Yi grabbed his coat from the back of the chair and followed the dean out of the cafeteria.
Su Xiao hung the Dragon Slayer Flash on his waist and followed.
The three people came out of the canteen, crossed the main road, and walked onto the city wall.
The searchlights on the city wall swept across the darkness, and in the beams of light, one could see the distant wilderness soaked in blood and flesh.
The robotic dogs had stopped their cleaning work. They stood in a semi-circle at the edge of the open field, their robotic arms hanging down at their sides, and red lights from their head sensors flashing in the darkness.
They did not take another step forward.
It's not that I don't want to leave, it's that I'm afraid to leave.
The Black Demon crouched in the middle of that open field.
It was at least ten times larger than when Lin Yi had seen it last time.
Last time, it was only the size of a round table, curled up on the ground like a crumpled black cloth.
Now it has a diameter of over 20 meters and a height of over 3 meters. Its surface is pitted and uneven, like a piece of mud that has been repeatedly kneaded. Black liquid is slowly wriggling in each pit.
It is eating.
The Dark Demon's body lay spread out on the wilderness like a pancake, with countless long, thin tentacles extending from its edges.
The tentacles reached into the pile of corpses, suckers gripping the body of a ground creature, and then the tentacles contracted like a compressed spring, dragging the corpse back to the Black Demon's main body.
The moment the corpse touched the surface of the Black Demon, it began to sink, like a stone falling into a swamp, slowly but irresistibly.
The sound of chewing came from inside the Black Demon's body.
The sound wasn't loud, but it was extremely penetrating, like someone sawing a bone with a blunt knife, each sound closer and more chilling than the last.
Lin Yi stood on the city wall, his hands gripping the railing, looking at the writhing mass of black, rotting flesh in the distance.
His senses swept over the Black Demon, and the moment they touched the surface of that rotten flesh, a familiar aura surged out from within the Black Demon.
He was all too familiar with that aura—the power of the abyss.
The pure, untransformed power of the abyss, though of the same origin as the power within him, is different in nature. Like two streams flowing from the same spring, one going east and the other west, they eventually transform into two completely different types of water.
The Dark Lord is a race from the Abyss.
They are not creatures mutated by the power of the abyss, nor are they species that have evolved special abilities in the abyss environment; rather, they are the original race born from the abyss.
These things do not belong to any known biological classification system; they come from the abyss and eventually return to the abyss.
Lin Yi probed the Black Demon's body with his senses and touched a mass of consciousness that was being suppressed.
That was the little fat boy's consciousness.
His consciousness was still present, but very weak, like an oil lamp swaying in the wind, its flame flickering and ready to go out at any moment.
The Black Demon's instinctive consciousness is vying for control of his body. If the Black Demon wins, the little fat boy's consciousness will be completely devoured, and his body will become the Black Demon's permanent vessel, never to return.
The Black Demon seemed to sense Lin Yi's abyssal power.
It stopped eating, and the tentacles that were dragging the corpse froze in mid-air.
The Black Demon's body rose up from the ground, like a giant mollusk raising its head.
The raised part turned towards Lin Yi, as if it were sizing him up.
Two gazes met briefly in the darkness.
Then the Dark Lord lowered his head.
It's not admitting defeat, it's not surrendering, it's just a lack of interest.
Its tentacles reached back into the pile of corpses, its suckers gripping the corpse of a fission species, and dragged the corpse back to its body.
The chewing sounds resumed, more rapid than before.
Lin Yi withdrew his gaze and turned to look at the person next to him.
"How many corpses has the Black Demon devoured?"
The dean took out a small notebook from his pocket and flipped through it.
“From the time we first noticed the anomaly until now, it’s been about forty minutes. In the first twenty minutes, it swallowed less than two thousand, and in the next twenty minutes, its size doubled and its eating speed doubled. At this rate, if we give it another hour, it could devour all the corpses on this battlefield.”
Lin Yi frowned, not because he was worried about the Black Demon swallowing too much, but because he was worried about the little fat boy.
The more life force the Black Demon devours, the stronger its instincts become, and the more severely the little fat boy's consciousness is suppressed.
If he keeps swallowing like this, the little fat boy will really never come back.
"I'm going downstairs."
Lin Yi climbed over the railing and jumped off the city wall.
The impact of the eight-meter drop was absorbed by slightly bending the knees upon landing, leaving two shallow footprints in the mud from the boots.
He stopped twenty meters in front of the Black Demon.
The Black Demon did not react; its tentacles continued to drag corpses through the pile, the chewing sounds persisted, and the black liquid on the pitted surfaces continued to writhe.
Lin Yi strode forward, fifteen meters, ten meters, five meters.
The Black Demon still did not react.
It is ignoring him.
Lin Yi stopped less than a meter in front of the Black Demon, extended his right hand, spread his five fingers, and pressed his palm on the surface of the Black Demon.
The rotten flesh felt very soft to the touch, like pressing your hand into a lump of dough that hadn't been kneaded. Your fingers sank in, and the surrounding flesh pushed aside, revealing a dark, gaping opening.
He poured the power of the abyss into his palm.
The Black Demon's body convulsed violently.
Lin Yi put his right hand into the opening, his entire arm disappearing into the Black Demon's body.
The Black Demon's body began to tremble, like an overloaded engine vibrating violently.
Lin Yi's fingers explored inside the Black Demon, touching something warm, soft, and still pulsating.
That's the chubby boy's body.
Lin Yi didn't use any force; he simply gripped the wrist and pulled it out of the Black Demon's body.
The first attempt failed; the fleshy walls inside the Black Demon gripped the chubby boy's body like a mouth, sucking every inch of him back.
Lin Yi poured even more Abyss Power into it.
The moment the Black Demon's flesh came into contact with that abyssal power, it began to soften, like a piece of butter being heated from solid to liquid.
The fleshy walls that had been gripping the chubby boy loosened their grip.
Lin Yi pulled the chubby boy out of the Black Demon's body.
With a muffled "pop," it sounded like the cork of a tightly sealed wine bottle being pulled out.
The chubby boy's body drew an arc in mid-air before landing on the ground at Lin Yi's feet.
His entire body was covered in a viscous black liquid, from the strands of his hair to between his toes; every inch of his skin was coated with that liquid.
"grass."
The chubby boy opened his mouth and uttered a syllable.
The sound wasn't loud, but it was exceptionally clear in the quiet wilderness.
Lock me up.
Lin Yi looked down at him.
The chubby boy's unfocused gaze began to focus.
The Black Demon's body began to shrink the moment Lin Yi pulled the chubby boy out.
The once-spread flesh walls shrank from the edges to the center like a punctured balloon, shrinking into a clump of rotten flesh that could barely be discerned in shape.
The rotten flesh lay on the ground, its edges still wriggling slightly, but the force of that wriggling was no longer enough to support it to continue eating.
It resembles a dried-up earthworm, twitching occasionally, with the intervals between twitches becoming longer and the amplitude becoming smaller.
The chubby boy sat up from the ground and wiped the black liquid off his face with his sleeve.
His eyes were still red, not the kind of red caused by crying or allergies, but a red that seeped outwards from the inside of his pupils.
"How long has your consciousness been suppressed?"
"I was suppressed from the third minute after I started swallowing the corpse. Everything that followed wasn't me doing; that thing was controlling my body."
The chubby boy looked down at his hands. There were several thin, long wounds on his hands, and the skin around the wounds was bluish-purple, like marks left after being bitten by something.
He had never allowed the Dark Lord to devour so much life force before.
In the past, when he released the Dark Demon, he would only let it devour a dozen or so low-level creatures before taking it back.
If he swallows too much, he will lose control, and the Dark Demon will turn against him, suppressing his consciousness to the lowest level and using his body as its vessel.
This time, he devoured the corpses of tens of thousands of Earthwalkers and Fissioners, a number far exceeding his control.
This time, he will either completely absorb that power and soar to new heights.
Either the Dark Demon devours him, his consciousness vanishes from the world, and the Dark Demon takes over his body and lives on forever. (End of Chapter)