Blacklight Virus

The leader tried to wrench himself free, but couldn't move Xia Leng in the slightest!

The fingers Xia Leng had clamped around his wrist were as cold and hard as iron pincers. They didn't feel warm like a living person's at all!

Crack~

Xia Leng's expressionless face betrayed nothing as he gave the wrist an almost casual squeeze. A sharp, crisp snap of breaking bone rang out.

The powerful force crushed the bones in the leader's remaining left wrist into powder...

"Ah!!! I'll kill you, you bastard!!"

Mad with pain, the leader roared like a crazed beast.

After all, with both hands gone, he couldn't survive in this world. He might as well use the last of his strength to take his enemy down with him!

But he had no way left to hurt Xia Leng. His once-proud legs were still numb, and both his hands had been completely ruined...

Out of his mind, he opened his mouth and lunged to bite Xia Leng like a rabid dog!

"Uh..."

But the moment he opened his mouth, he felt something hard shoved inside it.

Looking more closely, he saw Xia Leng had stuffed four fingers into his mouth, bracing his thumb against the leader's chin and gripping his entire jaw.

"You..."

Crack!!

Squelch!

Xia Leng tightened the hand gripping the man's chin and ripped the Baptized One's entire lower jaw off!

Blood sprayed across his face and body!

But the blood that had splattered over Xia Leng soon seeped mysteriously into his skin and vanished!

The leader, now missing his entire lower jaw, finally broke down completely. He writhed wildly on the ground in agony, thick blood mixing with dirt as muffled groans of pain escaped from the half of his mouth that remained.

His reign over this stretch of wasteland had come to an end...

Xia Leng still wore the same expression, cold as frost. His shadow-dark eyes gazed impassively at the mangled body writhing on the ground.

The malformed refugees hiding in the tents huddled together, so terrified by what they saw that they hardly dared to breathe.

Xia Leng walked over and reached out with five fingers hard as steel rods. He clamped a hand around the bloodied leader's neck and lifted the thoroughly crippled man off the ground.

"Mm... Please... spare me..."

In the end, his desperate desire to live overcame everything else. The leader began pleading incoherently with Xia Leng. Even after losing his arms and his jaw, he still wanted to cling to life in this apocalypse.

But the desperate look in the leader's eyes met only Xia Leng's clenched fist, hurtling toward him...

Bang!

One punch was all it took. The leader's head burst like a watermelon smashed open, sending bone fragments, brain matter, scalp, and more flying in every direction!

His arms and legs went limp, no longer struggling. Only the faint remnants of his nerves still made them twitch.

At that moment, a translucent blue crystal appeared inside the fist Xia Leng had thrown. Only the heads of Baptized Ones contained crystals like this...

The crystal he had once swallowed, unable to digest, was now wrapped in tiny tendrils extending from his palm as he held it in his hand!

In less than five seconds, it disappeared into his palm as if it had been digested!

At the same time, the muscles in Xia Leng's legs began visibly rippling. They grew more defined, and his explosive speed improved as well!

At last, the black-hole darkness in his eyes began to fade, gradually returning to normal. His consciousness seemed to return with it.

He stared in astonishment at the unfamiliar surroundings. Inside the crude tents, malformed refugees were watching him with terrified eyes. A headless corpse lay on the ground.

From its clothes and severed right arm, Xia Leng recognized the body as the Hunter-type Baptized One he had fought earlier!

Had those scenes just now really not been a dream?!

Was all of this before him something I had done...

I killed a Baptized One?!

And the green canister buried in his subconscious, the doctor, the test subjects, the modifications, and the rest...

They drifted indistinctly through his mind, impossible to shake, like fragments of long-sealed memories that had leaked out. But they were incomplete...

Only one word remained clear: [Blacklight Virus], imprinted deep in his mind...

Through these lingering fragments of memory, the coordinates of several distant, mysterious locations appeared faintly in his mind.

A voice seemed to call to him from those places, urging him to go there and unlock the mystery of his origins...

As far back as Xia Leng could remember, from around the age of five or six, he had wandered through the city's garbage dumps, scavenging food scraps to fill his stomach. At night, he slept in discarded cardboard boxes alongside cockroaches and flies, fighting stray cats and dogs for territory.

The word "parents" meant very little to him. It was as if he had sprung from a rock.

Then one day, people found the skinny, dirty, determined boy and sent him to an orphanage. That was how his "full" childhood finally came to an end...

"What are these shattered memories..."

Xia Leng desperately tried to recall the nightmare from after he had lost consciousness, but suddenly his head began to throb as if it would split apart. It was as though his subconscious was forcing him to go there in person and search for clues about his origins...

"The Land of Corpse Cold. Coordinates: 4559. Forty meters underground."

The coordinates suddenly burst into his mind, like a reminder programmed into a computer, once again suggesting that he had to go there.

"Then I'll go take a look..."

Xia Leng muttered expressionlessly. His day-in, day-out struggle to hunt for food had suddenly acquired a purpose, stirring an indescribable feeling in his heart.

He didn't know what the Land of Corpse Cold was, and had never heard of it. Perhaps the comfortable residents living inside the Fortress knew.

And so Xia Leng had his first goal: to set out for the nearest fortress city within a hundred kilometers, Komodo Fortress.

He could ask around for information there and stock up on supplies for the long, unknown journey ahead.

Just then, Xia Leng remembered that after blowing apart the Baptized One's head, he had grabbed a valuable Light Blue Crystal.

But it had inexplicably vanished from his palm!

Xia Leng stared at his hand in disbelief. The crystal's warmth seemed to linger in his palm, yet there was nothing there now. Had it seeped into his body?!

To confirm this strange occurrence, he instinctively reached into his pocket for the Black Crystal he had found earlier. Only then did he realize he was completely naked. The malformed refugees had torn his already ragged clothes to shreds.

Xia Leng was about to strip the animal hide off the leader's corpse and put it on when countless black tendrils suddenly began extending from his skin!

The tendrils were as fine as threads. They crossed and wove together in a steady rhythm, and in just a few seconds, they had woven animal-hide clothing identical to what the corpse wore, dressing Xia Leng in it...