Sendai Colony

The instant Long Xi opened his eyes again, his entire body began plummeting.

Wind roared in his ears, tossing his slightly long hair into disarray and making his clothes snap and flap.

Before he could even see where he was, his body gave him the answer.

He was falling, and falling fast!

Long Xi glanced down and nearly died on the spot.

He was hundreds of meters in the air.

A vast city lay below, its buildings densely packed together. Along its edges, an unnatural, curved wall of light enclosed the entire area.

A barrier?!

And one that screamed Culling Game at first glance!

Even if you teleported me straight into the colony, I wouldn't complain. Even if you dropped me from a few dozen meters up, I wouldn't complain.

But dropping me from hundreds of meters up?! Are you that afraid I might survive?!

"Fuck-"

Before he could unleash another curse, a system panel slammed into his face.

[Instance activated: Culling Game · Sendai Colony]

[Current mode: Trial Mode]

[Trial description: Upon entering the colony, you are automatically considered a Player]

[Basic rules summary:]

[1. Players earn points by killing other Players]

[2. Failure to score within the specified time limit will result in the removal of your cursed technique]

[3. Upon accumulating 100 points, you may add a new rule]

[4. Death in this trial counts as withdrawal and will not affect your life in reality]

[5. Entry is limited to once per night. The current maximum duration is seven days. After death, you may enter again following a five-day interval. Make the most of this opportunity]

[6. Some trial rewards may be brought back to reality]

[7. Livestream automatically activated. Perception modification initiated. Viewers will believe this is a virtual reality game]

Long Xi endured the discomfort of the wind long enough to read the notifications. By then, his body had already slipped into the barrier with a soft pop.

Veins bulged on his forehead. He was clearly ready to launch a saturation bombing of insults at the system's entire family tree!

"You're throwing me in now?"

"Are you fucking sick?!"

"I was just about to sleep!"

"Does this shitty system get off on ambushing users in the middle of the night?!"

"If you'd just put me on the ground, I wouldn't have said a thing!"

"Are you trying to kill me?!!!!"

His curses were filthy.

Truly.

Between his previous life and this one, his entire vocabulary of insults was practically getting an upgrade right then.

But the system ignored him completely.

The livestream chat exploded first. Having never experienced the thrill of a first-person free fall, the viewers fired off comments even faster than usual.

The viewer and follower counts were visibly climbing, but Long Xi had no time to look at the chat.

If he didn't think of something soon, he was about to put on a spectacular shower of scattered body parts.

He really didn't want to end up a puddle of mush like Jian Jie.

From this height, never mind that he was only just at the threshold of Grade 2-even Toji Fushiguro would have to cosplay his own son and get eliminated on the spot.

Long Xi bit down hard on his tongue to force himself to calm down, only to twist his face into a mask of pain.

But at least he calmed down...

Find somewhere to land first. Survive first.

Otherwise, even if he reinforced his body with cursed energy, a fall onto a rooftop from this height would still leave him bruised all over.

He didn't know Reverse Cursed Technique, either. Although he had no idea which colony he was in, every single one of them was deadly.

His fighting strength wasn't particularly high to begin with. If he got injured too, surviving inside this colony would become even harder.

His gaze swept around, ruling out high-rises and indoor pools one after another. Finally, he glanced down to his right and spotted a patch of dark water.

A river? A lake?

It didn't look like either... Even if it were full of nuclear wastewater, it shouldn't be this black, right?

It looked as though something was packed densely inside it...

It didn't matter anymore. Even if there were schools of fish packed down there-or piranhas-he had to go down!

As long as there was water! Even a water landing would do!

Long Xi immediately mobilized his cursed energy and violently redirected his fall toward it, with no intention of holding his cursed energy in check to try to slow himself down.

With his current abilities, tanking a fall from this height wasn't realistic.

His best option was to turn a vertical plunge into a diagonal dive and spread out the most lethal part of the impact.

His body jerked sideways in midair, and his right shoulder instantly ached from the strain.

Clenching his back teeth, Long Xi kept pressing his cursed energy, forcing his descent a little farther to the right, then farther still!

The wind grew fiercer, the airflow slicing across his cheeks like knives and leaving his eardrums buzzing and numb.

The eerily ink-black water rushed closer, until he could make out rings of distorted dark ripples across its surface.

"Fuck!"

Boom!

The water exploded. The tremendous impact slammed into Long Xi's chest, knocking the breath out of him as the turbulent current dragged him under. His limbs instantly went numb, and he nearly lost consciousness.

The good news was that he hadn't turned into a human jigsaw puzzle scattered everywhere. The bad news was that this wasn't much better. It felt as though someone had grabbed all his internal organs and kneaded them.

He tumbled twice underwater, forced himself steady with cursed energy, then held his breath and surged upward.

With a splash, his head finally broke the surface. He opened his mouth and gulped down a lungful of foul, fishy air. His throat burned, and his nose was full of rank, bitter river water.

Before he could catch his breath, a dense chorus of beating wings suddenly reached his ears. Bzzz-bzzzz-the sound closed in from every direction, like countless tiny motors running at once.

Half his scalp went numb on the spot. Long Xi whipped his head around.

Black. Everything was black.

The bridge supports, the riverbank, the backs of billboards-even the water he had just plunged into-were crawling with masses of black insects.

They weren't ordinary insects. They were cockroaches, huge and hideous, their oily carapaces gleaming disgustingly in the dim light.

Their slender antennae whipped wildly, their legs scrabbled madly over anything they could grip, and their mouthparts opened and closed without stopping. The sight alone made his stomach churn.

Long Xi cursed aloud. One glance told him exactly what he was facing.

And it also told him exactly which colony he was in...

"Fuck! Why are these your things?!"

He didn't hesitate for even half a second. He raised his hand and fired off Furious Flame Mound, cranking its power straight to the maximum.

Emotion? He didn't need to work himself up anymore!

The system had dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night and thrown him into the Culling Game for a high-altitude free fall. Now it had arranged a cockroach welcoming party. If his rage didn't multiply thirtyfold, it would hardly do justice to tonight's hellish combo.

Flames erupted in his palm. With a boom, a huge swath of black insects was burned through on the spot. A scorched stench instantly filled the air over the water, and the cockroaches in front flipped belly-up and dropped into the river.

But there were even more behind them, densely packed together, surging forward like a black tide. Forget thousands-there could have been tens of thousands!

Long Xi's face turned green. Kill them all? Like hell he could. There was no end to them.

His foot suddenly sank as he concentrated gravity precisely on the water beneath it, then pushed forward hard against the resulting recoil.

Water burst with a sharp crack, and he shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bow. His second and third steps followed in quick succession. Long Xi sprinted across the surface, trailing a string of exploding white waves.

This was a fine-control trick he had only figured out over the past two days. Applying gravity over a large area easily went out of control, but if he focused the force on a tiny point beneath his foot, he could temporarily use the water as a foothold.

Of course, that only worked if his movements stayed coordinated. If he messed up now, he would fall in and become food for those damned cockroaches.

Long Xi ran with intense concentration-so intense that he had already cursed eighteen generations of the system's ancestors in his head.

He had even decided how he would shove this shitty system into a toilet and flush it three times once he got out, then soak it in disinfectant for twenty-four hours.

The insect tide behind him refused to let up. The creatures had nearly covered the water, a black mass that made his scalp crawl just looking at it.

As he ran, he quickly scanned his surroundings: a battered bridge, an abandoned shopping mall, an elevated road broken in half, and the occasional eerie fluctuation of cursed energy flashing above the distant city.

Clearly, this really was the Sendai Colony. Not some beginner village, but a notoriously dangerous map in the Culling Game.

Long Xi cursed as he ran, sprinting with everything he had, but the insects still slowly closed in on him.

"System, you really think highly of me!"

Sendai-the place where Yuta Okkotsu had gone on a killing spree in the original story. Ryu Ishigori, Takako Uro, Dhruv Lakdawalla, and Kurourushi. A whole bunch of monsters gathered here had turned Sendai into a hell-tier ranked match.

Other people at least got a few minor enemies to warm up with when they entered an instance. He had been airdropped straight into the boss's home.

And the cockroaches chasing right behind his ass had already made the answer perfectly clear.

Kurourushi, the only cursed spirit among Sendai's four strongest fighters. Its specialty was insects-the kind that sent your sanity plummeting and gave you nightmares for the rest of your life.

Long Xi's expression darkened. It wasn't that he had never considered running into something major as soon as he entered the instance, but who could have expected the opening move to be the ultimate trump card?

This wasn't a trial. The system was clearly afraid his life was too comfortable and had specially arranged a hell-difficulty start for him.

He didn't know Reverse Cursed Technique, so he couldn't just force a kiss on a cursed spirit and try some Gala Game trick!

He dashed another few dozen meters before a dark swell suddenly rose from the water ahead without warning.

Long Xi's pupils contracted, and his body instinctively lurched sideways.

The next second, a huge mass of black insects exploded out of the water, missing him by a hair as they swept past his back. The foul gust they stirred up sent a chill down his spine.

He flung a blast of flame behind him. With a hiss, the swarm became a blazing fireball.

But Long Xi felt no relief at all, because that meant one thing-the creature was closer now. It wasn't just the swarm pursuing him. The main body was moving too...

That nauseating presence, so dense it was almost tangible, was already nearby!

Sure enough, before he had another moment to think, a muffled crash suddenly came from the abandoned mall on the riverbank ahead.

Boom!

A corner of the exterior wall collapsed, sending bricks and rubble tumbling down.

A massive black silhouette slowly emerged from behind the building. The shrill scrape of its armored shell, the rustle of jointed limbs dragging across the ground, and its revolting stench all reached him from dozens of meters away.

The moment Long Xi looked up and saw it clearly, his footing nearly slipped.

It really was here.

Not the swarm.

The creature itself.

Kurourushi.