After clearing away the collapsed ceiling, the way ahead was wide open. The door to the artifact storage room had fallen off and was wedged at an angle, barely holding itself up.
“Seriously, what the heck happened here? I’ve seen trashed buildings before, but nothing this bad. Not even a fire with zero casualties could do this kind of damage. Something else must’ve gone down.” Rachel Luo thought, gripping the door, then yanked it off with a loud crack.
But in the next instant, a foul wind blasted straight at her!
Turns out, a Spasm Fiend was hiding behind the door. The moment the door came off, it lunged at Rachel Luo with its jaws wide open.
Good thing Rachel had picked up some Insight Technique. Against a Spasm Fiend ambush, her reflexes were lightning fast. In a split second, she ducked, leaned back to dodge the claws, let out a sharp shout, tensed her muscles, and kicked upward—bam, crack! Her powerful kick sent the fiend flying.
Next, backup arrived. With a fierce buzzing roar, a light flared up from the darkness behind Rachel Luo—a chainsaw. Its spinning blade glowed like a maxed-out MMO weapon, spewing sparks everywhere. Out of the sparks, Chainsaw Girl shouted, stepped forward, and swung her arm for a slash!
Crunch, rip, splat—hard to describe, but the Spasm Fiend’s skin, muscle, and bone were torn apart in the most brutal way.
Yellow sparks splattered with black and red, chunks of bone and meat flying everywhere. By the time Chainsaw Girl put away her chainsaw, the Spasm Fiend’s chest and belly were nothing but minced meat and shattered bone—dead as dead can be.
“Score! Another kill for me!” Chainsaw Girl, looking like a college student, flashed a V-sign, totally unfazed by the pile of gore. Not even a hint of nausea. By the way, this is Rachel Luo’s other powerhouse teammate, forum ID: ‘Chainsaw Zombie-Slayer.’
She’s a minor forum celebrity, and like KingJester_NotAStud, she’s powerful but not exactly normal. She’s got a thing for slaying humanoid monsters—gets all hyped when she sees a Spasm Fiend. Six of them once ganged up on her, but instead of panicking, her eyes lit up and she chopped them all to bits.
Of course, she’s perfectly normal around regular people.
“What’s up with you?” Chainsaw Girl turned around, noticing the old professor staring blankly at the Spasm Fiend. She raised a brow, “Don’t tell me you know that thing?”
“She… she was my assistant…” Professor He said, devastated. “She was so dedicated, so serious. I never imagined today would end like this…”
Well, that was awkward. Chainsaw Girl scratched her head, embarrassed.
“Sigh, better to let her rest in peace than have her wander as a twisted monster. Really, I should thank you… sigh…” With another heavy sigh, Professor He, well into his seventies and ready to die, managed to pull himself out of his grief.
“Alright, time for business.” Out of this quirky bunch, Rachel Luo was still the most reliable, so she naturally took charge. “KingJester_NotAStud, Chainsaw Girl, you two clear the storage room and wipe out any lurking monsters. I’ll collect supplies and look for anything useful. Professor He, the main event’s all on you.”
Everyone got moving right away.
In this sealed room, no one worried about the fire attracting monsters too strong to handle. They found flammable stuff and made makeshift torches. Artificial power was useless, but natural energy still worked. In the dim firelight, everyone did their thing. Rachel Luo searched for anything useful—even antiques, old books, and paintings looked useless, until she found a sword in some broken glass.
The sword was old-fashioned, but its shine was bright, and the blade gleamed—probably a modern replica of an ancient sword. Rachel Luo gripped the hilt, swung it, and a flash of sword light flickered—pretty cool. Yang Qi mostly taught her boxing early on, but after sparring with the Sword Saint and learning the Snowblade Sword Technique, he also taught her sword skills.
In this chaotic world, bare hands just didn’t cut it. Gripping the sword finally gave her some sense of security.
She had no idea where her master was now. If he were here...
“So that’s it!” A sudden shout made everyone tense up. Professor He was clutching a stack of documents, eyes bulging like lightbulbs: “I was wrong, I really messed up! It’s him, it’s really him—if it wasn’t for me, if only it wasn’t me! It’s all my fault, ahhh!”
Rachel Luo stepped forward and grabbed Professor He, who was stomping and hammering the ground. She spoke softly, “Professor, let’s not talk about blame yet. What exactly happened?”
KingJester_NotAStud and Chainsaw Girl exchanged a look and stepped up too: “Yeah, what’s really going on here? What’s with all this black stuff, and those weird monsters outside—where did they come from?”
“Alright, let’s handle business first, then I’ll pay the price!” Professor He took a deep breath, eyes red with pain: “It all started with the Black Death Emperor. Something leaked out from him—something caused all this! Look, it’s recorded here: that black mist is called ‘Miasma.’ About eighteen hundred years ago, it caused a huge disaster in the Western Regions. ‘Wherever the Miasma passes, water and grass wither, no living things, monsters run wild, and ten thousand miles become a death zone!’”
(This chapter isn’t finished yet~.~ Click next page to keep reading the good stuff!)
“Ten thousand miles of death zone?!” The three Chosen Ones stared at each other. Chainsaw Girl couldn’t believe it: “Professor, I haven’t read much, but don’t mess with me—did something that huge really happen in ancient times? If it did, wouldn’t it be famous forever? Why wasn’t it in our middle school textbooks?”
“Well, maybe. It happened on the distant western frontier, so either it got labeled as superstition and covered up, or everyone who could’ve written it down… just died.” Rachel Luo offered the scariest guess, then asked: “Professor, is there any historical trace?”
But Professor He was frantically flipping through the documents, then looked up in a daze: “A mystery in the history world… finally solved by this file…”
“What mystery?”
“Loulan! The disappearance of the ancient Loulan Kingdom!” Professor He said, stunning everyone: “The Tarim Basin used to be a grassland, full of water and herds, and Loulan thrived on it. But around the year 200, the grassland suddenly turned to desert, and Loulan vanished!”
“Grassland ecosystems are usually stable. No one knows why it disappeared almost overnight. We’ve come up with all kinds of wild theories, but if someone told me it was some kind of ‘qi,’ some weird mystical thing, I’d have smacked them! But now—” Professor He stared at the words, laughing bitterly, “I have to believe it. If this keeps up, Shanghai could be the next Loulan! Wait…”
It looked like Professor He thought of something else. He clutched his head and muttered, “Not just Loulan—maybe even ancient Babylon was wiped out by this Miasma! All those ancient kingdoms that vanished in dust and sandstorms, the ones that just disappeared at their peak—maybe it was all this! And me, I brought a city-destroying disaster straight to Shanghai—uhaha, I’m a criminal for the ages!”
“Professor, don’t go off the rails!” Rachel Luo shouted, pulling the professor back from the brink. “Focus! What special properties does this Miasma have, and what does it turn into?”
“Right, right, that’s the real business. Let me see—damn, it’s broken!” The document looked like someone had ripped out half of it; most sentences were shredded and unreadable.
“Forget it, let’s see how the ancestors handled it!” Chainsaw Girl said impatiently. “If nobody could beat this Miasma, it would’ve wiped out humanity ages ago! But it got sealed, locked in a coffin. Let’s see what they did and copy them!”
“Hold on, let me check—oh, here it is! It says the Black Death Emperor’s imperial robe, accessories, and everything in the iron tomb and bronze mound were all used to seal the Miasma! He still wore the robe, but the jade—where’s the jade?” Professor He dropped to the ground and started searching frantically. The three others joined in, and eventually they found a bunch of jade necklaces and ornaments.
“Let me try them on first!” KingJester_NotAStud didn’t care about superstitions and started hanging the burial jade all over himself. After twisting his waist and turning around: “Hey, not bad, it really feels different—seems to work!”
“As long as it works! Professor, academic research can wait. Just tell me one thing—” Rachel Luo said briskly, “If we put all this jade back on the ancient corpse, will it still help?”
“That probably isn’t a corpse, more like a clay figurine used to seal the Miasma. The document’s a mess, but from context, someone must’ve found a way to pack all the Miasma inside and lock it in the coffin. According to the record, ‘as long as the jade figure isn’t broken, the Miasma stays sealed.’ There’s probably still a ton of Miasma inside. That’s the source of all the current disasters—if we can plug the leak, it won’t fix everything overnight, but it’ll help.” Professor He guessed.
“Alright, that’s the plan—find the jade corpse, plug the Miasma!”
Rachel Luo gave a commanding wave and led the four-person squad into action again. Professor He mentioned he still had a broken jade shard in his studio, chipped off the jade figure’s forehead—could be important. So the crew decided: hit the studio first, then hunt down the Black Death Emperor. The Chosen Ones swore they’d change fate itself!
“Where’s the studio?”
“Not far, just across the street.”
With Professor He leading the way, the group hurried outside. As soon as they stepped out the museum’s front door, Rachel Luo suddenly grabbed someone. She stared wide-eyed at the black mist surrounding them, her face tense: “Something’s off.”
Shhh-shhh, the sound came from all directions, and twisted figures emerged from the thick fog, closing in. A quick count—at least thirty of them.
“What, just a bunch of small fry? Watch this!” Chainsaw Girl wasn’t scared at all and was about to charge in, but Rachel Luo stopped her, face serious: “Not those—there’s something else, something stronger in the mist!”
Just as she finished speaking, a glow lit up deep in the fog—a dark yellow fire, blocked by the mist but radiating heat. The black Miasma was being sucked away, thinning out and extending their visible range.
When their vision extended to thirty meters, they finally saw the source of the yellow light.
It was a vehicle.
A bus, even labeled with “Route 49.”
But this bus was anything but normal—it was driving. In a world where all artificial power was dead, the bus had grown a human face on its windshield and was rolling forward! Dozens of Spasm Fiends circled it like bodyguards. Of course, they weren’t serving the bus—their master was someone else.
(This chapter isn’t over yet^.^ Click next page to keep reading!)
“Kebabs…” Inside the roofless bus sat a monster built like a mountain of meat. Its skin was blood-red, with massive devil horns curling down from its head. For this beast, the bus was just a bathtub. The front half of the bus blazed with fire, making it look like the bus’s face had flaming hair. And in the back, the meat mountain was calmly roasting human flesh over the flames.
Bodies were skewered on iron rods. The meat mountain spun them like kebabs, roasting people until they were charred and crispy, then picked up a rod, opened its giant mouth, and—crunch!—bit off half a torso.
Crunch, crunch, a few chews, and the whole person was swallowed whole!
Gotta admit, the scene was so intense, so overwhelming, that everyone was stunned.
“Kebabs…” The meat mountain wasn’t done. It reached to the back of the bus and grabbed another person. This one was tied up tight, cloth stuffed in their mouth, but they kept struggling and letting out muffled screams.
Wait—screams?
Spasm Fiends never make a sound, even when they die!
Rachel Luo focused her Insight Technique and looked closer—it wasn’t a Spasm Fiend at all, but a real, living human. A young woman!
“Damn!” Chainsaw Girl might go nuts chopping zombies, but she hadn’t lost her humanity. She grabbed her chainsaw and growled, “Are we going in or not?”
“Well…” Professor He hesitated. He could tell the meat mountain was a serious boss, and with so much at stake, picking a fight seemed reckless. Honestly, running was the smart move.
Just then, the meat mountain leaned in and sniffed the woman, clearly pleased with the ‘ingredient.’ “Kebabs!” He grabbed an iron rod, ready to skewer her like a shish kebab!
The woman struggled and screamed. Rachel Luo’s eyes flashed cold as she drew her sword and charged: “I’ll draw aggro, Chainsaw Girl attacks, NotABachelor protects the professor and gives ranged support. First, save her! Go!” In a blink, Rachel Luo kicked off and leapt forward, using her training to run across the heads of the Spasm Fiends like stepping stones.
The Spasm Fiends reached up to attack, but Chainsaw Girl, cackling wildly, tore through them with her roaring chainsaw.
“Hya!” Rachel Luo dashed forward, kicked off the bus’s big face for a boost, and soared over the flames, sword flashing straight at the meat mountain’s face. At the same time, Chainsaw Girl zipped around to its side, revved up, and hacked her chainsaw at its lower half.
NotABachelor acted fast, unzipping something with a flourish, then flopped face-down on the ground and roared: “Check out my ultimate move—Face-to-the-Earth!” Crack—the floor shattered, and a huge stone was catapulted at the meat mountain like a medieval siege weapon.
Even with the group attack, the meat mountain was tougher than expected.
“Kebabs!!” it roared, swinging its massive arms and sending a blast of wind that knocked Rachel Luo flying and deflected the boulder. The chainsaw slashed its huge butt, spraying blood, but for a beast that size, it was nothing. With another swing, it forced Chainsaw Girl back. The monster bellowed with unstoppable ferocity: “Nobody’s stopping me from eating—kebabs!!”
That said, it gave up roasting—just opened its mouth wide and went straight for the woman.
“Damn it!” Rachel Luo caught her breath and tried to charge again, but it looked like she’d be too late.
Just as the woman was about to die, a heroic shout rang out, echoing like in a TV drama, and a tall figure dropped from the sky: “Dominance: Wilted Blossom!”
Boom—a blinding beam of light slammed into the meat mountain. The explosion shredded the bus, knocked over Spasm Fiends, and left everyone gaping. With a thud, a tall, muscular man landed, half-ancient, half-modern in style, holding the rescued woman in his strong arms. His cape fluttered in the blast wind.
With the explosion behind him, this comic book–style hero slowly uttered two words: “Dominance…”