Chapter Ninety-Seven: Advancement

As Jicheng adjusted the bidirectional valve on the side of the syringe, he carefully watched the liquid shifting within the small oval window.

Better to inject it sooner. Keeping it on him any longer would only invite trouble.

He still remembered clearly the look on Yao Lun’s face when they came out of the Hive.

It had been a venom so deep it seemed he would gladly flay Jicheng alive and devour his flesh. If he had not been held back by Speaker Zhang’s pressure, he might have struck already.

“Old Yao must be furious that I came out of the Hive alive. I need to become a second-tier ability user as soon as possible.”

The valve gear was slowly nudged to the middle position, tested back and forth to be sure.

“Do you have any plan for that Councilor Yao?” Lu Rao asked with a tilted smile. “Why not just kill him?”

The question clearly hit the mark, and Jicheng’s hand paused on the gear.

“For now I have no intention of provoking him. Let’s get back to South Harbor first.” He said, “Yao Lun has been a councilor for many years. His assimilation with the second-tier gene primordial must be quite high by now.”

“And from what Brother Zhou said, the primordial he injected is the type that excels at combat. Even after I advance to second tier, I may not be his match.”

“Besides, all the imperial relics accumulated in South Harbor New City over the years are probably concentrated in the hands of the councilors. That is what concerns me most.”

In truth, that last point was the key.

If one considered only physical capabilities, then once Jicheng finished injecting the Ghost Vine, the gap between him and Yao Lun would not be too great even if there still were one. As long as he got close enough to entangle him, a single air-cutting strike would be enough to kill instantly.

But the fear was that Yao Lun might be carrying some piece of forbidden technology.

Jicheng only had one life.

As for launching a sneak attack of his own, that would be even more absurd. If it failed, the outcome needed no saying. If it succeeded, he would very likely be besieged by the ability users of South Harbor.

“What if he can’t hold back and comes looking for trouble?”

“Under normal circumstances, he probably won’t.” Jicheng said. “Back when I was still a first-tier ability user, he did not make a move. Clearly, Speaker Zhang’s words still carry weight with him. Not to mention that I’m about to advance now. If he really killed me, it would be no different from cutting himself off from South Harbor.”

Whoever struck first would be the one in the wrong. That would be starting an internal feud.

“Of course, that’s only in theory.”

After listening, Lu Rao let out an “mm” and then raised a hand again.

“Oh, right, A Cheng. I heard Sister Lingfei say that injecting a second-tier gene primordial needs a very quiet, sealed, uninhabited environment. Is this room really suitable?”

Jicheng first carefully removed the needle cap, then drove the needle into the position of his own heart and pressed down the plunger before answering calmly:

“Beggars can’t be choosers. Yao Lun’s glare is too frightening. I can’t gamble my life in his hands, can I? What if he sees that I’ve obtained the second-tier primordial, flies into a rage, can’t think straight, and really comes to kill me?”

“So I have to inject it immediately. The faster I advance, the better.”

Lu Rao plainly did not approve of this reckless disregard for his own health, and pouted for a long while.

“If you end up with some hidden illness because you advanced too hastily, Sister will be furious.”

“There won’t be any problem.”

Jicheng gently cut her off. From his experience in his previous life, a quiet environment and a sealed space free of interruption were merely icing on the cake, not necessary conditions. With his perfect-start assimilation rate, failure was almost impossible.

“Don’t listen to Zhang Lingfei’s nonsense. Just watch from the side. I guarantee I’ll advance safely.”

“And unlike unlocking a gene lock, the higher the primordial assimilation, the lower the rejection reaction. My advancement should be very fast...”

As he spoke, his voice gradually faded.

In Jicheng’s eyes, the entire field of view suddenly went black. The sound of his breathing and heartbeat receded as though stripped away thread by thread. The whole world fell into a deathly silence and darkness.

Soon, a strange rustling noise began to sound beside his ears.

Then the surroundings lit up again.

But everything had shifted from stillness into violent change.

The small dining table, the seats, the backpack, the walls, even Lu Rao standing motionless before him... all of it seemed to have had a layer of skin peeled away, warped and mottled, then curling and sloughing off in strips.

“This is a sensory distortion that appears during the injection of a second-tier gene primordial. Nothing serious.”

Jicheng remained very calm.

Different primordials produced different reactions after injection. But strangely enough, the scientific community across the universe was deeply unscientific on this point. They often explained such sensory distortions as spirituality, rather than hallucination.

He had never come into contact with something as rare as the Ghost Vine before, so the scene before his eyes was unfamiliar indeed.

But whatever the case, so long as he stayed calm and ignored it, nothing should go wrong.

Whoosh.

After the outer skin was peeled away, everything around him changed drastically.

The originally refined living compartment looked as though it had endured a hundred years of erosion. Only rust-eaten panels and a skeleton of steel beams remained. Flesh seemed to peel from Lu Rao’s body, as though she were suffering some terrible torture.

Even knowing it was not real, Jicheng could not bear to look too closely, and turned his gaze to the table instead.

The bouquet of calla lilies placed there had now become a cluster of rotting fingers, while the water in the vase had turned into thick, bright-red blood.

A prickling numbness, like ants crawling, spread across his feet. Beneath them, the vehicle’s undercarriage was held up only by a mesh of iron bars. The base vehicle was still moving, while fragments continued to peel off and fall away. Yet the grains of sand on the ground surged upward in a frenzy, mixed with countless bloodthirsty insects.

Jicheng relaxed his body, closed his eyes, and refused to look at any of it, treating it all as though it did not exist.

Until molten-red flames pierced through his eyelids.

He opened his eyes again. The upper half of his vision was already a blaze of scarlet, sparks fluttering in disarray like the ash from fiercely burning coal, falling in showers and scattering everywhere.

In his blurred perception, furnace-hot currents of air poured down from above.

The world was divided neatly in two. Above was raging fire, melting the roof of the vehicle.

Below was darkness like hell, filled with wailing and howling, shrill and hideous.

The faint vibration of the base vehicle’s treads became starkly conspicuous in Jicheng’s ears, its low hum only adding to the eerie atmosphere.

He turned his head and, through the shattered glass window, saw that the desert outside had also been churned into flying ash. The distant wasteland and the nearby sand were both being torn apart, replaced by scorched earth seeping with blood-red light. Cracks spread in all directions, while ghostly winds shrieked.

The wind devoured sand, soil, rock, and everything else; it wore away the flesh from bone, then blew the bones to dust.

That hissing sound seemed like the agonized dying scream of an entire planet.

“Kind of scary,” Jicheng muttered, shifting uneasily.

...

Lu Rao had been watching him speak halfway through a sentence, only for him to suddenly fall silent and go still. Her eyes were full of confusion.

“Why did A Cheng stop talking? Has it started this fast?”

“The alcohol I told you to get, you didn’t spray it either.” She waved the bottle of ceremonial spirit in her hand.

“Kind of scary,” Jicheng suddenly murmured.

Though she did not know what had happened to him, Lu Rao still moved a little closer in concern.

Despite the ample lighting, she could see large shadows creeping across Jicheng’s face, his expression turning somewhat ferocious.

At once, she remembered what Zhang Lingfei had told her not long ago: “If advancement fails, he could lose all reason and attack every living thing around him.”

Lu Rao edged closer still, preparing to help wipe the sweat from his neck, when she heard a faint, almost imperceptible voice.

It sounded very much like A Cheng’s.

Just as she was thinking this, the base vehicle came to an abrupt stop in a way that seemed almost to defy the laws of physics.

A pair of iron-hard arms closed around her throat.

They were Jicheng’s hands.