Deng Yuqi instructed the squad leaders to continue with the evacuation, but with a change of plan: instead of gathering survivors to escort them to the temporary shelter, they were to settle these people in an abandoned building for now. They would only be brought back to the main shelter once Shen Ge had dealt with the aberrant worm.
Upon receiving Deng Yuqi’s message, Liu Jiayi and her team quickly arrived with the main force to provide support. As for Shen Ge’s proposal, Liu Jiayi didn’t deliberate too long before making her decision.
Not that she trusted this man who had only joined the exploration team a few days ago and already made a name for himself—no, she had long been dissatisfied with the Council.
In truth, whether it was the exploration team or the aberration-hunting team, as resources grew tighter and tighter under the apocalypse, it became increasingly clear that the corrupt Council was nothing but dead weight holding the shelter back.
But replacing the Council was no easy task. After all, decades of “deep-rooted” conditioning had made many people accustomed to obedience. Unless pushed to the brink, it was nearly impossible to expect them to rise up and resist.
The “rebellion” of the New God Cult this time, however, presented a golden opportunity. The timing, the circumstances, and the public sentiment were all aligned—no one was willing to let this chance slip by.
After consulting with the head of the aberration-hunting team, Liu Jiayi had the deputy leaders of both teams take charge separately, splitting up the evacuees from the shelter and keeping them under control. They would wait for Shen Ge to eliminate the aberrant worm, then seize the shelter in one fell swoop and take the Council’s place.
It seemed even the Freak Organization hadn’t anticipated this turn of events. They had arranged for their men to eliminate the “Bishop” and take his place, hoping to remove unstable variables, and then slowly erode the shelter from within through the New God Cult, eventually bringing it under their control.
Even if that plan failed, they had set the aberrant worm as a backup to drain the shelter’s defenses.
But they hadn’t counted on a wild card appearing out of nowhere—Shen Ge, who turned their scheme around and helped the exploration team take over the Council, completely changing the shelter’s ownership.
The Freak Organization had poured tremendous time and resources into raising this aberrant worm. Unfortunately, for Shen Ge, a fourth- or fifth-tier aberration was merely a matter of how much time it cost him.
The worm, their so-called “trump card,” lasted only two hours before Shen Ge put it down. Seeing this, Deng Yuqi and the others immediately stormed the shelter.
Of course, Shen Ge didn’t need to worry about the shelter’s internal affairs—besides, that wasn’t his strong suit. Unless they needed him to go in and wipe out the Council himself.
Compared to the Council and the shelter, Shen Ge was far more concerned about the Freak Organization.
By now, he had cleared out all the fourth- and fifth-tier aberrations around the shelter, leaving only the “great whale” hidden in the storm clouds above, and the seventh-tier aberration whose whereabouts remained unknown.
But unfortunately, Shen Ge still hadn’t found any energy signature that could connect to the “Dream Fragments”—which meant he couldn’t open a passage back to “reality.”
So he pinned his hopes on the Freak Organization, hoping to find a way to lure the great whale down from the sky, or at least locate the seventh-tier aberration.
Over the next two days, while Deng Yuqi and the others handled the shelter’s affairs, they also interrogated the captured freak.
The freak’s name was Wang Dong. He had been the head of security at the Great Jing Research Institute. After Great Jing fell into chaos, he had followed the institute in their relocation and later became one of the first subjects of the Freak Project.
The institute Wang Dong had been stationed at was merely one of several Freak Organization outposts, hidden underground in a villa district on the outskirts of Great Jing.
Before the apocalypse, the villas were home to Great Jing’s elite—the so-called “upper class” who controlled most of the city’s wealth. But as aberrations appeared and the disaster spread, these wealthy individuals, desperate for “immortality,” turned their attention to the aberrations themselves.
They set up a charity foundation—on the surface, to contribute to global philanthropy, but in reality, to build a secret underground laboratory beneath the villas for researching aberrations.
When the aberration disaster hit Great Jing, this secret lab became a shelter of sorts, absorbing researchers from all over the city.
Shen Ge made a record of the list and intel Wang Dong provided. Even though this wasn’t his world, there were many commonalities between different worlds, and perhaps he could use this information to track down the Freak Organization in his own reality—after all, this world had plenty of “familiar faces,” so it stood to reason that they existed back home too.
Though Wang Dong had been among the first to participate in the freak experiments, his slow mutation and lack of combat ability meant he’d only climbed to the rank of squad leader. He had hoped that completing this mission flawlessly would earn him a high-ranking position as the New God Cult’s “Bishop.” But instead, he fell into Shen Ge’s hands.
After the exploration team took control of the shelter, Shen Ge accompanied them to clean out the Council’s archives, where he found intelligence on Great Jing’s collapse in this world.
According to the records, Great Jing’s supernatural response department had first discovered creatures called “aberrations” as early as the 1990s. But at the time, they’d assumed these were just diseased animals—mutations caused by some illness. Not long after, however, they detected aberrant energy fluctuations in the same area.
After months of investigation, they still couldn’t identify what this aberrant gas actually was, and since they’d already labeled it an animal disease, they didn’t invest much effort into studying it further.
Shen Ge hadn’t expected this world to discover aberrations several years earlier than “reality.” Unfortunately, they missed their best window for research. It wasn’t until a string of aberration incidents broke out overseas—and the complete collapse of the Sakura Country’s aberration disaster—that Great Jing finally remembered the aberration they’d found all those years ago.
“Heh.” Shen Ge couldn’t help but sigh. No matter how many times the world restarted, it seemed there would always be people who led humanity down the wrong path.
Combining the intel from the shelter with Wang Dong’s information, Shen Ge decided to head to the outskirts and check out the Freak Organization’s outpost.
Deng Yuqi wanted to send a small team with him, but these people were a full tier below the supernatural agents from “reality.” Bringing them along would be like carrying a bunch of dead weight, so he politely declined her offer—as well as Fang Mingyue’s intention to tag along.
Since he didn’t have the Red Mist Armor, Shen Ge couldn’t rely on it for travel, so he had to “request” a combat vehicle from Deng Yuqi for the journey.
He didn’t know how to drive one, but in the apocalypse, there were no traffic cops to ticket you, no red lights, and no lane restrictions—just floor the gas and plow forward. If you hit something, reverse and try again. The vehicle wasn’t great at much else, but its crash-worthiness was perfectly suited for an apocalypse war rig.
As Shen Ge drove into the area Wang Dong had described, a long-missed system alert suddenly rang in his mind—
[Warning: High-tier aberrant energy detected. Host has been locked on by multiple high-tier aberrations. Current number of aberrations exceeds safe limits. Host is in grave danger—life hanging by a thread. Please leave this area immediately!]
“…?”
Life hanging by a thread? Grave danger?
Ever since Shen Ge advanced to Tier 5, he hadn’t heard such an urgent warning from the system in a long time. For a moment, he actually felt a little excited.
Didn’t this mean a mountain of resources was waiting for him?
Several warning messages exploded in his mind one after another. Then, ahead, the sky suddenly darkened with storm clouds, as if a downpour was coming, and a thick fog began gathering at an alarming rate.
Boom!
Something was in that fog. Before Shen Ge could get a clear look, there was a deafening crash—a massive tentacle burst up from the ground and coiled around his vehicle.
The moment it wrapped around the war rig, the “tentacle” opened its mouth, revealing rows of teeth like a lamprey’s.
The next second, the tentacle bit off a huge chunk of the vehicle. But by then, Shen Ge had already used “Collapse” to teleport onto the roof.
He didn’t immediately deal with the tentacle. Instead, he observed where it connected to the ground, trying to pinpoint the hiding spot of this high-tier aberration.
Just then, rain began to pour down from the sky in sheets. The rainwater struck the tentacle aberration that had devoured the vehicle, driving it into a frenzy.
Shen Ge then realized this wasn’t ordinary rain—it was highly corrosive aberrant acid rain. Or rather… it looked more like drool dripping from an aberration.
Even with his Invisible Barrier protecting him from the corrosion, he couldn’t help but notice the bubbles sizzling against it. His gaze drifted upward toward the gathering storm clouds.
Was that the “great whale,” or some other aberration?
Unfortunately, Shen Ge couldn’t fly. Using the Invisible Barrier as stepping stones to ascend was impractical—not only would his aberrant energy drain too fast, but simply pinpointing the “great whale’s” location in the sky was already a challenge.
Meanwhile, the tentacle aberration, drawn by the aberrant energy radiating from Shen Ge, realized that after eating the vehicle, the “filling” inside was gone. It immediately turned its attention to him, hovering in midair.
Invisible Aberrant Domain!
Collapse!
Shen Ge expanded his domain and tried to use “Collapse” to shove the tentacle back underground, hoping to enrage whatever was below and lure it to the surface. But after he stuffed the tentacle back, the ground went still again, as if it had never been there.
Clearly, this high-tier aberration had no intention of giving up its “advantage” to fight him on the surface. Shen Ge was left a bit speechless—finally running into an aberration with a brain, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.
Sure, he could use “Collapse” to go directly underground and find it, but based on past experience, that would probably land him straight in the aberration’s stomach.
And this was the Freak Organization’s “headquarters” in this world. What if this was their “guard dog”? That would literally be delivering himself as a snack.
Shen Ge called on the system to scan the area, only to find that the [Map] was dominated by an enormous red dot.
“A seventh-tier aberration?” Shen Ge froze.
Based on the map’s scale, a red dot of that size had to be a high-tier aberration far beyond fourth or fifth. But this was supposed to be the Freak Organization’s stronghold—why would a seventh-tier aberration be here?
He refused to believe that this world’s Freak Organization had the ability to “tame” a seventh-tier aberration. If they did, they wouldn’t need to rely on schemes like the New God Cult to control a shelter.
As the tentacle vanished, the aberrant black fog that had gathered suddenly dispersed, revealing a massive horde of aberrations lurking among the ruins ahead.
There was a giant spider dozens of meters long, a lamprey-like worm resembling an earthworm, a hybrid of gorilla and crocodile, and an evolved version of the “chimera” he had killed earlier.
The terrifying part wasn’t these aberrations themselves—it was that they were all “getting along,” each occupying its own patch of rubble.
For aberrations, the aberrant energy of their own kind was even more enticing than human flesh. Having them congregate in one place without devouring each other was, in itself, an aberration!
And in the farthest distance, there was another mass of fog. Unlike the “great whale” in the clouds, this aberrant black fog connected both the ground and the sky, and it was far larger than the storm clouds above.
From Shen Ge’s position, looking ahead, he couldn’t even see the end of it. Inside the fog, a colossal silhouette flickered in and out of visibility.
It looked like a monster made of countless tentacles—at least several hundred, maybe even thousands of them!
Each tentacle was several times larger than the one that had attacked his vehicle, giving the impression that the earlier tentacle had actually detached from this very creature.
The upper half of this gargantuan aberration spread its tentacles across the entire sky as far as Shen Ge could see, while the lower half stretched down to the ground and burrowed deep underground, as if most of Great Jing lay under its control.
With a casual flick of one tentacle, it curled around a giant worm aberration over twenty meters long and dragged it into the black fog.
So that’s why the aberrations on the ruins could coexist peacefully—they were all just “farmed food” for this monster.
[Warning! Warning! Warning!]
[Host is within the domain of a seventh-tier aberration. A large number of high-tier aberrations influenced by this entity are active in the area. Given your current strength, you stand absolutely no chance against them! Please cherish your life and flee aberration-infested Great Jing immediately!]
[Warning! Host is in close proximity to a seventh-tier aberration. Facing it means nine deaths and one slim chance of survival—you are in imminent danger! Escape the domain now!]
Only a seventh-tier or higher aberration could trigger such frantic “alerts” from the system. But what Shen Ge couldn’t figure out was this: the shelter was only about a hundred kilometers away. A seventh-tier aberration this close—how could the shelter not know about it?
Even if the shelter’s resource-gathering teams never ventured into this area, the seventh-tier aberration had never bothered to hide. Why hadn’t it attacked the city?
And wasn’t this supposed to be the Freak Organization’s base?
A seventh-tier aberration sitting right on their doorstep—there’s no way the Freak Organization would have dared to build a stronghold here, even with a hundred times the nerve.
This colossal aberration’s upper body filled half the sky in his vision, while its lower body touched half the city. If it wanted to, it could “swallow” all of Great Jing in an instant!
A monster this massive and terrifying—even if every supernatural warrior in this world’s Great Tian Dynasty joined forces, they couldn’t scratch it.
Shen Ge might handle fourth- and fifth-tier aberrations with relative “ease” now, but against a seventh-tier—hell, even a sixth-tier—his odds of victory were less than one in ten.
And that one-in-ten success rate required perfect timing, terrain, and a dozen other conditions. In other words, whether he could take on a sixth-tier aberration didn’t depend on his own strength—it depended on whether the aberration gave him an opening. Take that fusion freak in the dream world, for example: if a sixth-tier aberration hadn’t shown up at the same time, and the two titans hadn’t fought each other, allowing Shen Ge to scavenge the leftovers, it was doubtful he’d have even escaped the fusion freak’s body.
Still, while Shen Ge was no match for a seventh-tier aberration, its appearance also meant he finally had a chance to reconnect with reality!
