The Abomination hand had already grabbed Lin Xiao's ankle.
The force was terrifying; Five Fingers dug into his flesh, as if trying to rip his leg bone out of his knee. Lin Xiao could no longer feel the pain; his body felt like a piece of wood rotting from the rain, wanting only to sink. The sky was black, the rain was still falling, and he could hear his heartbeat slowing down, becoming lighter and lighter, like the second hand ticking to its last tick.
The Abomination lifted him upside down, its single remaining eye filled with savage pleasure. It suddenly threw a powerful punch, and a "thud" was heard.
The fist pierced through Lin Xiao's chest, leaving a large hole in his body.
In that instant, Lin Xiao's mind cleared. He could feel the wind rushing in from the hole, blowing through his lungs, through his heart, through all the blood that hadn't yet cooled. Betty, May, Gwen Stacy, Natasha, Hill Sif, Tony... those familiar faces flashed before his eyes frame by frame, then shattered one by one in the rain. His lips moved, as if he wanted to shout something, but in the end, only a very faint whisper escaped his lips, so faint that even he couldn't hear it.
He felt that this time, he might really be going to die here. His life was filled with too many regrets, too many emotional debts, and too many unfinished things. Was this really how it would end?
Suddenly, a faint golden light flashed past and entered Lin Xiao's body. Then it grew brighter and brighter!
The light seemed to tear the entire rainy night apart, evaporating the surrounding mud and water into white mist, and illuminating the face of Abomination in every detail. When the golden light touched Lin Xiao, it seemed to come alive, quickly surging into Lin Xiao's limbs and bones. Some of it even materialized and traveled around Lin Xiao's body, forming an impenetrable golden cocoon.
The Abomination was violently blasted away by the golden light, its massive body crashing through the half-collapsed brick wall behind it, sending rubble flying like shrapnel. It rolled three times in the mud, overturned a jeep that had long since burned to a shell, and finally came to a stop thirty meters away, motionless.
Lin Xiao was still lying on the ground, but he could feel that the light was extremely warm. It was as if someone had pressed the reset button on his body. His bones were reconnected under the golden light, his blood vessels were reconnecting, and his muscle fibers were tightening one by one as if they had come alive.
Lin Xiao took a deep breath, his eyes darted around violently under his eyelids, and then he snapped them open. The rain was still falling, but his heartbeat had returned, pounding as if someone were drumming on his ribs.
This is... Unyielding Heart! Its effect has been triggered!
Lin Xiao's expression shifted from disorientation to shock in a split second, then from shock to complexity, and finally from complexity to ecstasy.
"Hahaha, little did you know that there's always a way out? I, Lin Xiao, am back!"
He sat up abruptly, still trembling. He glanced down at his chest; his clothes were completely torn, but his skin was smooth and unblemished, without a single scar. He clenched his fists and slowly stood up, mud and water gushing down his body. He tried to move his shoulders, then his neck, and then his arms.
It doesn't hurt anymore. It doesn't hurt at all. My mental energy has fully returned, like a well that had been drained has been filled back up to its original size.
He coughed, spitting the blood from his throat onto the muddy ground. Then he laughed. The laughter rose from low to high, from faint to real, like someone lighting a fire in the darkness, burning brighter and brighter.
The Abomination had risen from the ruins. Its left eye was tightly closed, its right eye was bloodshot, its chest heaved violently, and its face was covered in festering sores from the golden light. It watched Lin Xiao stand in the rain again, watching the man who had just been like a dead dog suddenly stand up and even burst out laughing.
"Impossible..." The Abomination voice changed, revealing for the first time clear disbelief, "You should be dead! I saw you with my own eyes..."
"I died." Lin Xiao interrupted him, ripping off his soaked shirt to reveal his rain-soaked muscles. "And then I came back. Don't you mutants all like this 'death and resurrection' trope? How about it, mine's version is way more exciting than yours, right?"
With a roar of Abomination, as if some old wound had been reopened, it stomped its foot on the ground, sending mud flying three meters high, and crashed into Lin Xiao like a derailed locomotive.
Lin Xiao did not retreat. He adjusted his breathing, and before the Abomination's foot could stomp down, his right fist had already struck out.
The fist ripped through the rain, striking the Abomination precisely on the sole of its foot. The Abomination's massive body was as if it had been hit from below by a heavy cannon; its entire leg, from foot to knee, twisted into an unnatural angle, and its enormous body spun backward, crashing into the muddy ground and creating a huge crater.
Lin Xiao flicked his wrist, gave himself the classic Vegeta pose, and pointed his thumb at himself. He was about to say something to mock Abomination when his expression suddenly changed, and he quickly lowered his hand, pointing at Abomination instead.
"Damn it, you can't just strike that pose randomly; using that 'pretentious' move will backfire."
No sooner had he finished speaking than the Abomination crawled out of the mud puddle, half its face distorted from the beating, green blood streaming down its chin, yet it still kept moving forward. The savage confidence it once possessed was gone from its eyes, replaced only by a madness driven to the brink.
"What... what kind of monster are you?" A Abomination voice was squeezed out of his throat, hoarse as if his throat was filled with sand.
"Me?" Lin Xiao straightened up, his aura gradually rising. "All you need to know is that my name is Lin Xiao. And you, right now, are my punching bag."
The two engaged in a fierce battle.
The Abomination swung its fists like a madman, each punch carrying the force to smash through the ground. Lin Xiao didn't take the blows head-on; instead, he sidestepped, leaned back, and slid through the Abomination's shadowy fists. Occasionally, when he couldn't dodge, he would use his forearm to block, and with each block, he could hear an extremely faint sound, like gears meshing, coming from within his body.
The Heartsteel is resonating. It is still layering.
"Ding-- Heartsteel current level: 52. Total damage absorbed: 46,000 tons of TNT equivalent. Each level increases defense and maximum health, current increase: 52%"
Lin Xiao raised an eyebrow. While dodging the attacks of the Abomination, he began to calculate in his mind. He was able to survive just now, Heartsteel deserved at least half the credit. This thing was strong, and it could increase the upper limit, but each layer required enduring enough damage first. 52 layers meant 52 times of repeatedly teetering on the brink of death.
"I see now." He took a breath, sliding back three meters to dodge a powerful punch from Abomination. "This thing is forcing me to be a human punching bag. Every time I level up, I get a beating. This is fucking awful."
After he finished speaking, he suddenly raised his hand and gestured for a pause towards the Abomination.
"Stop! Halftime break!"
The Abomination ignored him completely and threw a punch at Lin Xiao's face. Lin Xiao dodged to the side, the force of the punch making his ear sting.
"I said rest! Can't you understand human language? You're Abomination, not a savage. Can't you behave like a savage? You've been beating me for so long, it's perfectly reasonable for me to ask for a break to recover!"
The response of Abomination was yet another, even heavier, swinging punch.
Lin Xiao sighed, dodging awkwardly as he mentally activated the system. He had casually closed it during the battle, but now that he had reopened it, a barrage of pending information and frantic suggestions immediately popped up on the panel.
"Ding--Host is currently in combat. Real-time suggestions are as follows: Option 1: Use the Five Thunder Spell to attack the target's right knee, combined with Blue Silver Grass to disrupt movement, which can buy three seconds to escape the window. Option 2: Create distance and wait for military support. Option 3..."
"Shut up," Lin Xiao hissed in his mind, dodging another sweeping attack from the Abomination. "I don't want to run, and I don't want to drag this out any longer. Today, I'm going to beat it into submission fair and square!"
While dodging the Abomination, he used all the attribute points he had accumulated.
He'd been reluctant to use those freely allocated points, accumulating many more over time, all lying dormant in his System Space. He hesitated time and again, repeatedly thinking, "Let's wait a little longer." Wait for what? Wait until someone pierced his heart before he thought of using them?
"I've always been hesitant," Lin Xiao's voice drifted through the rain, low and deep, "Now I know who the strongest attribute is."
His focus slammed heavily onto the Strength column, dumping all his points into it at once.
528!
550!
600!
680!
715!
A golden light, visible only to him, exploded from his body, like countless fine electric currents surging through his bones. He felt as if he had been thrown into an erupting volcano, every muscle burning, swelling, and crackling. The feeling was both painful and pleasurable, as if he had been reforged from the inside out.
"Ding--This system feels a strange sense of satisfaction. Host, I'll ask you one more time, does the humanoid Hulk smell good?"
Lin Xiao clenched his fist. Rain fell on his shoulder, but before it even touched his skin, it was shaken into mist by an invisible aura. He felt a continuous stream of power surging up from the deepest part of his body, like a river that had been blocked for too long finally bursting its banks.
He slowly raised his head, looked at the Abomination rushing towards him, and a smile curled at the corner of his mouth.
"It smells delicious."
The words had barely left his mouth when he shot off like a cannonball. The ground blasted open a three-meter-long trench behind him, and the rain was torn in two by his body. This time, he didn't use the Blink Dagger, the Five Thunder Spell, or the Blue Silver Grass. He just wanted to see what kind of impact he could achieve with pure brute force.
Abomination only had time to raise its arm.
Lin Xiao had arrived. His right fist slammed down from mid-air, carrying an indescribable wind pressure, like an entire steel wall crashing down on his head. Abomination instinctively raised his arms to block.
"Boom--"
Those two terrifyingly thick arms were like two rotten logs in front of Lin Xiao's punch. The Abomination was smashed half a foot into the ground, and the surrounding soil turned up like a circle of exploding waves. Its two arms were twisted at an unnatural angle, clearly broken.
Lin Xiao didn't stop. He grabbed Abomination's ankle, pulled it out of the mud, and slammed it to the ground like a tattered sack. Once, twice, three times. Each slam created a large crater, each slam made the earth tremble like an earthquake. Abomination's body was no longer recognizable, like a pile of green flesh that had been repeatedly smashed, only occasionally twitching to prove that it wasn't quite dead yet.
Lin Xiao tossed it into the air one last time, and as it fell, he raised his knee and delivered a knee strike to its back. The Abomination's body snapped at a bizarre angle, like a toad with its spine broken, and crashed to the ground, completely still.
Lin Xiao stood in the rain, his chest rising and falling slightly, his body steaming with white vapor, like a newly forged war god. He looked down at the Abomination on the ground, his smile slowly fading, leaving only a layer of calm coldness in his eyes.
"If you had told me to increase my strength earlier, we wouldn't have had to die once." He looked at the system panel, his tone surprisingly sincere.
"Ding--This system has already said that you've been hesitant and indecisive all along."
Lin Xiao smiled and stopped being stubborn.
The rain was still falling, but it had lessened a bit.
Lin Xiao stood before the enormous corpse, looking down at it. The Abomination's body was mired in the mud, like a toppled mountain of flesh. Rainwater streamed down its twisted limbs, washing the green blood into tiny rivulets. Its eyes were still open, its only remaining right eye staring at the sky, its pupil already dilated, but its mouth was still crooked, as if it hadn't understood how it died even in its last moments.
Lin Xiao slowly squatted down and closed its eyelids.
" Blonsky," he murmured the name.
Doupao had previously shoved all the information in front of him— Emil Blonsky, a former United Kingdom special forces soldier employed by General Ross, who, after failing to capture Banner, voluntarily underwent an incomplete serum injection in order to gain power comparable to the Hulk. He thought he was becoming the second Hulk, but ended up becoming a monster he couldn't even recognize himself.
"You're a pitiful person too." Lin Xiao's voice was very soft, so soft that it was easily washed away by the sound of rain.
Lin Xiao stood up and looked around. The military camp was completely destroyed. Overturned armored vehicles, burnt-out tents, shell casings scattered in the mud, and fragments of tattered uniforms. The rain was getting lighter, and a faint gray-white sliver appeared in the distant sky. Dawn was approaching.
He walked to a relatively intact patch of ground and found a softer patch of soil next to the ruins of the command post. Lin Xiao stretched out his right hand, and Blue Silver Grass sprouted from his palm. Several vines wrapped around a broken cement slab next to him, and with a gentle pull, he cleared a two-meter square clearing.
"Burying you is a good deed," Lin Xiao muttered to himself as he worked. "Next time I'm reincarnated, I hope I don't have to be a soldier. I'll find a better job, like selling roasted sweet potatoes or something."
The Blue Silver Grass vines, like obedient shovels, burrowed into the soil, turning over clumps of earth. Lin Xiao stood to the side, watching the pit grow deeper and deeper, his expression gradually calming down. When it was about a person deep, he gathered the vines, walked to the corpse of the Abomination, bent down, and picked it up.
The weight made his heels sink, but Lin Xiao wasn't in a hurry. He walked step by step to the edge of the pit and put it in. The body fell to the bottom of the pit, and muddy water poured in from all sides, making a "glug-glug" sound.
Lin Xiao squatted by the ditch, took out the pack of cigarettes that had long been soaked by the rain from his pocket. He took one out, squeezed it, but didn't light it. He broke the cigarette in two and threw it into the ditch.
"This is what I kept for myself," he said. "Here, take it. Smoke it on the way."
Then he stood up, Blue Silver Grass surged forth again, pushing handfuls of soil from the edge of the pit into the hole. The soil hit the corpse with a dull thud. Lin Xiao didn't speak again, just buried it again and again. He didn't know why he had to do this. Maybe it was because he felt that no matter what this guy became in the end, he was still a person. Maybe it was because he had also died once today, and some obsessions suddenly let go.
Or perhaps, it was simply because she didn't want Betty's father to wake up and see the monster he had personally raised lying dead in the wilderness.
"Old man," Lin Xiao patted the last handful of soil firmly, and said in a low voice, "If you don't live up to my expectations, you'll be letting this pile of mud down."
As dawn approached, Lin Xiao dragged his weary body to Thaddeus Ross's side. The old man was still unconscious, but his breathing had become much more stable. Lin Xiao picked him up, let his head rest on his shoulder, and walked out of the military camp.