"Huff, huff, huff."
It was too hot. Even the air seemed to be burning. Vast amounts of water evaporated from his body, trying to carry away more heat, but the temperature pushing his body to its limits far outstripped its cooling system. Even evaporating every drop of water in his body could not stop the rapidly rising temperature. Leo felt as though he was about to catch fire, just one spark away from becoming a torch.
Unlike his passive evolution in the desert, being inside the volcanic crater was purely about heat resistance. Every cell was working toward that same goal.
Leo often imagined each of his cells as a miniature engine. At this moment, countless miniature engines were spinning madly, all struggling to survive.
Although his body had not yet reached its limits, Leo could still feel the cells inside it evolving. As batch after batch of cells died, they passed information about the heat and heat resistance on to the next generation.
When new cells formed, they would naturally choose to evolve a little toward heat resistance. Perhaps their cell walls grew a little thicker, increasing their defensive thickness. Perhaps they shrank to reduce their energy consumption. Or perhaps they came up with some strange idea during their evolution and changed themselves bit by bit.
This was very much like giraffes evolving long necks to eat the leaves at the tops of trees.
This was the result of natural selection.
Hundreds of millions of cells constantly evolved in countless directions. Leo simply could not see his own cells; otherwise, their evolution would certainly have left him speechless with shock. The uncertainty of biological evolution would have overturned his entire understanding.
But regardless, after repeated trials by high temperatures, only qualified cells that had evolved in the right direction could survive. Cells whose evolution failed to meet the requirements would be eliminated over several rounds of evolution, eventually replacing all the unqualified cells.
Each round of evolution was a major screening process, selecting the strongest, most perfect cells.
Now, Leo intended to intervene in this evolutionary process with his own methods, accelerating their birth and their replacement.
Leo was on the verge of passing out. The temperature was too high, and his consciousness began to blur. He staggered around to find a good place to lie down, preparing to enter the deepest space within his consciousness.
Unlike in the desert, where he could not control where he fell, he could now make himself a little more comfortable.
Leo had plenty of experience with his body's evolution and was not at all worried about being roasted to death like a piece of meat.
Leo slipped into a semiconscious state. His five senses were already in disarray. One moment, he heard bombardments filling the sky; the next, he heard the buzzing of mosquitoes burrowing into his brain.
One moment, he seemed to be moving through the cruelest battlefield; the next, he seemed to be savoring the misty rain of Jiangnan.
Lying quietly on the ground, Leo waited to lose consciousness. He vaguely seemed to hear something cutting through the air, but he paid it no mind. They were all auditory hallucinations. Once he passed out, he would not hear anything.
"Leo, wake up. There are wizards fighting outside the volcano." Benji's voice rang out in his mind.
Hallucinations. Still hallucinations. Every sound is a hallucination.
"Leo, wake up, now! There are wizards fighting outside the volcano."
Benji wanted to slap Leo twice. At a time like this, he actually dared to pass out. And hallucinations? Hallucinations, his ass!
"??"
Leo opened his dazed eyes. It really did seem to be Benji speaking, not an auditory hallucination.
"Someone's fighting? Who?"
Leo asked hoarsely in confusion. His consciousness was somewhat muddled, and his reactions were extremely slow. He could not distinguish what mattered from what did not.
"Stop spacing out. Hurry up and recover."
Benji could clearly sense the intensity of the battle outside. Even the cave Leo had dug began shaking, with loose stones constantly falling. The flimsy cave looked ready to collapse under the shock waves of the battle outside.
Even the magma beneath the crater outside was affected. Its temperature was clearly rising.
"Oh."
His eyes still dazed, Leo had yet to grasp what had happened, but he obediently took several bottles of healing potion from behind him at once and poured them into his mouth.
The Bitterheart Grass Potion had shackled all his mana. Until its effects were removed, his mana could not recover, so before taking the Bitterheart Grass Potion, Leo had already placed several prepared potions in the cave behind him for emergencies.
He had not expected to need them so soon.
The potions entered his stomach, and his mana recovered. The shadow beneath his feet twisted. Leo took out an antidote potion, and the toxins inside his body were swept away.
He activated the Healing Rune Array on his chest. After repeated washes of its power, his body was recovering rapidly.
As his body recovered, Leo's awareness began to return in earnest.
With his senses restored, he could clearly feel the tremors coming from outside the crater. The entire volcano seemed to be shaking.
"These are definitely wizards of at least level one fighting."
Having recovered only a little, Leo immediately stopped, concealing his aura with grave caution. He did not know whether his faint fluctuations of aura just now would draw the attention of the wizards fighting outside.
With no idea whether they were friends or foes, caution came before everything!
As long as he did not attract their attention, he could wait for them to leave and remain safely hidden here.
Boom!
A thunderclap suddenly exploded out of the clear sky, seemingly about to shake the entire volcano apart. Leo certainly did not dare run outside to look. He could only peer out cautiously from the depths of the cave.
Through the small cave entrance, he could see a mangled corpse falling from the sky into the crater amid countless falling rocks.
It was a middle-aged-looking wizard, with a tattered wizard robe and half a staff. His whole body looked as though it had taken a cannon shell head-on. Everything below his chest was gone. Leo could even see his hollow chest cavity, with nothing left inside.
Even so, this wizard had yet to die completely and retained a faint trace of consciousness.
As he fell into the crater, he seemed to sense Leo's gaze and even cast a weak, astonished glance toward the entrance of Leo's cave.
Perhaps he had not expected a mere wizard apprentice to be here either.
Their eyes met for an instant. That single glance made Leo's scalp prickle.
Whether judged by his physical constitution or the fluctuations of his aura, the wizard about to fall into the volcanic magma was definitely a level one formal wizard.
More importantly, Leo spotted a familiar emblem on one corner of his wizard robe: a burning purple flame.
It was precisely the standard wizard robe worn by the teachers of the Purple Flame Wizard Academy!
This was a teacher from the Purple Flame Academy!
Danger!
Danger!
Danger!
Every cell in his body frantically warned Leo. If concealing his aura earlier could still have kept him hidden, then this chance meeting of eyes had practically dug him out of the cave and laid him beneath the blazing sun. Anyone who was not blind could see him.
Before Leo could recover from his shock, he felt a deadly gaze lock onto him.
Even though he was deep inside the cave, beneath a thick layer of rock, he could clearly feel that gaze locking firmly onto him. Like heavenly punishment, it could erase him at any moment.
"Hehehe, another little rat. Are you coming out yourself, or should I throw you into the magma along with the entire crater?"
Sure enough, sinister laughter echoed. He had been exposed.
Cursing himself would do Leo no good. He could only go out first and stall for as much time as possible.
He knew his own importance. The Purple Flame Academy would not let anything happen to him.
So the more time he could buy now, the greater his hope of survival!
His body had not yet recovered. It was roughly at 40%, and the attack power he could unleash ranged between 150 and 180.
Leo did not know whether to laugh or cry. This was even lower than his attack power at his peak with the Gravity Rune Array set to four times gravity.
I hid so well, so why did someone still stumble across me? What unbelievable luck!
If bad luck's mother had opened the door for bad luck, bad luck would have come home!
"Be careful. The wizard outside has an extremely formidable aura. Even at my peak, I might not necessarily be a match for him."
The slight tremor in Benji's words made Leo's heart sink further. Benji was a demigod-level powerhouse. Converted to the wizard system, he was a level three existence.
Although the levels of other worlds did not correspond to wizard levels at all, and their strength differed greatly, in the vast majority of cases, even level two wizards could defeat level three powerhouses from other worlds.
But a wizard who could make Benji admit his inferiority had to be at least at the peak of level two or above.
Leo felt bitter inside. This was not merely bad luck. His luck could not have been worse.
Had he encountered a first-level wizard, he might still have been able to escape using his shadow talent. Now, he had encountered a wizard at the peak of level two or above.
That level was far beyond what he could handle!
Leo inwardly cursed his bad luck, unaware that Benji was also inwardly cursing what kind of world this was. Although he had learned about it before, was it not a little too unreasonable to casually encounter someone stronger than himself?
In his own world, he had been a renowned expert, worshipped by countless living beings. Yet here, he was not much stronger than some random passerby.
Leo climbed out of the crater barefoot, his upper body bare and only a pair of trousers covering his lower half. His whole body was coated in volcanic ash, pitch-black like a fleeing refugee.
With his feeble aura, withered body hair, and hair that smelled scorched, he looked every bit a wild man!
Even the widely experienced wizard in the sky could not help freezing for a moment at the sight of such a thing climbing out of the crater.
Would killing someone this weak disgrace my name, Nox?
Leo raised his head and looked up. All he could see was a wizard suspended in midair, radiating unimaginable power. He could not make out his face. Light twisted and refracted around him, and looking at him with the naked eye for too long would induce dizziness.
"So this is a powerhouse among wizards?" Leo murmured to himself in despair.
If Leo had still harbored a shred of hope before climbing up, then after truly seeing this wizard with his own eyes and feeling that mountain-like pressure, he knew he had absolutely no hope of escape.
There was no conversation. While Leo was still mired in despair and apprehension, the wizard high in the sky casually waved the staff in his hand.
Boom!
An explosive roar suddenly rang out.
He had attacked.
Perhaps Leo was too weak. Nox had no interest in even speaking. A casual strike to kill him instantly would settle it.
The instant he saw the air blast toward him in the form of a shock wave, the shadow beneath Leo's feet surged. His expression taut, Leo vanished instantly.
It was Shadow Jump. Leo had escaped using the shadow talent he had gained from being tainted in the instant the two worlds connected.
Boom!
The instant Leo left with Shadow Jump, the entire section of the crater where he had stood exploded. The once-circular crater now resembled a doughnut with a huge bite taken out of it. A quarter of it had been blasted apart.
A large stretch of the crater collapsed into the volcanic magma. Billowing black smoke rushed out of the crater, forming an apocalyptic scene like a volcanic eruption.
There was not a trace of delight on the face of the wizard in the sky. Instead, he shifted his gaze to one side in surprise.
Fifty meters away, Leo jumped out of the shadow behind a rock. Looking at the shattered crater, his mouth went dry. If he had not escaped quickly with Shadow Jump, there would not even have been scraps of him left.