Sometimes time crawled like a sluggish snail; sometimes it galloped like a wild horse gone berserk. In the blink of an eye, one month, six months, ten months, twenty months...
Two years of drifting passed just like that.
There was still only a lone sailboat, and the Demon God's Sea still stretched endlessly beyond the horizon.
But after two years, marine organisms had appeared along the hull of the once-new wooden sailboat. Barnacles and shipworms were steadily multiplying. No amount of killing, scraping, or eating could get rid of them all. It was infuriating and frustrating, and Zhang Ming had to jump into the sea every few days to maintain his boat.
The sheer vastness of the Mysterious Zone far exceeded Zhang Ming's imagination. Through the World Tree's senses, their boat seemed to be crawling along like a snail. After two years of painstaking travel, they had certainly moved farther from the Black Tortoise Continent, but their distance from Earth... seemed barely to have changed.
It really was so far away...
Fortunately, with a group of companions by his side and a busy, fulfilling life, he did not feel quite so lonely.
Those two years had also brought plenty of dangers, great and small.
For instance, they had once encountered a spherical purple creature that emitted poisonous gas. It could fly, and the growths protruding from its skin released a sickly yellow, foul-smelling gas that poisoned every fish in the surrounding waters, large or small.
Zhang Ming named this monster the "Gas Bomb."
Fortunately, he possessed Toxin Resistance, which was already a merged innate ability, so he had no fear of the gas.
One lightning spear brought the thing down, and they gleefully treated themselves to a feast!
The Gas Bomb smelled foul, and as for how it tasted... even