Chapter 95: It’s Green
With a light flick of his fingertips, Chu Yang retrieved a bottle of water from his spatial storage. Pressing his thumb against the cap, he gave it a brisk twist, popping the seal with a soft click.
He tilted the bottle, letting the icy water cascade over the freshly harvested crystal cores, washing away the crust of dark, dried gore. As the droplets rolled off, the stones revealed a deep, vibrant luster far richer and fuller than that of ordinary Tier 1 cores, with faint ribbons of light swirling beneath the surface.
“Not a bad haul at all!” Chu Yang weighed the stones in his palm, running his thumb over their hard, cool facets as a satisfied grin curved his lips.
“Let’s keep moving while we still have time,” he suggested. With a casual flick of his wrist, the cores vanished into thin air, safely stowed in his space.
Jiang Jue offered no verbal reply, merely shifting half a step to position Chu Yang securely between himself and the alley wall. Scanning the shadowy path ahead with cold vigilance, he murmured, “Stay close.”
Lin Xiao fell into step behind them with renewed energy, his mouth running without a break: “Hey, Third Brother, don’t you think we look like an elite dungeon team farming high-level mobs in an online game? The Boss is our main tank and top DPS, you’re the crowd control and support, and I’m the dashing ranged carry dropping damage from afar!”
Keeping a sharp eye on the perimeter, Chu Yang couldn’t help but shoot back, “Some ranged carry you are. You almost took a point-blank ultimate to the face from that mob back there. If I hadn’t stepped in fast, you’d be sitting at the respawn point waiting on a timer—except this game doesn’t give you extra lives.”
“That was a calculated tactical bait!” Lin Xiao argued stubbornly. “I was drawing aggro to create a clean opening for you and the Boss, got it? High-level team strategy!”
“Right, brilliant strategy,” Chu Yang said, rolling his eyes. “Taking hits directly with your face.”
Though they bantered back and forth, neither let their guard down for a second. The trio maintained a tight triangular formation, their eyes constantly sweeping the gloom as they pressed deeper into the alleyway.
They hadn’t walked far when the wet, grinding sound of tearing flesh and muffled growls echoed from the entrance of an abandoned convenience store up ahead.
Five or six common zombies were hunched in a tight circle, furiously ripping apart a mangled, unrecognizable corpse.
“Look at that, more business!” Lin Xiao’s eyes lit up, cold steel glinting between his knuckles. “Watch me this time—I won’t let a single one get close…” He took a step forward, eager to strike.
“Hold on.” Jiang Jue raised a hand, stopping him in his tracks. His brows knit together as his gaze locked onto the pitch-black storefront and the thick, twisted dead tree bursting through the cracked pavement beside it. “Something… is wrong in there.”
Before the warning could fully register, the air shattered!
From the deep shadows inside the store, a dark blur lunged outward with speed that far surpassed an ordinary Tier 2 mutant, hurtling straight toward Lin Xiao at the front!
Chu Yang’s pupils contracted. His spatial energy surged instantly, ready to throw up a barrier in front of Lin Xiao—but mid-flight, the dark figure twisted unnaturally, altering its trajectory with impossible agility. With a sharp hiss, it skated along the brick wall at a blistering pace!
Even more alarming, wherever the creature brushed past, thick, thorned vines burst from the cracks in the masonry and cobblestones, whipping fiercely toward the trio’s ankles!
“What the hell is this thing?! A mutated creeper with a grudge?!” Lin Xiao yelped. Despite his shock, his reflexes were razor-sharp; with a flick of his wrist, two steel darts whistled toward the lunging tendrils as he kicked hard off the pavement, leaping backward just in time to avoid being snared.
A burst of purple lightning flared beneath Jiang Jue’s boots, crackling across his frame in an instant. With a firm stomp, the vines coiling around his legs sizzled loudly, instantly blackened and reduced to brittle ash by the raw voltage.
Chu Yang took an even cleaner approach. Sweeping his fingertips through the air, an invisible spatial blade sliced silently forward, severing the incoming vines cleanly at their roots.
Only then did the group get a clear look at the mutant.
Its frame was far more withered than that of a standard zombie, though it carried none of the usual frailty; instead, it resembled a piece of petrified, dehydrated timber. Its skin was a dry, grayish-brown, and its joints were covered in fissures that looked remarkably like rough tree bark.
At the tips of its fingers were not rotting claws, but ten elongated, razor-sharp wooden spikes.
Faint crimson light flickered in its eyes, carrying an eerie, predatory chill.
“A Wood-element mutant zombie?” Chu Yang said in surprise. “No wonder the greenery around here is completely dead—it must have drained every scrap of vitality from the area.”
“Wood or water, who cares? Let’s take it down!” Still fuming over the ambush, Lin Xiao hurled his hands forward, sending a dense barrage of steel spikes raining toward the mutant.
The Wood-element zombie was exceptionally cunning, refusing to trade blows head-on. It leaped effortlessly across the alley’s rubble, weaving its arms to command the vines across the ground and walls. The tendrils thrashed like living tentacles, not only trying to entangle the fighters but also scooping up loose masonry and broken timber to fling at them as heavy projectiles.
“Look at this thing using tactics!” Chu Yang threw up a spatial barrier to deflect the flying debris. He tried to lock his focus onto the fast-moving target, but the chaotic web of vines made targeting difficult.
Jiang Jue’s expression turned icy.
Abandoning fine lightning arcs, he brought his boot down heavily against the concrete!
BOOM!
A concussive, circular wave of violet lightning erupted from his foot, expanding across the alleyway like a ripple on water!
The perimeter of vines was instantly vaporized into charred dust, filling the air with the sharp, acrid stench of scorched wood.
Caught in the blast radius, the Wood-element zombie’s rapid movements hitched, freezing it in place for a split second.
“Now!” Silver light flared in Chu Yang’s eyes. Clasping his hands toward the mutant, he triggered his ability: Spatial Imprisonment!
Rather than a crushing blow, he focused entirely on binding.
The air surrounding the zombie turned thick and viscous like solid resin, dragging the creature’s limbs into an agonizingly sluggish crawl, as though trapped in deep mud.
“Stay right there!” Seizing the opening, Lin Xiao redirected his floating spikes. Instead of aiming for the kill, the steel darts slammed into the ground and surrounding walls like heavy iron stakes, instantly forging a rigid cage to lock the mutant down.
The Wood-element zombie thrashed violently, tiny green shoots bursting from its flesh as it tried to tear through the spatial bind, the red glow in its eyes pulsing frantically.
Jiang Jue closed the distance in a heartbeat. Moving like a bolt of lightning across the cleared ground, the condensed purple blade in his grip hummed with a high-pitched, lethal resonance.
Without a single wasted flourish, the arc of violet energy thrust straight forward with pinpoint accuracy, driving cleanly into the narrow, vulnerable joint at the base of the creature’s neck!
Squelch!
The blade drove home, and the volatile lightning energy detonated inside the creature’s core!
The Wood-element zombie convulsed once, the crimson light in its eyes dying instantly as the thrashing vines across its body went completely limp.
Jiang Jue cleanly withdrew his weapon and stepped back. The creature’s rigid frame swayed once before crashing face-first into the dirt.
“Target down!” Lin Xiao let out a long breath of relief, waving his hand to recall his steel spikes. “That thing was way more annoying than the ones that just charge in a straight line.”
Letting his spatial focus fade, Chu Yang walked over to the corpse and crouched down with his dagger. “A Wood-element mutant… I wonder if the crystal core is actually green?”
“Green works just fine!” Lin Xiao chimed in, stepping over to clean up a few common stragglers that had been incapacitated by the lightning shockwave. He grinned playfully, “As long as it’s not the color of a cuckold’s hat!”
