A Sheep

Strongman (D-Class Curse Mark): With this curse mark's blessing, consuming large quantities of food allows your strength to increase continuously and your physique to grow stronger;

While smoking or watching adult films, you can divert pain equivalent to an amputation without anesthesia;

When fighting others, the more damage you sustain, the more your strength increases;

With this curse mark's blessing, you can more easily learn various forms of fighting, lethal combat, and offensive violence, while coordination throughout your body improves significantly.

This curse mark can be upgraded by merging it with similar talents and curse marks.

If a talent was a single, narrowly focused ability, then a curse mark was a comprehensive enhancement of one aspect of a person.

The difference between a line and a plane.

Obtaining the Strongman curse mark was equivalent to Su Wu gaining a permanent physique-enhancing buff.

Eating large quantities of food would increase his strength and toughen his body!

He could learn offensive violence more quickly!

Those two abilities alone made Su Wu feel he had gotten his money's worth.

What's more, the talents merged into the Strongman curse mark hadn't vanished. Their abilities were still reflected in the curse mark.

Worth it!

Excitement burned in Su Wu's chest, and he could hardly wait to try out the curse mark's abilities.

But he restrained the impulse and first put his newly acquired Chevrolet Cruze key into the backpack on the table.

He had taken this key from the car outside the restaurant in the simulated future.

Even after the road ahead had been blocked by wrecked cars and he and Jiang Yingying had abandoned their vehicle to continue on foot, he hadn't discarded the key.

He hadn't expected it to appear among the items he could bring out.

In this simulation, Jiang Yingying had personally handed Emergency Can to Su Wu before she died, yet he hadn't appeared among the items available to bring out.

Was it because the rooster was alive, while the car key was an inanimate object?

The former couldn't be duplicated, but the latter could?

The simulator's criteria for determining personal possessions were truly a mystery. He couldn't make out its rules at all.

Still, whatever the reason, since he could bring this key into reality, it should also unlock the car outside the restaurant.

That way, even if something changed and there was no key inside the car outside the restaurant, he would be prepared.

Su Wu zipped up his backpack, closed his eyes, and began reviewing the simulation in his mind.

The closing assessment had been, "The darkness before dawn is always hard to endure." That suggested the route he had chosen was correct.

Perhaps breaking through that group of Trapped Corpses would get him to a relatively safe area.

But how could he break through their encirclement?

The Trapped Corpses themselves were fairly fragile and could easily be smashed to pieces. But once those piles of mangled flesh reassembled, their strength would increase in every respect.

They reassembled their mangled flesh very quickly!

They couldn't be killed.

The number of Trapped Corpses was unknown. Su Wu had seen some wearing tattered nurses' uniforms and doctors' clothes.

There were also several ambulances among the wrecked cars.

He therefore suspected that everyone who had died in that heap of wrecked cars had later been turned into a Trapped Corpse.

By a rough estimate, more than a hundred corpses were buried in that heap!

How could he smash over a hundred Trapped Corpses in a short time and escape the area shrouded in gray mist before they reassembled?

That was the key to breaking out!

Su Wu pondered carefully, gradually developing a few ideas.

To smash over a hundred Trapped Corpses in a short time, he would need tools-anything that could rapidly cut or pulverize flesh.

Things like chainsaws, blades, or gasoline.

He even considered driving a large truck straight over them.

But Su Wu soon dismissed that idea.

The heap of wrecked cars blocking the road was itself part of this supernatural entity. By blocking the road, it had made it clear that it wouldn't permit any vehicle to pass.

Supernatural powers didn't follow reason at all.

Under these circumstances, never mind a large truck-even a tank would still be unable to get through!

Besides using tools to force a bloody path through, was there another way out?

Su Wu racked his brains but couldn't think of a second method.

The faces of his two former colleagues, Xin Qiaoge and Wang Zhiyou, flashed through his mind, immediately filling him with intense disgust.

Those two colleagues had done plenty to trip him up at work.

"Sima Work Thief!"

"You're already corpses, and you still want to drag me down with you!"

Su Wu clenched his fists.

Lunchtime.

In a private dining room at a restaurant outside Peaceful Garden.

A waitress entered carrying a pot of tea. Seeing Su Wu sitting alone at the head of the table, she paused, then smiled and said, "The Whole Roast Lamb you ordered is ready. Have your friends not arrived yet?

"Shall I ask the kitchen to hold off and serve the dishes once your friends arrive?"

As she spoke, she poured Su Wu some tea.

Su Wu shook his head. "No need to trouble yourself. Just bring everything out."

"All right, I'll tell the kitchen to serve it now." The waitress tactfully asked no more questions and quietly left the private room.

Before long, two kitchen apprentices entered carrying an iron rack with an entire roasted lamb skewered on it. They set the whole lamb on the table, its rich roasted aroma filling the air.

After that, Lamb Offal Soup, Lamb Fat Flatbread, Spicy Lamb Blood Curd, and other dishes arrived in a steady stream.

Once everyone had left the room, Su Wu cut off a leg of lamb, methodically sliced up the meat, and began eating it piece by piece.

The distinctive aroma of lamb burst in his mouth along with its juices.

He didn't appear to be eating quickly, but in less than three minutes, the entire leg of lamb was in his stomach.

In the past, whenever he received his monthly paycheck, Su Wu would treat himself to a roast leg of lamb at this restaurant.

A leg of lamb with a serving of staple food had been just enough to fill him up.

But this time, he finished the whole leg in under three minutes without feeling the slightest fullness, as though he had swallowed nothing but air.

Su Wu didn't feel particularly hungry.

Yet it seemed that, as long as he wanted to, he could eat all the food in front of him.

The Strongman curse mark lets me strengthen my body and increase my strength by eating continuously, but it doesn't limit how much I can eat at each meal.

So, in theory, as long as I wanted to, I could eat even an entire cow?

And all the food I eat could gradually be converted into improvements to my body?

If food were scarce, could I also keep eating only as much as an ordinary person?

This curse mark is amazing!

As these thoughts stirred in his mind, Su Wu rolled up a Lamb Fat Flatbread and put it in his mouth.

Threads of soothing warmth rose from his abdomen, then circulated throughout his body.

Bathed in that warm current, the muscles throughout his body began to tremble faintly. His flesh, slack from a long lack of exercise, gradually regained its elasticity.

A sense of strength welled up naturally from within his body.

A state of health he had rarely enjoyed through years of work slowly returned.