Zhang Chen looked at the Stone Tablet before him. It seemed blood-red and sinister, wreathed in evil aura and even capable of drinking blood. The more he looked at it, the more eerie it seemed.
"If I want to study the strange and uncanny, I have to keep using golden light to stimulate it and see what wonders these oddities of the world possess." Since the Stone Tablet could not run away, Zhang Chen unhesitatingly pressed his palm against it. Golden light pierced several inches into the tablet, and wherever it shone, countless blood-red vein-like threads on the Stone Tablet shattered one after another. Then, great swathes of Experience Points began to fall.
Experience Points +80 Experience Points +60 Experience Points +90 Experience Points +120 ...
Great swathes of Experience Points kept dropping, and Zhang Chen was instantly all smiles. With the Stone Tablet providing Experience Points, why should he keep painstakingly digging graves? Wasn't it far better to shear the Stone Tablet's wool directly? The Stone Tablet seemed to have been driven into a corner by him. Countless characters burst forth with blood-red light, flickering and reflecting through the air. Yet in the next instant, golden light erupted around Zhang Chen, and the red light released by the Stone Tablet was beaten back to its original form.
"So I'm this strong?" Zhang Chen had been startled by the Stone Tablet's counterattack. Its sudden burst of red had given him quite a fright, but who would have thought that red light was nothing but a flashy façade? Before the Light of the Righteous God, it had no room to resist and was directly turned into nothingness.
"Not worth a single blow!" Zhang Chen muttered to himself. As he watched the countless blood-red threads on the Stone Tablet being erased without end, surprise flickered in his eyes. "But as the Stone Tablet takes damage, the Experience Points it drops are actually starting to decrease."
"Eh~"
A quarter of an hour later, Zhang Chen frowned as he looked at the Experience Points dropped by the Stone Tablet.
Experience Points +8 Experience Points +6 Experience Points +9 Experience Points +1 Experience Points +8 Experience Points +7 Experience Points +10 Experience Points +2 ...
"The Experience Points it drops seem to have decreased drastically." Zhang Chen stopped what he was doing and turned his gaze to his Golden Finger Interface.
Name: Zhang Chen 1 Skill (Second Tier): Light of the Righteous God (0/5000) 2 Skill (Unranked): Dragon Qi (0/2000)] Points: 4500
Zhang Chen's Experience Points had now risen to four thousand five hundred. He was only five hundred short of the five-thousand threshold. As long as he accumulated another five hundred Experience Points, he could upgrade his Light of the Righteous God. Yet the Stone Tablet before him seemed to have been sheared until it was limp. The Experience Points it dropped had begun to plummet, even reaching single digits, and sometimes he had to attack it several times in a row before any Experience Points fell.
"I've verified one thing now. My Light of the Righteous God can harm the strange and uncanny, and once they're injured by me, they drop large amounts of Experience Points. Of course, the key point is that there is also a limit to the Experience Points an oddity can drop." Zhang Chen stared at the Stone Tablet. His Dharma Eye opened as he examined it from top to bottom, carefully observing the changes in the aura within it. The red mist on the Stone Tablet had faded until it was almost imperceptible. The blood-red characters upon it seemed to be bleeding out even more blood, which had even gathered into a small puddle on the ground.
Zhang Chen looked at the blood pooled on the ground. No aura surrounded it; it appeared to be nothing more than ordinary blood.
"Truly strange." Zhang Chen muttered to himself, studying the Stone Tablet from top to bottom with a thoughtful look in his eyes.
"I fed it blood before, and only then did it begin to awaken into something strange and uncanny..." Zhang Chen looked at the Stone Tablet, where the red current had become exceedingly thin. He hurriedly dragged over the rabbit and wild chicken nearby, then raised his knife and brought it down. Scalding blood splashed over the Stone Tablet.
The moment the blood fell onto the Stone Tablet, it was instantly absorbed.
Zhang Chen watched the Stone Tablet with his Dharma Eye. Sure enough, as the Stone Tablet absorbed the blood, the red current gradually began to recover.
After feeding it the blood of a chicken and a rabbit, Zhang Chen tossed the wild chicken and rabbit aside. Then he stared fixedly at the Stone Tablet. "This Stone Tablet can grow stronger by absorbing blood. That's truly uncanny. Luckily I discovered the clue early. Otherwise, if I kept feeding it, the consequences would have been unthinkable. If I raised it for a while longer, who knows whether it might fly out and start eating people outright."
Seeing that the red current on the Stone Tablet had recovered somewhat, Zhang Chen pressed the golden light in his hand against it once more. Countless newly formed red threads within the Stone Tablet shattered again, but the Experience Points that dropped were still pitifully few.
Experience Points +5 Experience Points +3 Experience Points +1 Experience Points +2 Experience Points +3 Experience Points +4 Experience Points +5 ...
The number of Experience Points falling was pitifully small. Zhang Chen looked at the Experience Points on the Stone Tablet, unable to make sense of the pattern for the moment.
"By rights, after I fed the Stone Tablet with the rabbit and wild chicken, the red current on it recovered somewhat. It should have dropped more Experience Points. Why hasn't there been any improvement at all?" Zhang Chen looked at the Stone Tablet before him, deep in thought.
Moreover, he discovered something else: he could only harm the blood-red threads on the surface of the Stone Tablet. His golden light could not penetrate to the deeper red threads within it, so he had no way to deal with them at all.
"What should I do?" Zhang Chen circled the Stone Tablet, examining it back and forth, but after a long time, he still reached no conclusion. He watched the Stone Tablet before him. Once Zhang Chen stopped damaging it, the blood-red threads deep inside slowly stretched outward and began to reclaim the areas Zhang Chen had purified.
Once the Stone Tablet was filled with those blood-red threads again, Zhang Chen shone his golden light upon it, but the Experience Points it dropped were still very few—almost none at all.
"Did I drain it dry?" Zhang Chen looked at the pitiful Experience Points falling. Those repeated +1, +1, +1, +1 were truly miserable.
"I probably did drain it dry!" Zhang Chen stopped what he was doing. He looked at the Stone Tablet with a thoughtful expression, then ceased his actions altogether. "I'll come back tomorrow and take a look!"
After all that fussing, an entire day had passed. The sun had shifted, and the cave was freezing to the bone. Zhang Chen glanced at the Stone Tablet, wrapped himself tightly in animal hide, and ran outside.
Zhang Chen went to the stream to wash up, but when he saw the water level had dropped again, he could not help frowning. "This doesn't seem very good!"
The waterline had dropped again!
Though Zhang Chen was worried, faced with such a natural disaster, he was powerless.
Carrying the wild chicken to the beehive, Zhang Chen chopped up the chicken legs and fed the giant hornets for a while. Only after clearing away every trace did he return to the karst cave and search for a nest suitable for raising the giant hornets.
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