Shen Ge could feel the viscous black blood flowing slowly around him. Since he was inside the black blood, he could faintly sense a downward pulling force.
“Blood vessel?”
Shen Ge was used to running around inside high-rank specters’ bellies, but this was the first time “Collapse” had dropped him directly into a specter’s blood vessel.
At this moment, the system’s warning was still ongoing. In short, the black blood here had very strong specter-energy corrosion. If Shen Ge stayed here too long with his physique, he would suffer severe corrosion.
However, even without the system’s warning, Shen Ge had no intention of staying long in an environment like this. A specter’s belly was already full of danger, let alone being inside blood with extremely high corrosion.
But the problem was — it wasn’t that Shen Ge didn’t want to leave. He couldn’t. The high-intensity specter energy coverage suppressed his own specter energy. Just maintaining the No Exit domain to keep the Formless Barrier’s defense active consumed most of his specter energy. He had no more specter energy to spread out his domain and scout around.
Shen Ge opened his panel and glanced at it, calculating the rate of specter energy consumption. Just maintaining the Formless Barrier consumed about one-twentieth per minute. In other words, based on his specter energy cap, he could last at most another twenty minutes before needing to consume another Mental Apple to replenish.
“Flowing blood?” A sudden flash of inspiration sparked in Shen Ge’s mind. A bold idea flashed through his head. He opened his backpack and took out a strange person inhibitor that he had brought from the Quanlong Mountain base.
Before setting out to investigate East Ring Lake, besides “borrowing” some more specter energy equipment, Shen Ge had also grabbed a few specter energy canisters and a strange person inhibitor.
His purpose for this investigation was that strange person who looked exactly like him. Carrying a specter energy inhibitor on him was just a precaution.
Although he still wasn’t sure whether what was trapping him right now was a specter or a strange person, this strange person inhibitor could suppress specter-energy corrosion. Maybe it would have some effect.
So here was the question: how could he inject the strange person inhibitor into the black blood while it was separated by the Formless Barrier’s defense?
Shen Ge thought for a moment and came up with a solution. He condensed a very small cube of Formless Barrier in front of him, injected the strange person inhibitor into it, and then slowly pushed it out through the defensive barrier.
Then — release!
Splash!
The blood-red strange person inhibitor immediately merged into the black blood the next second. Two or three seconds later, the originally slow-flowing black blood suddenly began to boil violently, surging rapidly. Combined with its viscous state, it looked like magma gushing out after a volcanic eruption.
The boiling black blood rapidly spread outward from the part where the strange person inhibitor had been injected. Then all the surrounding black blood began to boil, and the entire space started to distort.
Shen Ge noticed that the consumption for maintaining the No Exit domain had decreased. Clearly, this specter was controlling its specter energy to suppress the spread of the strange person inhibitor.
At this moment, the strange person inhibitor was like injecting an antibody into a body full of viruses. The antibody was now frantically devouring the virus.
Shen Ge hadn’t expected the strange person inhibitor to be this effective. If it proved useful, he could have the research department mass-produce it when he got back — then even ordinary people could deal with specters.
But to prevent the strange person inhibitor from spreading, the specter — just like how Shen Ge had covered himself with the Formless Barrier — used its specter energy to isolate an area, “quarantining” all the regions affected by the strange person inhibitor. This caused the initially violently boiling black blood to stop spreading after being isolated.
Naturally, Shen Ge couldn’t let the specter have its way. So, taking advantage of the reduced specter energy consumption, he forcibly spread out his No Exit domain and condensed the Formless Barrier, trying to “smash through” the specter’s blockade.
And so, this became another specter-energy contest between two Rank 6 beings. Both sides’ specter energy was being continuously consumed. Just as the boiling blood seemed about to break through the blockade, the next second it was pushed back by the blockading specter energy. Shen Ge and the specter pushed and blocked, turning it into a war of attrition.
This strange person inhibitor was the newest type made by the research department by extracting strange person samples from Yun’er. Its effect against strange people was much better than against specters. Because strange people were fused specter cells, and specters and humans were inherently somewhat mutually repulsive, the strange person inhibitor was more effective.
On the contrary, since specters had no human cells in their bodies, the strange person inhibitor could only rely on its own power to fight specter-energy corrosion. It couldn’t mobilize human cells to resist, so its effect was less than half.
The research department had originally conducted experiments using a Rank 2 specter and a Rank 2 strange person called “Two Heads Four Arms.” One strange person inhibitor could kill a Two Heads Four Arms, but could only damage the injection site of a Rank 2 specter.
For example, if the injection site was a forelimb, then over time — about 10 to 30 minutes — that forelimb would “necrotize” and couldn’t be restored by the specter’s high healing ability.
When Shen Ge had seen this report back then, he hadn’t thought much of it. He wasn’t a researcher, and flipping through research reports was only to find easier ways to deal with specters. But now, through the reaction of the specter before him, he understood.
The “necrosis” at the specter’s injection site was because specters, unlike strange people, had no human cells in their bodies. After the strange person inhibitor was injected, the specter quickly detected it. For self-preservation, it released specter energy to “quarantine” the strange person inhibitor — that is, “necrosis.”
Clearly, Shen Ge’s desire to use the strange person inhibitor to give ordinary people the ability to deal with specters was a good one, but unfortunately, low-rank specters could render the strange person inhibitor completely ineffective through limb “necrosis,” and high-rank specters could even confine the strange person inhibitor to a very small area.
Unless someone like him could control specter energy to affect the specter and “assist” the strange person inhibitor in breaking through, killing a specter with the strange person inhibitor would be very difficult.
What’s more, this wasn’t even an ordinary strange person inhibitor. It was a rare item researched by extracting strange person samples from Yun’er. Even if you slaughtered her entirely, you could make at most a few dozen bottles — while specters in the world were as numerous as ants. Until the underground specter-energy corrosion was solved, specters could never be fully killed!
Shen Ge pulled back his thoughts and focused on controlling the No Exit domain to break through the specter’s defense. But at this moment, he suddenly felt a violent vibration appear within the boiling black blood.
This feeling was very eerie — somewhat like picking up a container filled with boiling liquid and shaking it left and right. But before Shen Ge could figure out what was causing it, he felt his specter domain seemed to have broken through the specter’s defense and was continuously spreading outward.
But this feeling wasn’t accurate either, because it wasn’t that he had broken through the defense — rather, he simply couldn’t feel that “resistance” anymore.
The specter gave up resisting?
Clearly not. Instead, the specter had discovered the “bug” inside its body. For self-preservation, it activated “quarantine mode.” Just like how low-rank specters would directly necrotize a limb, this specter directly “cut off” this chunk of its body — along with the blood vessels inside.
Shen Ge felt his “entire house” being thrown into the air, then exploding through the underground. Black blood sprayed like torrential rain, and chunks of flesh fell to the ground along with it.
Only then did Shen Ge notice that these chunks of flesh looked exactly like severed octopus tentacle segments. The next moment, he crashed heavily onto one of the tentacles.
In the distance, beside the huge crater, another bottomless small hole had appeared. This was the hole Shen Ge had been “thrown out” and smashed into.
Shen Ge got up and jumped down from the tentacle flesh chunk. With no more specter-energy corrosion, he no longer needed to maintain the No Exit domain, which instantly made him feel much lighter.
Shen Ge looked up at the sky. Compared to when he had entered the underground ruins, the thick dark clouds in the pitch-black night sky had dispersed somewhat. A dark red full moon hung in the sky, looking extremely eerie.
“A red moon?” This wasn’t the first time Shen Ge had seen a red moon. Every previous time he’d seen one, it had been in overlapping spaces.
Shen Ge scanned his surroundings. At this moment, he was at the center of the specter disaster outbreak shown on the doomsday map. The surrounding buildings had all collapsed into ruins. Forget people — he couldn’t even see a single specter or parasitized person nearby. Only dense black mist of specter energy kept drifting out from the various-sized craters.
In the end, Shen Ge’s trip underground had yielded nothing except a crisis mission and the knowledge that two high-rank specters were hidden below.
Shen Ge still had a small portion of his specter energy left. He didn’t plan to continue clashing head-on with the underground specter. Humanity’s advantage in dealing with specters lay in the fact that specters had no consciousness. If humans also relied purely on brute force against specters, what difference would there be between them and these monsters?
Shen Ge’s purpose for this trip was the underground research data and the “resources” buried in the ruins — dealing with specters came second.
But the method of going down through “Collapse” had proven useless. Shen Ge even suspected that of the two monsters underground, only one was a specter — the other was a fusion-type strange person.
If not, it would have been impossible for him to “Collapse” straight into the specter’s body. That experience was too similar to dealing with fusion-type strange people.
As for why a fusion-type strange person and a high-rank specter could coexist harmoniously, Shen Ge had actually had a similar experience before — in the dream world, when he encountered a Rank 6 fusion-type specter, a Rank 5 strange person had been parasitizing inside its body.
And that mysterious space Shen Ge had just experienced — he could faintly sense a specter-like parasitism there too. The reason the opponent had been so furious at the commotion Shen Ge caused was probably out of fear of waking the slumbering Rank 6 specter.
Having figured this out, since the strange person inhibitor couldn’t deal fatal damage to high-rank specters, Shen Ge decided to focus on provoking “conflict” between the two high-rank specters. After all, “parasitism” didn’t mean they truly coexisted harmoniously. As long as there was a trigger point, it could set off a century-scale war.
But before that, Shen Ge decided to first give Fang Mingyue and Deng Yuqi a heads-up, so they could prepare for evacuation in case of a high-rank specter battle. Otherwise, with two high-rank specters fighting, whether the already precarious Great Capital could survive was an unknown.
Not to mention there was still a Rank 7 specter watching covetously from another direction. Facing a同类 about to break through to Rank 7, that Rank 7 specter definitely wouldn’t let this juicy morsel become its rival. Once the Rank 7 specter joined the battle, it would almost be a replay of the “God War” that sank Sakura back then.
Shen Ge decided to first help the shelter collect the underground resources, and while he was at it, see if he could grab a few specter energy equipment. Best if he could get the underground research institute’s data out — then even if a few high-rank specters blasted the ground apart, it wouldn’t affect his original goal.
“System, classify and scan the surrounding resources.”
Originally, Shen Ge’s thinking was that since he was just moving resources — whether weapons, ammunition, food, or water, they were all indispensable resources for the shelter — he could just go with random draws.
But earlier, Shen Ge had spent thirty thousand system points to conduct a detailed observation of Fragment 5 World, so he now had less than forty thousand system points left.
Compared to obtaining ordinary resources, the specter energy equipment and research data that had sunk underground with this research institute were far more valuable.
Research data couldn’t be drawn out, but specter energy equipment might be. So Shen Ge chose to do a scan first. If there was specter energy equipment, he would directly “transfer” it.
[Spend 1,000 system points to precisely locate resources within a ten-li radius?]
“Yes.”
[Locating——]
[Marking successful. Host can view in the map. Spend system points to transfer designated resources to your location.]
Shen Ge opened the [Map] and took a look. Besides red dots representing specters, the map had various green, blue, and white dots. After zooming in, there were annotations next to them — from “living supplies,” “weapons and equipment,” to “vehicles,” “specter corpses,” everything was there.
And judging by the positions of those specter corpses, they were most likely experimental materials from the underground research institute. They were also marked with “free attribute points 1-3” and so on.
Although Shen Ge had long known that so-called free attribute points were rewards from the system “devouring” specter corpses within range through transfer, seeing such straightforward labeling for the first time still stirred something in his heart.
He didn’t know either — as the system continued to “awaken,” when it recovered to 100%, it would mean more and more specter cells had been devoured, eventually replacing Shen Ge’s human cells.
Then his half-human, half-specter nature would eventually turn him into a complete strange person. This feeling always left an unease in Shen Ge’s heart — a worry that he would become one of those underground monsters with no consciousness, only an “evolution” instinct.
“Phew.” Shen Ge sat on the ground and let out a long breath. Clearly, thinking about whether he would become a monster when his life wasn’t even guaranteed was meaningless. Besides, the system itself wasn’t a product he had actively chosen — there had long been no way back.
Pulling back his thoughts, Shen Ge focused on those differently colored marker points. White represented the most basic resources. As the colors changed — from white, green, blue, purple, gold… — it meant the resource’s rarity was increasingly higher.
“Man, the system’s creator… couldn’t have been a gaming addict, right?” Shen Ge had long wanted to complain about the “Shen Ge” of World 1. Whether it was the lottery or leveling up, the system was exactly like a game system. Clearly, the “Shen Ge” of World 1 had been deeply addicted.
But this kind of marking had one advantage — it let you see at a glance which items on the [Map] were rare.
Shen Ge zoomed in on the only gold dot on the [Map], then selected “Transfer.”
[Spend 50,000 system points to transfer the characteristic equipment “Endless”?]
Wait?
Endless?
Infinity Edge?
