"Did this red dust accelerate the onset of the Zombie Potion inside me?"
Rein looked at his rapidly shriveling arm. How could he not understand? This was exactly what a poison attack looked like.
Moreover, his eyesight was now astonishing. Those hair-thin red threads were clearly Bloodline Worms, each one even finer than a strand of hair!
The Mind Core had also clearly alerted him that a large number of lifeforms had been "activated" inside his body!
"What the hell is going on?! The Zombie Potion isn't poison at all, but some kind of dormant living parasites?"
In an instant, countless unbelievable thoughts flooded Rein's mind.
He had thirty seconds before he croaked. There was no time to think. Without hesitation, he pulled several potions from his folded space.
Advanced Antidote Potion, Advanced Healing Potion, Advanced Cure Potion. With no time to distinguish between them, he injected every high-grade potion in his storage space that seemed potentially useful into his thigh.
But it still had no effect whatsoever. The red hair continued growing wildly.
Rein could clearly feel life draining from his body.
The dizziness grew stronger and stronger.
Those Bloodline Worms were like bloodsucking leeches, frantically absorbing the blood and moisture in his body, seemingly determined not to stop until they had sucked him dry.
In just those one or two seconds, another tenth of Rein's bodily fluids had been drained away. His face looked like that of a zombie, his body withered to the bone, and his consciousness was gradually blurring.
Yet just when Rein thought he was about to croak and transmigrate again—
Something dramatic happened!
"Eh?"
As one particular injection went in, Rein instantly felt as though his soul had returned to his body. His awareness rapidly cleared.
Looking closely again, the red hair covering his body visibly shriveled. Those things were actually injecting all the fluids they had sucked out back into his body?!
"I'm saved!"
Having taken a stroll at the gates of hell, Rein was still shaken. His chest rose and fell as he gasped for breath.
Looking more carefully, he realized that the effective potion currently being injected was the antidote to the Zombie Potion he had concocted in Piscis's laboratory while practicing.
Ding! The unnamed insect swarm has entered dormancy. Estimated awakening time: 1,094 days.
Whew.
Rein let out a long sigh of relief.
The onset period had become three years again.
The hidden danger had not been eliminated, but at the very least, his life had been saved.
At that moment, he understood. This so-called Zombie Potion truly was some kind of mysterious parasitic insect?
The so-called antidote was actually a potion that forced the parasites into dormancy?
And that red dust from before had been the catalyst that awakened the parasites?
All sorts of strange knowledge suddenly surfaced in his mind.
"Eh?"
Rein had no time to think through the connection, but then a thought flashed through his mind that made his scalp go numb.
"Damn it, Piscis was an Oma Royal Family spy?!"
Rein had been saved because he had an antidote left over from his earlier alchemy practice.
But the others who had taken the Zombie Potion were not so fortunate.
The instant those red fireworks exploded, tragedy had become inevitable.
The death rate among bandit groups had always been high, and their members were replaced quickly. In a large organization like the Weasel Bandit Group, more than half the members had taken the Zombie Potion.
It was not just the newcomers. Even veterans who believed they had already been detoxified were hit.
Ordinary gas masks could not block such fine dust. Once inhaled, thirty seconds were enough to kill.
And that First Prince's adviser had been setting this up for three years. This poison had been spread through all sorts of channels. The Weasel Gang was far from the only bandit group affected!
Of the more than one hundred thousand people before them, how many had those red-thread parasites lurking inside their bodies?
Just as White Wolf Bazel led a group of bandits in besieging the Oma party, screams suddenly rang out from the crowd.
"Brother, why is red hair growing all over you?"
"What's happening? What the hell is sucking my blood?"
"Damn it, help me pull this red hair off! Burn it with fire!"
"Ah!"
The heart-rending screams made everyone's skin crawl.
At first there were only one or two isolated cries, but then it was as if a chain reaction had been ignited. Wails of agony rose one after another in waves.
Companions who had just been lively and shouting about killing suddenly turned into red-haired monsters. In the blink of an eye, they were sucked dry into desiccated corpses, their deaths horribly grotesque.
How terrifying was that scene?
One or two people would have been one thing. But when the people before you fell in waves like wheat before a scythe, what normal person would not be scared weak in the knees?
In barely a dozen breaths, half of the tens of thousands of bandits who had just been surrounding First Prince Quentin's group had collapsed!
Several fireworks had killed tens of thousands. Even a top-tier powerhouse like White Wolf Bazel felt cold sweat running down his back at the sheer strangeness of this method.
Tens of thousands had vanished in smoke amid laughter. At that moment, everyone looking at the black-robed adviser beside First Prince Quentin had a deep fear in their eyes.
Bazel finally understood why this man named Metternich gave him such a spine-chilling feeling.
With such methods, he had already won seventy percent of the battle without fighting!
Vaguely, Bazel felt that Metternich's claim about wiping them all out might truly come to pass.
Because Bazel had thought of an even worse consequence!
"Eh? We're fine?"
"Haha. Looks like this poison only works on newcomers?"
"Damn it, it was the gang's alchemists! They hid bugs in the potions they prepared for the newcomers!"
"There's a traitor! Those Oma bastards infiltrated us long ago!"
"..."
Some of the smarter bandits had probably already guessed the whole story.
The leaders of the bandit groups were also somewhat relieved. Although this firework massacre had caught everyone off guard, the elite members of the major groups had not suffered serious losses.
Most of the tens of thousands who died were newcomers who had not awakened as Transcendents, or Awakened who had only just broken through their first Gene Lock.
These people were not the core of the major bandit groups, and their combat strength was utterly ordinary.
So what if they died? Newcomers' lives were cheap. They could just recruit more.
But before long, the leaders' relief turned into despair.
"Not good! The Mechanical City has stopped operating!"
"Damn it, where are the boiler workers? Hurry up and add coal!"
"Chief, this is bad! All the boiler workers are dead!"
"..."
The commotion erupted again. Only then did the bandit higher-ups, who had just been counting themselves lucky, realize that disaster was imminent!
What jobs did newcomers do in bandit groups?
Boiler workers, artillery operators, mechanical control operators!
Once they died, it meant no one was left to operate the Mechanical City.
A Mechanical City without operators was nothing more than a pile of scrap metal!
The dust spread unhindered into the control cabins of the various Mechanical Cities, and then vast numbers of red-haired monsters died again.
The larger the mechanical fortress, the more people it needed to operate in coordination. In the blink of an eye, more than ninety percent of the basic operators had died!
Even if the surviving bandit higher-ups wanted to operate them, they lacked the ability.
The result was that, in an instant, no more artillery fire came from the Mechanical Cities of the various bandit groups. With no one feeding coal into the Steam Boilers, the power they supplied weakened further and further until they gradually ground to a halt.
In the blink of an eye, the thousand or so Mechanical Cities that had just scattered and fled so nimbly were all dead in the water.
And despairing news followed one after another.
Far in the distance, dark masses had already appeared along the horizon. The Oma Empire's large-scale Mechanical Legion had encircled them.
Without the Mechanical Cities, the bandits had also lost their greatest means of escape.
Now they really were going to be wiped out to the last man.
"This method is fucking incredible!"
Watching the scene before him, four words instantly surfaced in Rein's mind: catching turtles in a jar!
Even though he himself had been one of those caught in the scheme, he had to admit that the person behind this setup was exceptionally brilliant.
But then another thought struck him, and he froze on the spot as if struck by lightning.
"Piscis was an Oma Royal Family spy. Could the secret of Baron Morin's Relic have already been leaked to someone else?"
As Rein looked again at the battlefield, which resembled a hellish scene, his expression grew increasingly grim.
Originally, he had planned to get away from the center of the battlefield first. Preserving his own life was the priority.
Even if he were captured by the Oma Empire's army afterward, his identities as a doctor's apprentice and alchemist's apprentice meant he would most likely not be killed.
No matter where he went, those two professions received preferential treatment.
Besides, he was originally just a rookie bandit and had not made any wanted lists. His crimes did not warrant death.
After being captured, perhaps he could turn over a new leaf, completely cast off his identity as a bandit, and join the Oma Empire.
However, because Piscis had been an Oma spy, all of that had become nothing but wishful thinking.
He now carried a priceless treasure. Piscis might be dead, but if outsiders knew this secret, they would certainly not give up on coming after him.
Oh. He had nearly forgotten.
There was also the mastermind who had hired Quinn to wipe out his family!
If Rein were captured as a newcomer of the Weasel Bandit Group, that person would definitely have the means to find him.
If he were caught, he would most likely be unable to escape soul-searching interrogation.
Baron Morin's Relic represented a tremendous opportunity for Rein, one that could change his destiny.
As for handing over all his secrets in exchange for barely surviving as a useless nobody for the rest of his life?
Pah!
He had been useless long enough in his previous life. This life, he planned to try something different!
"I can only risk everything and run."
Having reached that conclusion, Rein took a deep breath.
At least with the Mind Core, his chances of escaping were still fairly high.
Ding! Ballistic trajectory analysis complete. Direction: southwest.
The trajectory analysis had identified the weak point in the Oma Mechanical Legion's encirclement. The southwest was his only chance.
Without further hesitation, he darted toward the edge of the battlefield, swift as a leopard.
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