Human nature

"Actually, the rooms up here are all pretty clean..."

Lin Hao swiped the key card with a series of beeps, opening every room on the twenty-fifth floor first to eliminate any lurking threats.

Apart from one room containing a middle-aged female Madman, whom he bludgeoned to death outright, earning a gold necklace and a jade bracelet worth over four hundred wish power, the other rooms were all quite clean.

Although the contents of every room were more or less identical, his backpack started running out of space after he packed away the contents of three or four rooms.

"I'll make another round, clear out the threats, then bring Xiao Wen over to help move everything."

Lin Hao hesitated, but ultimately decided against using a room here as his base.

The Teleportation Point was on the first floor, so he would be better off choosing a relatively low floor.

After all, there were no working elevators now.

"The seventh or eighth floor might be a good choice. High enough to reduce the chance of beasts coming up, but still within reach of the Teleportation Point. I can work my way down gradually..."

Thanks to the broadcast from University Town, Lin Hao also knew that exploring anchored worlds would definitely be a long-term, frequent undertaking.

Food and everything else were easier to obtain in an anchored world, making it far better than the tropical rainforest.

If staying in an exploration world too long didn't risk becoming lost and going insane, requiring regular returns, most of the people in University Town would probably have been happy to stay in Great Qi permanently, despite its primitive productivity!

"Besides, Great Qi has traditional martial arts lineages. There's no internal energy or true qi, but if you can train to become a grandmaster of seeing the divine, indestructible, you can live for a full hundred and twenty years without your vitality leaking away, staying at your peak until your last breath."

Lin Hao had his equipment slots, but his own physical fitness hadn't improved. If he could obtain the Great Qi World's training methods, it would be like giving a tiger wings.

University Town had already been in the Abyss for several months, and its people had learned more about wish power. Its main uses were aiding healing, recovery, and training, as well as repairing damaged equipment with attributes.

The better one's training techniques, the more efficiently one could use wish power. Normal exercise involved tearing muscles and repeatedly repairing them, and everyone had a training limit. Exceeding it could instead cause muscle breakdown or even death.

With wish power assisting, however, that drawback vanished. As long as you could still train, you could train yourself half to death, and after recovering, the benefits of the training would be even greater.

However, the stronger one's body became, the more recovery cost, and the harder further improvements became.

Wish power could be activated at a Teleportation Point, but the drawback was that wish power items could only be redeemed when evacuating back from a world. Moreover, the redeemed wish power couldn't be traded!

Regular Evacuation points in exploration worlds only opened for seven days each month. Using one meant all wish power items would be forcibly reclaimed, except for the wish power equipment currently active on one's body, and ninety percent of the wish power would be confiscated as an evacuation fee.

To redeem collected wish power items without any loss, one had to find special quest items specified by the Earth Will, opening a special evacuation passage for a limited time.

As he considered all this, Lin Hao switched off the radio, which had begun repeating its broadcast, to save the batteries. Then he shouldered his backpack and prepared to head back.

But when he pushed open the fire escape door, he couldn't help frowning.

The fire escape door on the twenty-fourth floor below had been reopened, and three figures were blocking the stairs between the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth floors.

Hearing the movement above, all three looked up.

The man in the middle was powerfully built, standing at least six foot three and so burly that he resembled a brown bear.

He wore a full-face motorcycle helmet that looked expensive, along with a Mink Coat, and held a Fire Axe.

The two men beside him were dressed much more normally. One held a metal water pipe, while the other held a dry powder fire extinguisher, its nozzle aimed upward.

"What do you want?"

Lin Hao swept his gaze over them, giving the burly man and the fire extinguisher a little extra attention before calmly posing his question.

He had worn an ordinary long-sleeved shirt and jeans for a little extra protection, and was already drenched in sweat in this sweltering heat. Yet this fellow was wearing a helmet and a Mink Coat?

Unless he was mistaken, both were probably equipment with attributes. He just couldn't see their glow without concentrating on them at close range.

"Nothing much. You took our key card, so naturally, you owe us the stuff."

The man holding the steel pipe, the least conspicuous of the three, spoke.

"What? You let me come up here to test the Madmen, then swoop in to reap the rewards?"

Lin Hao laughed in anger. He hadn't gone out of his way to break through their fire door and rob them earlier, yet now they were robbing him instead.

How many days had it been? Staying in the hotel, these men surely had enough food. They couldn't have been starving out of their minds, yet they were already displaying their malice in full.

"Cut the crap. Leave the stuff and get lost if you don't want to die. Otherwise, you're not leaving."

The man with the fire extinguisher barked at him too. Despite his fierce tone and expression, however, he deliberately kept his voice low, as though worried about attracting something.

Although Lin Hao had confidence in himself, the dry powder fire extinguisher still made him wary.

His equipment enchantments gave him considerable killing power, but if the extinguisher sprayed his eyes and he took an axe blow or a pipe to the head, he would be just another corpse by the roadside.

Sure enough, humans were more troublesome than Madmen!

But noticing how deliberately they lowered their voices, Lin Hao immediately found a countermeasure. Preparing to duck into a room on the twenty-fifth floor the moment things went wrong, he deliberately raised his voice and called out loudly,

"What? Aren't you afraid I'll lure the Madmen over?"

When Lin Hao had lured Madmen before, he had only attracted those nearby, and his tapping hadn't been loud. His suddenly raised voice now gave all three men a fright.

Creak~

The sounds of doors opening and movement came from both above and below in the stairwell. The burly man with the Fire Axe flew into a rage and roared, his voice muffled by his helmet,

"Kill him!"

As he spoke, he charged up first, axe in hand.

I can't let him keep screeching. Even if he has some equipment, his physique is nowhere near mine, and he's alone.

Three against one. The advantage is mine!

With his towering build, the burly man cleared three steps in a single stride and reached Lin Hao in just a few bounds.

The pressure he exuded, like a charging bull, combined with the axe in his hand, was more than enough to make a timid

person's legs go weak.

Yet when Lin Hao saw him charging over, a smile appeared on his face instead.

"You fell into the trap..."

Whoosh~

Unaffected by Lin Hao's words, the axe chopped straight down toward his head.

Seeing Lin Hao swing a ruler up at high speed, a trace of mockery appeared in the burly man's eyes beneath his helmet. Has he been scared witless? Even if that ruler of yours has attributes...

Bang~

His fingers split open. Under the ruler's high-speed impact, the descending axe flew from his grasp, spinning backward with a whistling rush.

Crack~

The axe blade embedded itself directly in the fire door beside them!

That sudden visual shock struck both the two men following behind and the burly man with his bloodied hand like a bolt of lightning.

How was that possible?!

How could a wooden ruler do that?!

High-attribute equipment?!

How high did its attributes have to be?! Where had he gotten it?!

But Lin Hao gave him no time to react. After knocking the axe away, he whipped the ruler back toward the burly man, deliberately turning it flat to strike him with its broad face.

Even flat, however, its whistling speed produced the crack of breaking bone when it struck the burly man's arm.

The brown bear of a man staggered repeatedly under the force of the impact, screaming from the pain of his broken bone.

Then, exploiting the ruler's ease of handling and agility, Lin Hao struck his back and waist in a rapid succession of blows.

Every blow came with a sickening crunch. His spine was broken! His kidneys were smashed!

The burly man's initial screams became moans, before he collapsed to the ground and stopped moving.

Only then did the other two, a beat too slow, finally charge up.

Although the man with the fire extinguisher had reacted late, he still raised the nozzle and aimed it at Lin Hao.

Hiss, hiss~

Milky-white powder sprayed out, blanketing a broad area ahead. Lin Hao raised his pot lid in front of him, held his breath, and charged toward the man.

The pot lid blocked the direct spray from entering his eyes, while holding his breath kept it out of his nose, allowing him to ignore the extinguisher's interference for the moment.

Although the burly man's fall had terrified the pipe-wielding man, it also brought out his ferocity. He swung his steel pipe into the white cloud, striking at Lin Hao's seemingly flimsy aluminum pot lid.

He refused to believe the other man could keep hold of such a thin lid!

Clang~

A dull impact rang out. With the combined force of Lin Hao's charge and the deliberate swing of his wrist toward the pipe, the pipe-wielding man felt as though he had struck granite. The recoil numbed his arm.

Then he and his companion, who had only just begun spraying the extinguisher, were both rammed down the stairs by Lin Hao!

The extinguisher's spray abruptly stopped.

Giving them no chance to recover, Lin Hao quickly followed and unleashed a flurry of ruler blows on the man with the extinguisher.

Crunch, crunch~

Blows fell across his body and head amid a jumble of cracking bones, and he immediately fell silent.

"Please, spare me! They forced me..."

Hearing those sickening sounds of shattering bones after tumbling down the stairs, the pipe-wielding man lost all his courage and immediately begged for mercy.

But all that met him was the merciless ruler. With a wet crunch, he too fell silent.

After dispatching the three men, Lin Hao, covered in white powder, began breathing again. The lingering dust made him cough a few times, and his pounding heart finally slowed a little.

He spat out a thick mouthful of saliva tainted with powder.

Those three had even coordinated their attacks with a fire extinguisher, making them definitely harder to deal with than Madmen. Fortunately, they hadn't known what he was capable of, and he had successfully exploited that information gap to finish them off.

Otherwise, if they had ambushed him with dirty tricks, he would have been in serious trouble!

Up close, even in the dim light, Lin Hao could see bloodstains on both the steel pipe and the axe blade. He couldn't tell whether they had killed Madmen, ordinary people, or both.

Judging by how quickly they had come out to rob him, and how viciously they had attacked, other people had probably already fallen victim to them...

Tap, tap, tap~

Footsteps approached from both upstairs and downstairs. His raised voice earlier had also attracted some Madmen.

But faced with the straightforward Madmen, Lin Hao felt far steadier. He climbed back to the twenty-fifth floor and waited at the top of the stairs.

He wasn't sure whether other dangers remained on the twenty-fourth floor, but the twenty-fifth was definitely empty.

As long as there were no enemies behind him and not too many Madmen, he could bludgeon them all to death!

Even if there were too many, he could duck into a room first!

"Hehe, baby, where are you?"

"Are you playing hide-and-seek with me, baby...?"

"Hide-and-seek is over!"

"Let me see where you're hiding..."

Several strange cries came from below. Two Madmen climbed the stairs with grotesquely contorted expressions, lunging like vicious dogs at food. They were moving so fast that even the kitchen knives in their hands had slipped to the floor.

One pounced on a corpse on the floor and sank its teeth into it, seemingly ravenous, while the other continued charging up the stairs toward Lin Hao...