Transcending Worlds: I Have an Invincible Shelter

The night wind emerged from the depths of the Black Forest, carrying the lingering smell of smoke and fire, mixed with the bitter scent of earth and vegetation.

Su Yuyang walked deeper into the camp.

The entire camp was burned to the ground. The once densely packed wooden houses were now reduced to charred foundations and broken beams, emitting wisps of black smoke.

The only intact structure was a lone tent near the foot of Black Mountain, hastily erected by a few mutants.

It was specifically for Su Yuyang to rest in.

Su Yuyang walked to the front of the tent and paused.

Inside the tent were only a few decent stools and a simple wooden bed.

He raised his hand and made a gesture in the air. The next instant, a large, comfortable sofa fell out and landed on the ground inside the tent, raising a cloud of dust.

The seats are upholstered in off-white North American calfskin leather, and the cushions still retain a faint scent of hotel cleaning agents.

The Armani Hotel's upscale suite was missing a piece of furniture.

Su Yuyang thought about it for a moment. He had booked the room for a whole year, so taking a sofa shouldn't be too much to ask.

However, the hotel cleaning lady must have had a very interesting expression when she saw that there was an empty space in the living room.

The thought flashed through his mind, and he didn't dwell on it.

I heard light, shuffling footsteps behind me. They weren't light, nor were they heavy, but the rhythm was terribly erratic. They would take two steps, then stop, then take two more, as if they were walking on nails.

Su Yuyang sat down on the sofa, leaned back in the chair, and crossed one leg over the other.

"I've been following you the whole way, so just say what you want to say."

The tone wasn't exactly cold, but the space inside the tent was small, and the words echoed around the black wooden enclosure, making the air feel heavy.

The footsteps at the tent entrance stopped, and there was silence for three or four seconds.

Then came the dull thud of a knee hitting the ground, a sound that came with force.

Su Yuyang turned his head and saw Lin Xuanzhi kneeling inside the tent. The blood and dust on her face were washed away by sweat, leaving clear streaks. Her eyes were red, but she didn't shed any tears.

She raised both hands above her head, holding a Source Crystal in her palms.

The thing wasn't big, about the size of a thumbnail, and it was completely black, with a thin layer of black mist covering its surface. The mist swirled and flowed slowly, and occasionally a faint green light would peek out from inside, only to be swallowed up by the black mist in an instant.

The talent source crystal of the fourth-tier mutated black snake had been kept by Lin Xuanzhi after the previous hunt.

"grown ups."

Lin Xuanzhi spoke, her voice hoarse, but she enunciated each word with great force. "I humbly request that you bestow this Source Crystal upon me, my lord."

Su Yuyang didn't speak, waiting for her to finish.

"I want to awaken my talent." She paused, her Adam's apple bobbing up and down once.

"When we were on night watch at the camp, I hid behind the crowd. You, Jiang Xiaochen, and Zhao Xinyan protected me the whole way. Today, something happened at the camp—"

Her voice lowered, "Without a submachine gun, I am nothing."

Su Yuyang's gaze fell on the source crystal, then returned to her face.

He stood up from the sofa and walked over.

He stood two steps away from Lin Xuanzhi, without bending down or squatting, looking down at her.

The tent was dimly lit. Su Yuyang stretched out his right hand, pinched her chin with two fingers, and lifted her face up.

The movements were light, even gentle. But Lin Xuanzhi tensed up, her neck straight, her breathing rapid, and her chest heaving noticeably.

The two faces were less than a hand's width apart. Su Yuyang's hot breath swept across her nose as he spoke, and her panting was particularly clear in the quiet environment inside the tent.

"Fourth-order source crystal".

Su Yuyang said, his fingers still on her, watching her intently. "You haven't even awakened a first-tier talent yet. If you directly consume a fourth-tier item, you'll only have a 10-20% chance of surviving."

"I know."

"You knew it, yet you still ate it?" Su Yuyang raised an eyebrow.

"Hmm." Lin Xuanzhi replied stubbornly.

Su Yuyang stared at her for two seconds, then sighed softly, "If you die, the camp will be one less person in charge."

This doesn't sound like concern; it sounds like settling accounts.

Lin Xuanzhi didn't respond to that. She stared into Su Yuyang's eyes and spoke slowly and deliberately.

"We're attacking the Ash Earth camp in three days. I don't want to stand back and watch. If we can't hold out, I'll consider my life returned to the master."

Su Yuyang loosened his grip, took a half step back, looked down at the speck of dust on his palm, wiped it casually on his trouser leg, and his tone suddenly became very casual.

"Fine. You made the choice yourself, so you'll have to bear the consequences."

He turned around, walked back to the sofa, sat down in a more comfortable position, and casually patted the empty seat next to the sofa armrest.

"Come in. What kind of posture is it to kneel at the door? I'll protect you during your awakening, so you don't explode halfway through and waste one of my source crystals."

Lin Xuanzhi was stunned for a moment. When she stood up, her knees went numb and she staggered half a step, but she quickly regained her balance, walked into the tent, and sat down cross-legged on the open ground opposite the sofa.

She glanced at Su Yuyang, who was lounging on the back of the sofa with his long legs crossed, his posture excessively relaxed. He casually produced a bottle of DI100% blended juice and started drinking it.

Lin Xuanzhi clenched the source crystal, feeling the icy temperature in her palm gradually warming up.

She tilted her head back, threw the Yuanjing into her mouth, and swallowed it dry.

The pain of having a hard object scrape my throat lasted less than half a second. Immediately afterward, it felt like a red-hot iron ball had been stuffed into my abdomen.

The black, poisonous flames began to spread outwards from the stomach, creeping along the blood vessels to the limbs, leaving a trail of boiling oil wherever they went.

Lin Xuanzhi's eyes widened instantly, black blood vessels crawling across the whites of her eyes, and her pupils contracted sharply.

Her body arched violently before crashing back to the ground, her fingers digging into the wooden floorboards, her nails splitting, and blood seeping from her ten fingers.

Something is moving under my skin.

Black lines emerged from her wrist and spread upwards along her forearm, like living roots crawling under the skin. Wherever the lines passed, the skin turned bluish-purple, and capillaries burst one after another.

Sweat poured out as if someone had poured a bucket of water over my head, soaking my clothes completely and making them stick to my body.

She bit her lip, her teeth piercing through the flesh of her lower lip. Blood trickled down her chin, dripping onto her chest and onto her clothes, mixing with her sweat and making it impossible to distinguish one from the other.

Lin Xuanzhi didn't make a sound, not even once.

The violent energy of a fourth-order source crystal is far beyond what the human body can withstand; it doesn't penetrate and fuse with the energy as gently as a low-order source crystal.

It's like a direct explosion inside your internal organs, shattering you into pieces before letting the fragments piece themselves back together.

Lin Xuanzhi's body began to spasm, and the frequency increased.

Black flames shot out from the cracks in her skin on her back, like several black snake tongues dancing wildly in the air. With each wisp that shot out, her face paled a little more.

Life is being stripped away, and bodies are being torn apart.

Su Yuyang sat on the sofa without moving, his eyes fixed on Lin Xuanzhi.

The tent was so quiet that only the clattering of Lin Xuanzhi's teeth and the muffled groans she desperately tried to suppress, squeezed out from her nose, could be heard.

The black flames burned even more fiercely, and her whole body resembled a piece of charred wood, with fine cracks appearing on her skin, each crack oozing black blood.

Su Yuyang's brow twitched. If he didn't act soon, the person would be gone.

He frowned, then without further hesitation, his mind directly communicated with the black card in his mind.

The system activated, unleashing boundless mental power. Within a 30,000 square meter area, he was an invincible being with absolute control.

It wasn't a test, nor was it a gradual process; all of his mental energy was focused on one person at this moment.

An invisible force field enveloped Lin Xuanzhi's entire body, seeping into her skin, flesh, and bones inch by inch through her sweat-soaked clothes.

The black flame power released by the fourth-order source crystal is completely unreasonable. Wherever it passes, blood vessels burst, muscles are torn apart, and internal organs are burned over and over.

The moment Su Yuyang's mental energy surged in, the two forces collided head-on.

There was only a muffled "hum" from inside the tent, and the wooden floorboards underfoot bounced.

Her mental power transformed into hundreds of extremely fine threads, flowing along her blood vessels, wrapping around, enveloping, and pressing down on the rampaging black flames.

Lin Xuanzhi's body arched up and then slammed down on the ground, arched up and then slammed down again.

His teeth were clenched so tightly they were grinding together, and blood was still seeping from the wound on his lips, mixing with sweat and trickling down his neck.

She didn't make a sound, not because she didn't want to, but because her throat was so spasmed that she couldn't squeeze out a complete sound; only muffled, intermittent breaths came from her nose.

The ferocity of the fourth-order source crystal far exceeded that of the lower-order ones. Every time the black flames were suppressed by one layer, another layer appeared underneath, layer upon layer, seemingly without end.

Su Yuyang increased his mental output, and the gentle but irresistible power filled every inch of Lin Xuanzhi's body, driving away and compressing the black flames, forcing them in the same direction.

With nowhere left to retreat, the black flames began to contract and converge along a fixed path.

Lin Xuanzhi's breathing changed from rapid to long and even, and then from long and even to intermittent, with pauses of varying lengths in between.

Each pause made Su Yuyang tighten his grip a little more, afraid that she wouldn't be able to catch her breath.

Fortunately, it held up.

After several hours of effort, the hideous black lines on Lin Xuanzhi's body gradually faded away, like the tide receding.

Eventually, all the lines converged into two streams. One stream disappeared into the space between the eyebrows, while the other flowed to the inside of the right wrist, condensing into a black flame mark the size of a fingernail, embedded in the skin texture, and could never be erased.

Lin Xuanzhi collapsed to the ground, her chest heaving violently as she gasped for breath.

It became.

Tier 3 talent, [Poison Kill] awakened.

Su Yuyang withdrew his mental energy, leaned back in the sofa, and let out a long breath. He looked down at his right hand; his fingers were trembling slightly.

Looking at Lin Xuanzhi again, her entire demeanor has changed.

I can't quite put my finger on what's different, but it's just different. That frail, scholarly air from before is gone, replaced by something hard to describe.

It's probably a feeling that makes people hesitant to get close.

Lin Xuanzhi tried to stand up twice, but her arms were trembling and she couldn't get up.

Su Yuyang looked at him for two seconds, then stood up, walked over, bent down, scooped him up, supported his knees with one hand and held his back with the other, and placed him on the sofa.

Lin Xuanzhi's head was tilted to the side on the armrest, her eyes were half open and half closed. She was still conscious, but her body was completely out of her control.

Her lips moved slightly, but no sound came out.

Su Yuyang looked around the simple tent. The floor was a simple wooden floor, which he had originally planned to use for three days.

In this environment, it's not appropriate for someone who has just awakened to lie here and recover.

"System, teleport."

A burst of multicolored, dark light flashed for a moment, and Su Yuyang's figure vanished from the tent.

Lin Xuanzhi was left alone on the sofa. Her breathing gradually calmed down, and she fell into a deep sleep.

The black flame mark on his right wrist glowed faintly in the dim tent, flickering like a slumbering pulse.

Outside, in the camp square.

The sky was completely dark. The four mechs stood at the four corners, their indicator lights shining with a cold white light in the night, illuminating the square in a half-light, half-dark manner.

Jiang Xiaochen stood in the center of the venue, holding a list of names that had just been counted.

The green-eyed man stood half a step to his right, his hands behind his back, his expression dark and inscrutable.

There weren't many people left standing in front of me.

Mutants, gifted individuals, and ordinary survivors were mixed together, standing in several scattered rows.

The mist fungus's superpower had already cleaned the ground, turned over the soil, and even suppressed most of the bloody smell.

But everyone's eyes were still reeling. Some people were staring down at their toes, while others unconsciously shrank back, trying to stay as far away from the spot where the accident had just happened as possible.

No one can forget that scene. A living person, with a muffled thud, was gone, not even a complete corpse left.

Jiang Xiaochen raised his head and scanned the area from left to right.

"The club leader has given everyone three days."

His voice wasn't loud, but the square was so quiet that every word could be heard clearly.

"These three days are not for you to rest."

He pointed to the side, where a dozen long wooden crates were stacked ten paces away, revealing weapons neatly arranged inside.

Rifles, submachine guns, sniper rifles, and heavy machine guns, their metallic sheen gleaming coldly.

These things were brought by Su Yuyang from the real world.

"Rebuild the camp, conduct weapons training. Within three days, everyone must learn to fire a gun. It doesn't matter if you can't hit the target, at least you need to know how to load, how to aim, and how to pull the trigger."

Jiang Xiaochen paused for a moment, then glanced at the few miners in the back of the crowd whose eyes were still wandering around.

"If anyone lets me down at this crucial moment..."

He didn't finish his sentence, nor did he need to; the meat pie was still buried under his feet.

The people below all shrank their necks and nodded their heads like pecking at rice.

At this moment, Green Eyes stepped forward and stood beside Jiang Xiaochen, his gaze fixed solely on the dozen or so mutants.

"Everyone."

He spoke in a flat tone, even with a hint of politeness. But none of the mutants present felt at ease.

"You have witnessed the methods of the sect leader yourself. You have also tasted the food that the sect leader bestowed upon you."

Green Eyes didn't raise her voice; she just spoke calmly and evenly.

"Get rid of all those messy thoughts in your head. From today onwards, the camp will only follow one rule: whatever the camp leader says, goes."

He raised his hand and gestured three times towards the crowd.

"Mutants, vanguard, responsible for clearing out the remaining mutant beasts around the camp. Talented individuals, guards, taking over camp defense patrols. Ordinary people, logistics team, moving supplies, cutting down blackwood, and rebuilding houses."

No one said anything more, and the crowd dispersed.

The first few miners who walked up to the weapons crate were a little hesitant; their fingers trembled as they reached out to touch the gun barrels.

Zhao Xinyan stepped forward to demonstrate, pulling the bolt and loading the magazine, doing it nimbly.

"See clearly? Here, you try it."

The miner shakily shoved the magazine in, and it took him two tries to get it in place.

When he raised his gun, the muzzle pointed straight up, and the three people opposite him jumped two steps to the side in unison.

"Point the gun down! Point it down!"

Before long, sporadic gunshots rang out from the Black Forest.

Thump-thump-thump.

The shooting was chaotic; half the bullets didn't even hit the tree trunk, but at least they made a sound.

Jiang Xiaochen stood at the edge of the square listening for a while, then turned his head, his gaze passing over the charred ruins and landing in the direction of the end of the Black Forest in the distance. In that direction, separated by a deep moat, lay the ruined city of Tokyo.

"Green-eyed Brother".

"Um?"

"What's your opinion on the Ashes Land side?"

Green Eyes didn't reply immediately. After a few seconds of silence, he rubbed his right thumb back and forth on his index finger joint twice.

"Why do you think the club leader let that woman go?"

Jiang Xiaochen narrowed his eyes.

Green Eyes chuckled softly: "Whether she can go back or not is not important. What she says when she goes back is also not important. What's important is that the sect leader wants her to go back."

A terrified spy, running back to his hideout with everything he'd just witnessed, is more effective than any declaration of war.

He turned his head and glanced at Jiang Xiaochen.

"Three days from now, I can't wait!"

Jiang Xiaochen didn't reply, but the lines at the corners of his mouth tightened.

He remembered the day the Night Watch camp was trampled flat by the Ash Earth people, and the familiar faces who died in that massacre.

This debt has been weighing on my mind for almost two months.

Three days is enough.

Night fell completely, and there was no moon over the wasteland, only a perpetually hazy smog lingering overhead.

The outermost edge of the Black Forest, the section of land right next to the deep trench.

Chao Tingxue ran for more than an hour, but the invisible light shield disappeared at some point.

To be precise, she didn't know when the light shield disappeared. She only knew that when she reached out again, her palm didn't hit the cold wall. Instead, it passed right through and she grabbed a handful of damp air.

She froze for half a second, then charged forward like a madwoman.

The deep chasm lay beneath their feet. A crack, several meters wide, stretched between the Black Forest and the ruins of Tokyo. The bottom was pitch black, and the wind blew up from the crack, carrying with it a putrid, acrid stench.

Without hesitation, Chao Tingxue's physique as a fourth-tier talent gave her a boost. She pushed off the ground with both feet, leaping across the deep chasm and landing on the opposite pile of rubble. She staggered several steps before regaining her balance.

Her knee slammed into the gravel, tearing a large patch of her trouser leg. Blood seeped out and mixed with the mud, but she didn't care. She got up and kept running.

On the outskirts of the ruined city of Tokyo, a dilapidated high-rise building came into view in the distance.

When Chao Tingxue rushed to the bottom of the watchtower, her legs gave way and she fell downstairs, her face pressed against the ground, her mouth full of ash.

The team stationed here is Murong Shan's team, which is also the team that Chao Tingxue belongs to.

Several things flew out of the building at high speed, and one of them shouted.

"Listening to the snow in the morning! It's listening to the snow in the morning!"

Chao Tingxue propped herself up on her elbows, her face covered in mud and bloodstains, her voice hoarse beyond recognition.

"Quick...take me to see Lord Jintu! The Black Forest has undergone a transformation!"

Murong Shan rushed out of the dilapidated building, grabbed Chao Tingxue in one hug, and cried out urgently.

"Tingxue, what's wrong with you? How did you become like this?"

Clinging to Murong Shan's arms, Chao Tingxue gripped his forearms tightly with both hands. "Quick, quick, go inform Lord Jintu! Glass Mingyuan has been captured, and everyone involved in the rebellion in the Tokyo mining area has been crushed into mincemeat..."

She gasped for breath, her eyes were bloodshot, and her pupils were still dilated.

"That leader—he's not human. He can seal off the entire Black Forest; no one can escape. He let me out; he deliberately let me out—"

Murong Shan's face darkened inch by inch, but he did not interrupt Chao Tingxue's weak words.

"He said three days. Three days later, he'll attack our Ash Earth camp."

When Chao Tingxue uttered those last words, her voice was so hoarse that it was barely a whisper, and she collapsed after saying them.

Murong Shan was stunned for less than two seconds before he suddenly turned around and looked at the other talented individuals behind him.

"Go! Send this message back to the Ash Earth camp!"

A short hiss and the clanging of chains came from inside the iron gate. A mutated cheetah, entirely gray and black, was led out, its mane bristling and its four claws digging scratches into the stone floor.