Xie Litang rested for two hours.
She immediately set to work on hunting the deer beasts.
According to the high school Demon Beast Compendium coursework, deer beasts possessed extremely strong territorial instincts. Typically, two stags were never allowed to coexist within the same domain.
After two stags competed, the victor would mark its territory with urine to assert its dominance.
Xie Litang was in no hurry to go hunting. "Only novice hunters chase after their prey," she said casually. "A real hunter gets the prey to chase them."
Don't ask what Xie Litang was doing.
She simply went to that stag's marked territory and rolled... err, took a casual stroll through it.
Then, without stopping for breath, she rushed over to another stag's territory and stood right downwind.
In less than ten minutes...
A stag charged through the forest.
Its blood-red eyes stared fixedly at Xie Litang.
It lowered its head, crouched, and surged forward like a deer-type tank plowing through a battlefield.
"Come at me."
Xie Litang loved enemies that rushed in blindly.
Following the trajectory of the wind, Xie Litang was like a floating feather in a basin of water that no hand could ever catch.
She hadn't prepared any traps—who needed traps when they could just face it head-on with Steel?
Xie Litang swung her sword at the deer beast's front hooves.
The deer beast possessed lightning-fast reflexes. It leaped over ten meters into the air, coming down like a cannonball.
Its several-thousand-jin body blasted a crater into the ground. Just as the deer beast shook its head and began to rise from the pit—
In the next instant...
A longsword pierced right into its eye socket.
【Clang.】
Half of the deer beast's face exploded.
Yet the fierce nature of the demon beast made it screech, preparing to spring up once more.
Xie Litang struck twice more with her sword. One slash landed on the deer beast's front leg to prevent it from escaping on low health.
The other slash struck the deer beast's spine, snapping its backbone directly.
Rumble~
The deer beast crashed heavily to the ground.
【System Notification: Gold +20.】
Xie Litang's eyes immediately lit up. She still owed the system money for borrowing Heartsteel!
Including principal and interest, she had to pay back over four thousand gold next month. If she failed to pay, the interest would compound relentlessly.
And if she wanted to unlock other system features, she had to pay off her debt first.
"Twenty gold per deer beast."
"Holy shit, I have to kill over two hundred of these things. Fuck."
Xie Litang cursed under her breath.
She immediately sliced open the deer beast's chest, removed its heart, and extracted its essence blood.
A single deer beast weighing several thousand jin only yielded a bit over two hundred milliliters of essence blood.
As for the rest...
Xie Litang shook her head with a sigh. "The deer hide is useful, but it's way too heavy. A single hide probably weighs tens of jin."
"The deer penis, deer blood, deer meat—none of it is edible."
"Eating demon beast meat taints you with demon beast aura, which turns you into a monster."
Unless someone was starving to death...
Otherwise, eating demon beast meat was against the law.
If you really wanted a taste, you could purify the demon aura, but the cost far exceeded the value of the meat itself.
In this regard, Xie Litang really envied those fellow transmigrators who crossed over into demon-infested worlds, where killing any demon beast allowed them to eat it as blood food to boost their Vitality.
Xie Litang didn't linger.
She immediately rushed to the next patch of woodland.
After killing several deer beasts in succession, Xie Litang gradually figured out their pattern.
Crippling one of their limbs first was definitely the optimal approach.
No matter how tough or grueling it was, she had to accomplish that first.
Otherwise, even if a deer beast was severely injured, as long as it didn't die, it could dart into the mountain forest and leave you staring helplessly.
Don't ask Xie Litang how she knew—she had literally watched cash fly away like that.
"That's six."
Xie Litang caught her breath.
From noon until the moon hung over the treetops, this was already her limit.
It wasn't that she didn't want to kill more; the deer beasts' territories were spaced seven or eight kilometers apart.
Furthermore, the Old Tapir was watching her from the shadows.
Once night fell, the thin mist never dissipated.
If she truly exhausted all her physical strength and ended up being toyed to death by an Old Tapir, that would be a complete joke.
Xie Litang checked her backpack and breathed a slight sigh of relief. "Roughly twelve hundred milliliters of deer beast essence blood. That's enough to pay back a portion of the debt."
After resting for half an hour...
She immediately set off in the dark to trek back.
She was nearly three hundred kilometers away from Jianghai City now.
She had to return to Jianghai City before sunset tomorrow.
Covering less than twenty kilometers, Xie Litang stopped to rest for a moment once more.
If she had to describe how she felt right now, it would be a single word: exhausted.
Ever since she left the city...
She hadn't had a single good night's sleep.
At most, she could only close her eyes to rest her mind briefly before engaging in life-or-death battles with deer beasts. On top of that, she had to stay alert against the Old Tapir. Saying she hadn't closed her eyes for two days and nights wasn't an exaggeration at all.
Xie Litang opened her eyes again and took a deep breath. "Let's move."
Roughly every twenty kilometers or so...
She would rest for half an hour.
Resting at this rhythm was definitely far from ideal, but at least it conserved her strength—a fair compromise.
Without her realizing it...
The surrounding mist thinned and dissolved away.
Xie Litang couldn't help feeling puzzled, muttering, "Did that bastard give up?"
"Whatever."
"At least it's not a bad thing."
However, she quickly realized she was dead wrong.
In the wilderness, letting your guard down was the most fatal mistake.
Xie Litang reached a gully to rest again. Shortly after she closed her eyes, a gust of cold wind blew past.
Faintly, there seemed to be a smell of damp soil.
Rumble~
"The sound of water?"
That sound approached with terrifying speed and ferocity, rapidly escalating from a gushing roar to a deafening, thunderous boom.
"A flash flood? No..."
"Holy shit, there's a small reservoir upstream—the dam burst!"
Though it was called a small reservoir, within a gully like this, it manifested as a raging torrent of floodwater.
Without a second thought, Xie Litang ran toward the cliff wall.
Just as she grabbed hold of the vines hanging off the cliff, the floodwaters surged past her thighs.
Right now, her only regret was that she hadn't learned any movement techniques, possessing nothing but sheer Vitality.
A piece of driftwood smashed toward Xie Litang, crashing directly against her waist.
Xie Litang's vision went dark, and she nearly plummeted headfirst into the floodwaters.
Her back slammed hard against the cliff wall, and the sound of something shattering echoed from her backpack.
Unsure whether the deer beast essence blood had broken, she finally managed to climb to the top of the cliff wall with great difficulty.
Xie Litang was virtually at the point of collapse, gasping heavily for air.
Right then, a thick white fog suddenly billowed up.
On the opposite side of the gully, a white figure waved at her with a mock smile that looked chillingly sinister under the moonlight.
When Xie Litang saw it, her teeth nearly ground to powder. She exploded in rage: "Holy shit, it was you?!"
She opened her backpack to look.
A pungent stench of blood instantly filled the air.
The specially made toughened glass bottles had actually shattered—two whole bottles smashed in the impact, leaving the inside of her backpack soaked in blood.
Xie Litang pulled out the two ruined glass bottles, beside herself with rage: "Old Tapir, you beast! You absolute beast!"
She finally realized: the Old Tapir was trying to play her to death.
Xie Litang suppressed her emotions. While the floodwaters hadn't receded and the Old Tapir couldn't cross over...
She seized the time to rest, dozing off for over two hours in a half-awake state.
When she opened her eyes again...
Her spirit was visibly much improved.
Xie Litang took a bite of her compressed ration biscuit and set off once more, though she kept muttering under her breath as she walked: "You beast, you absolute beast! I'm definitely going to kill you!"
"If I don't kill you..."
"I'll take your damn name!"
"Beast!"
"You absolute beast..."
Dawn gradually broke.
The Old Tapir finally retreated with the daylight.
Over the course of the entire night, Xie Litang had run over one hundred and forty kilometers.
Xie Litang didn't dare to stop.
From the crack of dawn to three or four in the afternoon...
She finally traversed the remaining distance. The mountain forest and crumbling ruins behind her receded into the distance.
Towering city skyscrapers came into view.
Rate on N.U.
