Twentyfold Physique

Wu Zhong chased after Feipeng with confidence. With an eightfold physique, he carried Yang Chunsha in one arm as he sprinted.

He ran at incredible speed, light as if flying, like a cheetah in full pursuit.

He bounded and maneuvered through the mountains, covering over ten meters with every step.

Wu Zhong estimated that he could reach sixteen meters per second—6.25 seconds for a hundred meters.

That speed soon let him catch sight of Feipeng's back.

That guy's ass was simply too conspicuous. With a stick stuck in it, he laughed wildly as he ran. Wu Zhong had crippled his mobility, so even with more than a minute's head start, he was still caught.

"Cackle cackle cackle... Captain, save me!" Feipeng screamed himself hoarse, his pants soaked in blood.

With a stick lodged in his ass, he propelled himself forward. Even without a weapon, he still used his palms as swords to block Wu Zhong.

"Hmph!" Wu Zhong no longer feared him in the slightest.

His body shot forward like a shuttle, his iron fist meeting the attack head-on. The air howled and detonated.

Boom!

His armored iron fist clashed directly against the sword aura in Feipeng's palm. This time, Feipeng was the one sent flying.

Wu Zhong did not retreat even half a step. His current punching force was at least one and a half tons, while the arm armor offset a ton of recoil for him.

After the exchange, he could even keep charging forward.

What tremendous strength! Feipeng was horrified.

"I can become even stronger..." Wu Zhong's gaze turned icy.

Even while supporting Yang Chunsha with one hand and carrying the Giant Gate Shield on his back, Feipeng had no hope of defeating him.

Terror filled Feipeng's face, but his mouth continued to cackle. "Ho ho ho, where are you finding so many lunatics to absorb? Hahahaha..."

He truly found it strange. He could not understand how Wu Zhong had improved so much in such a short time.

Why would Wu Zhong tell him about the First-Generation Madblood Clan? That might not even be public information within their circle.

Smack!

Wu Zhong surged forward and kicked him again.

Feipeng was badly wounded and sent tumbling through the air. His ass slammed into a tree, leaving him twitching in agony, yet he still laughed with blood in his mouth.

"Hehehehe, why is the internal energy still there... I already turned off Multiversal Moment..."

"Ho ho ha? How many traits do you have?"

Feipeng laughed wildly in confusion. The power of laws from alien universes was not permanent; it only temporarily existed when Multiversal Moment was activated.

The implanted arm armor on Wu Zhong, for example, required Endless Summer to keep Multiversal Moment activated over the long term.

Likewise, the internal energy within Wu Zhong came from Feipeng. Once Feipeng turned it off, that internal energy should have vanished into thin air.

Yet it had not. Wu Zhong's attacks just now still carried a trace of internal energy.

Feipeng was on the verge of collapse. Wu Zhong had displayed too many traits: mental resistance, Incurable, forced silence, indestructible wooden and stone objects, and an impregnable vital gate.

If Feipeng had possessed even one of those traits and used it properly, he could have become a gold mercenary. Yet Wu Zhong had a whole pile of them.

"It's very rude to ask about someone else's abilities to their face."

Wu Zhong raised his right arm, intending to finish him directly.

However, a bluish-green figure darted out midway and blocked the Purple Molten Bomb.

Whoosh!

The purple plasma struck it without causing the slightest damage. The figure merely staggered back two steps before stopping.

"Vegetable Man?"

Wu Zhong's expression hardened. He hurriedly looked around and spotted someone hiding behind a tree more than ten meters away.

It was the gloomy young man he had met before.

"Gourd... Hahaha..."

Feipeng also spotted Gourd, though speaking was difficult for him.

Gourd nervously pulled out a pistol and assumed a standard shooting stance. But when he saw Wu Zhong's purple light cannon aimed at him, he quickly ducked back behind the tree.

It was unbelievable. Feipeng and Arborvitae had actually lost?

"Brother Feipeng, what happened? Where's Arborvitae?"

"Hahaha! Arborvitae is dead! Arborvitae is dead! Hahahaha!" Feipeng announced the death with laughter.

Gourd was dumbfounded. Was Arborvitae's death really that amusing?

"You killed him?"

With a sudden burst, Wu Zhong leaped sideways at extreme speed, bypassed the Vegetable Man, and blasted Feipeng to death.

Feipeng's laughter came to an abrupt stop. His chest was blown to mush, a bloody mass of flesh still bubbling.

Hiss!

At the sight, Gourd turned and ran. Arborvitae was dead, and Feipeng was dead too!

The two main fighting forces of their squad had both died at the hands of a rookie. It was absurd.

Boom!

A blast pierced through the tree trunk behind Gourd and exploded. The tree had blocked Wu Zhong's view, so the shot missed its mark, but it still melted away half of Gourd's waist.

Vomiting blood and clutching his waist, he fled at full speed while turning his gun around to fire wildly.

At the same time, he ordered the Vegetable Man to cover him at all costs.

Wu Zhong kept his eyes on him, shifting sideways and raising his cannon. The Vegetable Man fearlessly pounced onto his arm, took a blast head-on, then wrapped around him and hammered his neck with a barrage of punches.

If not for Wu Zhong's powerful physique, his Adam's apple would have been smashed to pieces.

Wu Zhong threw an icy punch, trying to knock the annoying thing away, but the Vegetable Man climbed right up his arm and was actually proficient in grappling.

It hugged Wu Zhong's body, climbed onto his back, and locked him down with both arms and legs.

"Get off!"

Wu Zhong punched and blasted at it, yet could not shake it off. He had not even caused it the slightest wound.

Meanwhile, the Vegetable Man's attacks on him were completely real.

If its strength had not been so weak—merely at an ordinary human level—it might already have broken his neck.

Bzz...

The Vegetable Man repeatedly jabbed at Wu Zhong's eyes. Wu Zhong shut his eyelids and endured it head-on.

Only then did he realize that if he regarded his eyelids as a closed gate, outsiders could not poke through them.

Still, it hurt terribly, because eyelids were soft.

"...This thing is really clingy!"

Wu Zhong was alarmed and furious. Though he would not suffer serious injury, he could not simply ignore something hanging off his body.

After all, an eightfold physique was not the same as having an iron body. He still had vulnerable areas, and getting hit there still hurt badly.

Especially since this thing had somehow pulled out a knife.

Ah, it was Wu Zhong's knife. He had taken it from 985 Gu Yue earlier and kept it tucked at his waist without using it. After all, the blade had long since chipped.

But the Vegetable Man had found it and began stabbing at him repeatedly.

Wu Zhong easily pinned down its hand, completely overpowering it in strength.

But when he tried to seize the knife, he found himself in trouble. No matter how much force he used, the Vegetable Man gripped the knife tightly.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Wu Zhong smashed it with the back of his head, rammed his spine into a tree, and even threw himself backward onto the ground. Yet it showed no intention of letting go.

Immune to physical damage and skilled in grappling, it was like an indestructible piece of sticky candy.

Only vegetables could harm Vegetable Men. Xia Heng had already demonstrated that before, but there had been many Vegetable Men then. Now there was only one—what was he supposed to do?

"Vegetables, vegetables! Where are there vegetables?"

With the Vegetable Man clamped against him, Wu Zhong looked around frantically. He should have pulled some vegetables from the village before leaving.

Gourd was about to escape. Wu Zhong wanted to chase him with the Vegetable Man as an accessory, but then he would not be able to carry Yang Chunsha. He could not just leave her behind while she was seriously injured.

"Right! Debiao!"

"You brought cucumbers, didn't you?"

Wu Zhong remembered that Yang Chunsha's usual communication tool was a cucumber. He immediately crouched down and began searching.

Sure enough, he found one tucked inside a layer of her clothes and hurriedly pulled it out.

With a cucumber in hand, he now possessed a sharp weapon.

Wu Zhong slashed and stabbed furiously. Crunching sounds rang out as he stabbed the Vegetable Man full of holes and broke its body apart.

"Die!"

With one final strike, Wu Zhong stabbed the Vegetable Man's head to pieces with the cucumber. The thing finally stopped moving.

Immediately afterward, its entire body disintegrated into ash, leaving only a pile of vegetable-hole rings on the ground.

Wu Zhong collected the rings, then discovered two vegetable seeds on the ground.

"Oh? It drops seeds too?"

Naturally, Wu Zhong accepted the seeds as well. When he looked up again, Gourd had already vanished.

He gave chase at full speed, yet did not catch even a glimpse of him.

"He runs that fast?" Wu Zhong shook his head slightly.

Since the man had already disappeared, Wu Zhong did not bother looking any longer. Gourd had not directly fought him, so there was no need to chase him relentlessly.

After fighting for so long—and even fighting in the village—they had probably already alerted 985.

This place was relatively remote, which was why he had not seen anyone yet. But 985's people were surely on their way, and might even have already begun forming an encirclement.

Wu Zhong did not dare linger. He immediately chose an even more secluded direction and sprinted away.

That direction was not toward Xia Heng, Luo Yi, and the others.

"I can't return to the original battlefield. By the time I get there, 985 will probably have arrived."

"I don't need to worry about Xia Heng. He can escape with a single teleport. Luo Yi probably has his own methods too. I'm still carrying Debiao, so there's no need to regroup with them at a time like this."

"Forcing a reunion would only drag them down."

Wu Zhong did not even turn back for Feipeng's wooden stick sword. He decisively carried Yang Chunsha at full speed and plunged into the deep mountains and old forests.

His hearing and vision were sharp, and he remained alert to every sound around him.

He ran until nightfall. When the moon rose above the treetops and the forest was pitch-black, after covering at least several hundred li, Wu Zhong finally stopped to rest.

It was not because he was tired, but because Yang Chunsha had recovered and woken up.

"You're alright now?"

"There wasn't much to eat. I only found some wild bananas."

"I tasted them. They're edible, and they're in season right now."

Yang Chunsha accepted the wild bananas, blinking as she fearfully touched her neck. "I dreamed that I died."

Wu Zhong comforted her. "That wasn't a dream, and you didn't die."

He then told her how he had turned the tables, saved her, and what happened afterward.

After hearing it all, she was deeply shaken.

Yang Chunsha had always wanted to find someone reliable to depend on. When she said she wanted to join Endless Summer's group back then, it had not merely been something she said recklessly to survive.

Along the way, she had indeed considered escaping and breaking away from them. But that was because she was afraid. She did not know whether Endless Summer's group was trustworthy, and she had not dared act on those thoughts.

But now, while the others might not be especially reliable, she felt that Wu Zhong truly was.

"Brother... Brother Wu, you really are something."

"Come to think of it, this was my first time fighting experts from the mercenary world, but you seemed even more like a rookie than I did."

Yang Chunsha was thoroughly convinced. No wonder Endless Summer values him so much.

When the Liongrass Mercenary Group attacked this time, Wu Zhong had essentially fought one against two. And those two were no insignificant figures in the mercenary world.

They were not famous enough to be household names, but among silver mercenaries, they were still outstanding.

In the past, Yang Chunsha would never have dared fight people like that.

Yang Chunsha added, "Those two gold mercenaries seemed more like useless loafers."

"They acted so confident, but when they encountered a strong enemy, neither of them could protect anyone in the end."

Seeing her go too far, Wu Zhong interrupted, "Alright, stop praising me. If Brother Xia hadn't made me a First-Generation Madblood Clan, I'd be dead too."

He believed the most dangerous moment had been that life-or-death gamble. Before confirming that he was a First-Generation Madblood Clan, he had truly despaired when facing Arborvitae.

After learning that he was first-generation, his mindset changed. There had still been twists and turns afterward, but none had been as despairing as the moment he saw Arborvitae's heart shatter, only for Arborvitae to become stronger instead.

"Debiao, come on, let me farm this a bit." Wu Zhong waved his hand, producing crackling sounds in the air as he told Yang Chunsha about the first-generation mechanism.

He had not continued farming it on the way because he feared Yang Chunsha might suddenly die. Now that she had recovered, he naturally wanted to take the chance to improve his physique.

"Here!" Yang Chunsha readily stretched out her arm and even bit through her own skin.

Wu Zhong lightly touched her blood, first hurriedly absorbing her hallucinatory schizophrenia, then re-embracing her with insomnia.

With a buzz, Wu Zhong felt wonderful all over, overflowing with energy. This was excessive healing.

Duplicate. Keep going!

He repeatedly fed and embraced her. Yang Chunsha felt little change, but Wu Zhong sometimes looked ecstatic with pleasure, and sometimes his bones and muscles rang as his physique surged.

Tenfold, elevenfold, twelvefold... Duplicate, again. Thirteenfold, fourteenfold... Duplicate, duplicate...

Wu Zhong continuously farmed the effect through embracing. The further he went, the more duplicates appeared and the fewer new traits remained.

But it did not matter. He could simply farm it a few more times. It was all profit with no cost.

A little over ten minutes later, his physical qualities had reached twenty times that of an ordinary person!

Twentyfold! It was absurdly powerful. With one punch, a tree snapped in response.

Wood chips flew far away like sharp weapons, embedding themselves in other trees.

He jumped and threw a kick. It was even more outrageous—a huge tree that would take two people to wrap their arms around exploded apart in the middle.

Yang Chunsha shrank back in shock. It was like an explosion.

"Twentyfold? Then without counting the arm armor, your punching force should exceed three tons now, while your leg strength is close to five tons. You're basically a humanoid heavy weapon!"

"As for running speed, it isn't calculated linearly, but it should be at least twenty-one meters per second. A hundred meters in 4.7 seconds."

Wu Zhong nodded and picked up a stone, crushing it into powder with one hand.

He stroked his body. "My internal organs are very strong too. My immunity and recovery are even more outstanding."

"With such superhuman physical capabilities, I should be nearly immune to all toxins and diseases, with incredibly lasting endurance."

Yang Chunsha looked at him enviously. "Can you keep improving?"

Wu Zhong actually wanted to continue, but for some reason, after refreshing it for several more minutes, he only got repeats, with nothing but healing effects.

"Seems like I can't improve any further? Are there really so few types of mental illness?" Wu Zhong wondered.

But it was enough. This feeling of being filled with power was simply wonderful.

He felt that if they fought again, he could instantly defeat both Feipeng and Arborvitae without taking a scratch...

"Try jumping."

He lightly jumped straight up, rising ten meters off the ground—enough to reach the height of a four-story building.

"Now, let's try it at full force..." Wu Zhong muttered, crouching down again as the muscles in his legs tensed.

Boom!

The earth and rocks beneath his feet exploded as he shot skyward like a cannonball.

But Wu Zhong felt a burst of agonizing pain. His head buzzed, and he blacked out, only waking as he fell back down.

Thud. He landed steadily on the ground, clutching his head and shaking it. His head felt numb.

"What happened to you? How did you jump yourself unconscious?" Yang Chunsha asked in surprise.

Wu Zhong stood up, feeling as though every organ, every bone, even every cell in his body had been subjected to immense pressure.

But it lasted only an instant. Then came the numbness, and after that, he was fine.

"Just now, my head suddenly buzzed... My whole body hurt terribly for a moment, and then I blacked out for an instant."

Yang Chunsha blinked. "Huh? You jumped yourself unconscious?"

"Come to think of it, you just jumped as high as a ten-story building... I get it. That instantaneous burst gave you too much acceleration. The pressure on your brain overloaded it."

Wu Zhong stared at her blankly. "What? Acceleration overload? My physique is already twenty times stronger. Shouldn't I have the corresponding tolerance?"

"It's just acceleration. How could I possibly fail to withstand it?"

Yang Chunsha tilted her head. "But you did withstand it. If you hadn't, you would've dropped dead already. The fact is, aside from feeling dizzy for a moment, you're completely fine."

"Then why did I get dizzy?" Wu Zhong still did not understand.

Yang Chunsha stroked her chin. "Let me calculate it. When you launched yourself upward just now, your acceleration must have reached seventy g at a certain instant."

"The surface of the sun is only twenty-eight g... So when you jumped with all your strength, all the blood in your body was forced to the lower half of your body... Of course you'd get dizzy when your brain was deprived of blood."

"This has nothing to do with your physical strength. It only has to do with your body structure and material composition."

Wu Zhong thought back and realized that it was true. At the time, he had felt as though all the blood in his body had been sucked away in an instant.

Yang Chunsha said, "Your blood was instantly compressed into your lower body, then rapidly rushed back through your whole body. Yet you only suffered minor injuries and recovered immediately. That essentially proves that your physique can withstand that level of acceleration."

"But you'll still pass out when you need to."

"Because the Madblood Clan is a trait. It strengthened your physical abilities out of thin air, but it did not alter your body structure or physical composition in any way."

"You know how absolute traits work. They're things forcibly imposed on you, no matter what. They don't care how you feel or whether there are any negative effects."

"Your blood is still human blood, not some kind of deep-sea acceleration fluid..."

Wu Zhong twitched the corner of his mouth. "True. That's what an absolute trait is."

The trait had given him the physical capabilities, but he was not "a life-form biologically equipped with those capabilities."

He was still human, just an extremely abnormal one... That was why going all out with acceleration could knock him unconscious.

In terms of the all-around nature of such power, possessing multiple forms of energy would be better, since they came with corresponding natural laws.

Wu Zhong tried jumping several more times and finally determined that, in actual combat, a maximum jump height of seventeen meters was optimal.