After clearing the low-level Ash Domain previously located on Fire Altar Road, Chu Wei quickly had the driver take them to another Ash Domain site.
This was an ordinary village outside Dongjiang City. An Ash Domain had descended into a small grove beside the village a day ago. Since no one lived at the point of descent, the village chief had not discovered and reported it until an entire day later. By now, it was nearly solidified, so Wang Zhifan and the others had to complete this cleanup mission as quickly as possible. Otherwise, this Ash Domain might solidify in the real world.
"Brother Fan, A Liao, inside this Ash Domain is a winding, pitch-black cave nearly a kilometer long. There are quite a few low-level lizard-type and bat-type monsters inside. We'd better eliminate them all within half an hour."
Before entering the small grove shrouded in dense gray mist, Chu Wei, who had used her summon to scout the entrance, explained the basic situation to Wang Zhifan and A Liao. Compared with their Ash Domain mission not long ago, they were under even greater time pressure this time.
"Mm. I'll go first and clear the way."
After hearing her out, Wang Zhifan promptly stepped into the gray area before them.
In the blink of an eye, the dim and blurry woodland before his eyes turned into rock walls illuminated by the beam above his head, with dark passages to his left and right. The beam came from the miner's helmet with a lamp on his head. Chu Wei had specifically found those in the trunk of the Administration's special vehicle earlier, and each of them wore one.
Before he could get a clear look at the passages on either side, Wang Zhifan suddenly swung the Blade of the Wolf Fiend at the upper right. A piercing shriek rang out, followed by the sound of some small creature hitting the ground.
"You little thing. You dared to ambush me? Don't think I can't find you just because you're hiding in the dark."
When Wang Zhifan turned and looked down, he saw in the lamplight that the creature he had abruptly cut down was a small monster resembling a bat. It had fallen to the ground and become a corpse split neatly in two.
As for why Wang Zhifan had been able to spot it in the darkness and strike it down in one blow, it was because his above-average Spirit attribute gave him exceptionally sharp perception.
Wang Zhifan's current Spirit attribute was 16, more than fifty percent higher than the average for a healthy adult man. Normally, such a high Spirit attribute was not especially useful for a melee class like his, since all his senses were perfectly ordinary and he had little need to rely on perception to judge anything. But the situation was different in the dark. Without vision, the sense he usually relied on most, the advantage of his high perception became apparent. Anything that tried to sneak close without particularly superb concealment would be immediately detected by him, and he could pinpoint its exact location.
"Whoa! It's so dark in here! Fighting monsters here has to be exciting!"
A Liao, the teenage gunner, entered the Ash Domain cave second behind Wang Zhifan. To everyone's surprise, he actually praised this place, where the restricted visibility would limit his performance.
"Brother Fan, you handle the rear defense. A Liao and I will clear the way ahead."
After entering third, Chu Wei glanced around the cave passage before quickly deciding on a cleanup strategy.
"Mm. Let's get started."
Wang Zhifan had no objection to Chu Wei's strategy. He had joined this squad as a temporary worker to serve as a bodyguard, so he did not need to worry too much about clearing monsters.
Chu Wei then released her female ghost summon, which demonstrated its ability to pass through walls and scout ahead in this cave passage environment. Along the way, the ghost was responsible for scouting the route and dealing with some troublesome monsters, while A Liao sprayed bullets at every enemy ahead. Since Chu Wei's summon was physically immune, he did not need to worry about friendly fire at all.
Wang Zhifan, meanwhile, took charge of defending the rear. He had initially thought this task would not be particularly troublesome, but before long, a steady stream of monsters attacked him from behind the group. He ended up slashing monsters almost the entire way, with a workload not much lighter than the other two in front.
This was likely because the light they brought into the dark environment had attracted monsters from both directions. Fortunately, the narrow passage was well suited to Wang Zhifan's strengths. He only needed to keep swinging and slashing in front of himself, and often a single strike would kill several charging bats or lizard monsters.
After fighting continuously for about twenty minutes, the three of them reached the end of one side of the cave passage without stopping their steps. They had cleared one direction to its end and had to turn back.
"Let's rest here for a minute. There are more monsters in this Ash Domain passage than expected, so everyone must be pretty tired after coming all this way."
Chu Wei was apparently worn out after the continuous fighting, so she announced a brief rest on the spot.
"I'm a little tired, but once we turn back, there shouldn't be so many monsters left to clear."
Seeing this, Wang Zhifan crouched down and leaned against the rock wall beside him.
He was genuinely somewhat exhausted. The number of monsters he had killed at the rear was not much lower than the number killed by the two in front. For a melee class like him, who had to keep swinging his blade, continuous combat drained stamina even more severely than it did for Chu Wei and A Liao.
Even A Liao, usually the most talkative of the three, rarely spoke now. He hugged his rifle, half-closed his eyes, and leaned against the rock wall to rest. It was clear that clearing two Ash Domains in a single day had tested the teenager's energy as well.
But just as the three were preparing to rest briefly at the end of the Ash Domain cave passage, Chu Wei, who had been resting with her eyes closed, suddenly gave a soft cry of surprise, drawing the attention of the other two.
"Brother Fan, A Liao, there's something inside that rock wall!"
As she spoke, she rose from her leaning position and walked more than ten meters in the direction they had come from. The lamp atop her helmet then shone onto an utterly ordinary section of the passage wall.
"What is it?"
Wang Zhifan immediately rose alertly and walked over to inspect it, but he could not find anything unusual about the rock wall. It looked like nothing more than an insignificant part of the Ash Domain cave wall, with nothing but bare, uneven stone.
"It's a humanoid statue. My summon found a hidden humanoid statue inside it."
Chu Wei explained to Wang Zhifan. As she spoke, her female ghost summon emerged from the rock wall before them. It seemed that the ghost had accidentally passed through the wall and discovered the anomaly.
"A humanoid statue? Ah Wei, if something like that really appears in a place like this, we should leave as soon as possible."
At Chu Wei's explanation, the hairs on Wang Zhifan's back nearly stood up. Just imagine it: finding a humanoid statue embedded in a cave wall within an Ash Domain crawling with monsters. Could that possibly be a good thing? Yet Chu Wei was not as nervous as Wang Zhifan. She quickly took out the special Administration device she possessed, tapped its screen a few times, and brought up a page.
"Based on the image my summon saw, this kind of statue seems to have been recorded in the Administration's Gray Domain Database. We may have encountered a special event."
As she spoke, she showed Wang Zhifan the information displayed on the device.
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