The eyes of the specially recruited students turned red when they saw the bloody storm Meng Chao stirred.
“I feel… kind of miffed. It feels like I’m being underestimated,” Xu Sheng said with narrowed eyes.
“That’s right. Usually, I’m the one standing in Meng Chao’s position and killing monsters while the rest watch by the side with their mouths hanging open,” Han Xing said.
“I am full. Can continue fighting,” Wu Wu said.
“Then what are we waiting for? Are we really going to let Meng Chao use his Ultimate Style to clear out all the monsters?” Shao Jianqing drew her broadswords with the propeller-shaped crossguards.
The four of them looked at each other and charged forward.
Xie Feng, Sun Ya, Duan Lian, and Jiang Rui looked at each other, and they saw the unwillingness to admit defeat on their faces.
“Damn it, even though we’re normal people and can’t compare to those four… five monsters, no matter what, we’re the Four Great Kings of Agricultural University’s martial arts course! There’s no reason why we should stay behind and watch them fight while doing nothing ourselves!”
Duan Lian snapped his sprained ankle back in place with a crack. With a pale face, he injected himself with a powerful painkiller and struck his chest. He let out an angry shout and charged forward.
The nine outstanding Dragon City freshmen worked together and turned into nine rumbling armored trains that charged among the blood-red rat horde. They suppressed and killed them.
The students’ vitality magnetic fields crashed against each other, which made their spirit flames burn even fiercer, and they managed to suppress the aggressive rat horde through brute force.
The power of the rat horde lay in its numbers and how it gathered together.
But once the rats were scattered and no longer united, even if the Blood Flower stimulated them, they were not powerful monsters.
Soon, the scattered rat horde became a swaying flame, and it was extinguished by the nine people’s combat boots, which were plated with steel plates.
But a strange, bloody fog gathered above the Swamp Rats’ mangled carcasses. It surged and gathered together.
Slurping sounds rose everywhere as the bacterial flora grew.
Tentacles resembling blood vessels grew out of the Swamp Rat carcasses. As if they were threads sewing a torn piece of cloth, the tentacles reconnected the torn carcasses. Some of them casually stitched different pieces of Swamp Rats together to form monsters with two heads, three or four tails, and a lot of claws.
Shao Jianqing and the rest gasped for breath as they watched this scene in disbelief.
Meng Chao spat on the ground while he wiped off the blood and cold sweat from his palms on his trousers.
The probability of monsters with Blood Flowers infesting them turning into undead was higher by more than 50%, so people usually had to kill them twice.
And the second time was often harder.
This was the reason behind why Meng Chao had turned tail and ran in the beginning.
But since they had already fought to this point, it seemed like they could only keep fighting until the end.
“Find its sclerotia!” Meng Chao shouted. “These bacterial flora belong to one settlement and listen to one sclerotia’s commands. As long as we destroy the sclerotia, the bacterial flora will wither. This is the way to completely get rid of it!”
The group looked at each other and surrounded Meng Chao to block the undead Swamp Rats from charging at him from all directions, which would give him a chance to search for the Blood Flower’s sclerotia.
Meng Chao shut his eyes and scrunched up his nose to sniff out the place which had the strongest stench of blood.
After a creature turned into the undead, it might not be faster and stronger, but it was definitely more poisonous and corrosive. Besides, the layout of the undead’s organs and bone structure were different from creatures that were alive. Its weaknesses were also quite different compared to the time it was alive, making it harder to deal with.
Sometimes, even when someone in the group beheaded an undead Swamp Rat, the things that looked like man-eating flowers would shoot out of their abdominal cavities and hiss while charging at their target’s neck artery.
Even if they split the undead Swamp Rats in half from the head to the tail, bacterial flora sometimes crawled out of the bloody cuts and connected with the torn limbs of the other undead Swamp Rats to create a brand new monster.
The deformed and ugly existences that looked like Frankenstein were horrifying and disgusting. The students’ mental strength index began to fluctuate, and their failure rate in creating their spirit energy magnetic fields continued to climb up.
Every time they failed to create their spirit energy magnetic field, they revealed a lot of openings, and the undead Swamp Rats bit them viciously.
Regardless of whether it was the specially recruited students or the Four Great Kings, their nano fighting suits were already torn to shreds. Their bleeding wounds gave off tendrils of black smoke, which was a sign that the wounds were corroded quite badly.
“Can we really not kill these creatures?”
The group felt their skins crawl, and a chill went down from the top of their heads to their spines. It was as if ice was stabbing into their skins.
At that moment, Meng Chao opened his eyes.
“That’s it!”
He moved like lightning and jumped over eight undead Swamp Rats. Then, he flew over like a roc with its wings spread. His Surging Lightnings were the wings that he spread to their limit.
His target was the Swamp Rat King that lurked in the depths of the rat horde. It was twice as large as a normal Swamp Rat, and it was so plump that even its limbs were curled up under its body.
The Swamp Rat King was covered in pulsating tumors. Bacterial flora rampaged in all seven of its orifices and danced about in a bizarre manner as if they were twitching. They were giving commands to the Blood Flower settlement.
The Blood Flower sclerotia had to be residing in its body.
Meng Chao charged at the Swamp Rat King like a hungry wolf. With just a few jumps, he landed in front of it.
The Swamp Rat King screeched and, immediately, dozens of undead Swamp Rats shoved at each other to pounce on its attacker.
Meng Chao had already predicted their attack trajectory. The dozens of undead Swamp Rats turned into his platform. He stomped on them with his combat boots, which squashed them dead.
Every time he stepped on one, it would increase his speed. He finished the creation of the Demon Subduing Pole in midair and intersected his Surging Lightnings. Then, with a cross-shaped slash, he cut the Swamp Rat King into four.
‘That’s not right. The rat king is too weak. It doesn’t look like it’s been infested by the sclerotia!’
Before Meng Chao landed on the ground, he knew that there was something wrong because of how effortlessly he killed the Swamp Rat King.
And just as he expected, he did not see the oval, heart-shaped sclerotia in the four parts of the Swamp Rat King’s carcass.
At that moment, Meng Chao landed on the ground, and in the moat beside where he landed, a snake-type monster suddenly shot out at lightning speed toward his neck artery.
This creature had the triangular head unique to venomous snakes. Its body was covered in dark gold spots, and it had thick, deformed blood vessels throughout its body. Some of them made scales burst apart, and the blood vessels protruded out of the body.
Its eyes had also been devoured by the fungus. Two red flowers formed by bacterial flora were in place of its sockets. It opened its mouth to the limit, and countless rampaging bloody tentacles shot out of it.
‘No, the leader of the Swamp Rats is a Golden Thread Snake! The sclerotia is residing inside the Golden Thread Snake!’
Meng Chao felt goosebumps break all over his skin.
Usually, the leader of a particular type of monster was a creature belonging to the same category. A rat king would command a rat horde, and a wolf king would control a wolf pack.
But in this world, where the law of the jungle ruled, the winners were kings, and monsters were incredibly intelligent. For the sake of survival, the weak would submit to the strong, and there were cases when some other race would rule over another.
Wu Wu was the best example.
As a human, she had ruled over a Ghost Leopard pack. As long as she continued bringing fresh food to the Ghost Leopard pack and expanding their territory, as well as defeating and eating all the challengers, the other Ghost Leopards would willingly accept her rule.
It was the same case with Swamp Rats.
Usually, the largest and fiercest rat with the sharpest fangs would be crowned king after it bit several of its kind to death.
But if they ran into an even fiercer mortal enemy like a snake-type monster, and for some reason, this mortal enemy did not want to finish all of them in one go, they might maintain a strange symbiotic relationship for a period of time.
The Swamp Rats would accept the Golden Thread Snake’s rule and provide some plump rats to it as tribute regularly so that most of their kind could live out their ignoble existence under its protection.
The Golden Thread Snake could then save up on the energy it needed to hunt and use the Swamp Rats to fight against its enemies.
It was a win-win situation.
When the Blood Flower ran into this rat horde ruled by a Golden Thread Snake, there was no need to even guess just who the sclerotia would choose to infest.
Meng Chao had chosen the wrong target.
And it was already too late for him to change them.
The Ultimate Style did not guarantee endless stamina and spirit energy.
Earlier, he had killed a Will o’ the Wisp Dragon. Then, he had carried out a highly precise harvesting. After that, he carried materials worth hundreds of kilograms and ran madly through a swamp. And that wasn’t the end. He then fought multiple rounds against a rat horde, and now, he was at the verge of collapsing. Even his toes were trembling.
‘I just ascended the stage brilliantly, but in the blink of an eye, I’m about to die?’
Meng Chao really wanted to flip two thick and long middle fingers at the cruel thing called destiny.
At that moment, he heard a faint cry resembling that of a falcon-type monster from the tumbling clouds.
Then, a piercing red light shot out of the clouds.
Falcon-type monsters were the mortal enemies of python-type monsters.
Even if infested by a Blood Flower, the Golden Thread Snake still jumped up as if it was electrocuted.
Even so, it did not manage to escape the fate of being surrounded by the red light. It was cut into several parts.
Dozens of blood-red, tentacle-like bacterial flora crawled out of the struggling and spasming Golden Thread Snake’s torn carcass. They dragged an oval-shaped heart and screeched like a burning spider as they looked for a new host.
The red light that cut the Golden Thread Snake split into dozens of thin, red lines and cut the Blood Flower sclerotia into pieces.
All the Blood Flower bacterial flora in the undead Swamp Rats’ bodies crawled out of the carcasses and thrust skyward with their final cry of denial.
An even more sonorous cry responded to them. It was the awe-inspiring cry of a Hell Beast. Then, a crimson flame that looked as beautiful and magnificent as a phoenix descended from the sky.
An incredibly handsome, long-haired young man with tear tracks on his face levitated in the burning flames.
It was at that moment that Meng Chao noticed that the red light that killed the Golden Thread Snake and Blood Flower sclerotia, which saved his life, was actually a ball of flames that resembled a phoenix. It was the long and beautiful tail of a bird!
‘This is… a beast soul. It’s the Undying Bird? Isn’t that man Weeping Reaper Lin Chuan, the person who is technically my neighbor because he’s staying in Joyous Heavenly Garden, which is right next to Blessed Heavenly Garden?
‘He’s the best graduate over the recent years from Agricultural University’s martial arts course, and he’s even more popular than Yan Feirou on the livestreaming platform. Among all the handsome and elegant guys in Dragon City, he’s the only male idol I don’t hate!’