Although there were fifteen newcomers, as Zhang Jie had said in his opening remarks, very few of them had any real talent or potential!
So when Wang Zhen shot three big shots in the gut, most of the newcomers couldn't take it. They didn't feel sorry for those three foul-mouthed pieces of trash. They just felt a pang of fear that they might be next. Besides, they genuinely couldn't believe Zheng Zha's talk about traveling between worlds, missions, or rewards like Superman. They recognized each word on its own, but strung together, the whole thing was impossible to understand.
Clearly, all these newcomers had failed their reading comprehension!
As soon as the door opened, the newcomers scrambled to get out. Guns were banned in China, and people were naturally afraid of them—especially when the person holding one had casually pulled it out and shot three street punks in the gut!
Wang Zhen had a baby face. He wasn't as unremarkable as Bai Gu, nor as ordinary-looking as Yan Zu, but he was still handsome and cute, with a harmless air about him!
Before, just having that face had lowered the difficulty of his missions by twenty percent. Add his caution and prudence, and Wang Zhen had managed to lower it by at least thirty percent!
But now he'd blown it!
A pistol might look good in your hand, but no one dared to love you with one pointed at them!
Even the three big shots gritted their teeth and didn't dare cry out, though they were trembling with pain. They clutched the gaping holes in their bellies and crawled toward the exit, inch by inch!
Seeing the three winding trails of blood on the floor, as if three mops had been improvising a work of art, Zheng Zha frowned and hurriedly asked Zhan Lan to go help stop the bleeding!
Zheng Zha wasn't just being blindly compassionate. Zhang Jie had once told him that killing a teammate meant paying the Main God compensation for mental distress: one teammate was worth 1,000 reward points. Besides, Wang Zhen had only fired to stand up for himself and Zhan Lan. It was also a way to make an example of them. The other newcomers hadn't been as foul-mouthed as those three street punks, but they'd said plenty of unpleasant things too. But after Wang Zhen fired three shots and put holes in the three foulest mouths, it was as if he'd snipped the newcomers' vocal cords. Nobody was running their mouths anymore!
"Thanks for helping out, Wang Zhen! But next time, could you use a different method—and aim somewhere else? Those three lumps won't last until the end of the movie, anyway. You're in trouble now. You owe 3,000 reward points, you know?" Zhan Lan said quietly as she walked over to Wang Zhen after stopping the three big shots' bleeding.
"The end of the movie? You're giving them too much credit! I'll bet those three jerks will be Xenomorph food in less than ten minutes," Wang Zhen said with a cold laugh.
Most of the newcomers had left, but four remained. Three were adults, and the last was a handsome middle-school student. Those three adults were the talented newcomers Zhang Jie had mentioned.
Zheng Zha went over to chat with them. The three newcomers looked like serious badasses, and each of them had quite a résumé to share!
The uniformed man with glasses introduced himself as Chu Xuan. He was a nationally treasured researcher at Longyin Military Base, held the rank of senior colonel, and had an extraordinary memory, though he wasn't good at planning or strategizing.
The young man with an ordinary face and an expression of detached emptiness introduced himself as Zero. He was an assassin, especially skilled at long-range kills with a sniper rifle.
Nearly two meters tall, as burly as a Siberian brown bear, and covered in thick hair, the Russian-blooded mixed-race man introduced himself as Ba Wang. He was a Russian half-breed, strong and able to hold his liquor, and best at suppressing the enemy with a machine gun.
All professionals!
Zheng Zha and Zhan Lan were delighted. Zhang Jie had said this movie world was calibrated for fifteen newcomers. If they were all just rats and rabbits fit only to feed the Xenomorphs, then this mission would be way beyond the intended difficulty!
The last one, a middle-school student who called himself Li Shuaixi, gave his introduction too. His ordinary credentials left Zheng Zha and Zhan Lan a little disappointed, but they couldn't ask for more. He was a perceptive student who knew his own limits. He also pointed out his strength: he knew a lot of movies inside out and could help their team.
Then Chu Xuan and the other two took the initiative, establishing their status in the team through their expertise. Zero, who called himself an assassin, cut his own arm with a knife to test how well the emergency hemostatic medicine worked. Chu Xuan, meanwhile, said he had watched the movie Alien I seven years ago and remembered every detail.
Wang Zhen didn't butt in. He gave the impression of being Zheng Zha's enforcer: ruthless, quiet, and not one to talk much, but always ready to act when needed. That was exactly the impression Wang Zhen wanted to give. He might have had a cheat, and the first thing he'd gotten was a class-change item that let him leap straight into a new role. That was why Wang Zhen wanted to keep it under wraps for now. Instant Transmutation Circles were certainly convenient, but they lacked power. Take the Flame Transmutation Circle he'd brought out as a cover, for instance: its orange-red flames only reached eight or nine hundred degrees.
So, even as he basked in his own coolness, Wang Zhen had come back to his senses!
The road ahead was long!
He still had to keep working on Human Transmutation, keep communicating with the "Gate of Truth," keep exploiting loopholes, and keep opening blind boxes to try his luck!
So Wang Zhen didn't care much about what Zheng Zha and the others thought. It was like taking on a mission: even if he needed some time to prepare, if he could complete it with absolute certainty, no one would bother looking into what happened in between.
By the same token, once Wang Zhen ascended to godhood, who would care about all the struggles along the way?
Zheng Zha was a company manager, but his company wasn't exactly one of the Fortune 500. Faced with Chu Xuan, a nationally treasured researcher and senior colonel, he naturally bowed his head. The deeply rooted tendency to defer to official rank couldn't simply be cast aside at will. Zheng Zha didn't even verify Chu Xuan's credentials before handing him the reins.
Even Wang Zhen, watching from the sidelines, couldn't tell whether this was Liu Bei's three visits to invite Zhuge Liang out of seclusion, with Zheng Zha feeling uncertain about a mission meant for fifteen newcomers and desperately needing an expert to guide him—or whether Zheng Zha had been completely duped by Zhang Jie and was making an idiotic move after his IQ took a nosedive.
Wang Zhen had already made up his mind. After their first encounter with the Xenomorphs, once chaos erupted and everyone was thrown into disarray, he'd use the opportunity to leave!
If he wanted more reward points and bonus missions, he couldn't stick with Zheng Zha and the others. That would make him an easy pawn, left to take the fall for others, and he wouldn't earn many reward points or bonus missions.
So the only way to guarantee he got the most out of this was to go solo!
Of course, hogging all the rewards like that wasn't good for team unity, and it wouldn't help him keep a low profile. That was why Wang Zhen planned to wait until their first encounter with the Xenomorphs, when everyone scattered and ran for their lives. Then he could grumble, "When the flock is in the forest, the birds stay together; when disaster strikes, they fly apart," while happily going solo...
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