“Bai Qiu!”
Guinelia jolted awake with a cry.
Her face was already soaked with tears.
Hastily wiping them away with her blanket, she didn’t even bother putting on her shoes before rushing out the door.
It was five o’clock in the morning.
Barring any unusual circumstances, this was usually the coldest time of day.
Chilly winds lashed against Guinelia’s thin frame, yet she paid them no mind, sprinting forward with all her strength.
Pop!
She pulled out a potion while running, bit the cork free, and drained it in one gulp, clutching the empty bottle tightly as she continued to race ahead.
Boom! Boom! Boom…
Pillars of light descended one after another from the sky, teleporting away the players who had used their tickets.
Seeing this, Guinelia pushed herself even harder.
Her eyes locked onto the only Western-style villa within the Safe Zone.
Taking a deep breath, she accelerated once more.
Having abandoned her shoes for the sake of speed and enhanced herself with a potion, her movement speed had increased—but her durability had not.
Looking down along her fair calves, the soles of her feet were already caked with dust, torn open by gravel and sharp stones, leaving bloody wounds behind.
Boom! Boom!
Two beams of light descended into the courtyard of the villa.
Guinelia cried out in despair.
“Bai Qiu! The weak point of that multi-headed monster is its chest!”
The beams of light vanished.
A heartbeat later, Guinelia burst into the courtyard and flung open the front door with such force that the little Black Iron Worm, which had been happily eating darksteel ores from its food bowl, jumped in fright and nearly knocked the bowl over.
Guinelia collapsed onto the floor.
Looking at the place where Bai Qiu and Zhang Shiyao had disappeared with the teleportation light only moments earlier…
She had still arrived too late.
Hearing the commotion, Wang Shiyun and Feng Yuling hurried over to investigate.
The two froze in surprise when they found Guinelia kneeling in the courtyard, sobbing uncontrollably.
…
The monster stood extremely far from the temple.
Yet even from over ten thousand meters away, it still appeared unimaginably colossal.
Though it had already lost two of its heads, giving it a pitiful appearance…
The one facing it was neither a beast of equal magnitude nor an all-powerful deity.
It was Bai Qiu…
A man who had possessed transcendent power for less than two months.
At this moment, Bai Qiu was barely able to remain standing, bracing himself against his spear with both hands.
His Concealment Cloak had long since vanished.
The Skyward Battle Armor had also been mostly dissolved by a pool of green corrosive substance.
A massive hole had been blasted straight through his torso at chest level.
Even the Dragonslayer Star Breath Spear had suffered severe damage.
Within a fifty-kilometer radius around him…
Not even the slightest breeze remained.
His flesh was slowly dissolving from his body, dripping onto the ground.
Even the flesh that fell to the earth emitted wisps of white smoke, gradually corroding the surface beneath it.
Blood seeped from all seven of his facial orifices.
It was obvious that he had reached the end of his strength.
Bai Qiu took out every potion he had and poured them directly onto the gaping wound in his chest.
Instantly, his chest erupted violently, as though water had been poured into a vat of boiling oil.
“Urgh… AAAAAH!”
Even Bai Qiu, who had always been unyielding in the face of hardship, couldn’t suppress a scream under such unbearable agony.
Several thousand meters behind him, Guinelia’s vision had long since blurred with tears.
Yet the monster’s overwhelming aura left her completely frozen.
She couldn’t move.
She couldn’t even call out to him.
Like the final flicker of a candle in the wind, Bai Qiu looked toward the incoming pillar of destructive energy.
Suddenly— A crimson light burst from his body.
His figure vanished from where he stood.
In the next instant, Bai Qiu had already appeared near the monster’s chest.
Wrapped in that crimson radiance, he drove his spear toward its chest with all his might.
Despite the immense disparity in size, the monster visibly panicked.
It retreated in fear while simultaneously lowering several of its heads, using them as shields to block Bai Qiu’s attack.
BOOM!
Crimson light exploded outward.
One of the monster’s heads was blown apart by more than half.
But it had still managed to withstand Bai Qiu’s devastating strike.
The monster’s blood poured down like torrential rain.
Yet when that blood splashed onto Bai Qiu…
Clouds of white smoke immediately billowed upward.
Clearly, every drop of the creature’s flesh and blood was saturated with deadly poison.
Bathed in that rain of blood, Bai Qiu’s body was corroded away in an instant.
Powerless, he fell from the sky and was swallowed whole by the monster in a single bite.
“ROAR! ROAR! ROAR!”
The three remaining heads bellowed in unison.
The resulting shockwaves rippled across the lake in impossibly fine waves, shattering rocks and sending debris flying.
Even Guinelia, more than ten thousand meters away, saw her vision go black.
She lost consciousness.
………….
“Bai Qiu! That multi-headed monster’s weak point is its chest…”
After using his ticket, Bai Qiu was teleported to a massive harbor, where one enormous cruise ship after another was docked along the piers.
Bai Qiu quietly repeated Guinelia’s warning to himself.
While he had been ascending in the teleportation beam moments earlier, he had caught sight of her rushing toward him, tears streaming down her face.
But once the ticket had been activated, the teleportation process was beyond the power of any single person to stop.
Even so, he was certain Guinelia wouldn’t have become so distraught for no reason.
She must have been trying to tell him something of great importance.
“A multi-headed monster… whose weak point is its chest. Could it be a Hydra?”
Bai Qiu muttered to himself, firmly committing Guinelia’s words to memory.
His gaze drifted toward the deepest slot in his Storage Card, where that bottle of magic potion rested.
Could that potion really predict the future?
Looking up, he noticed that before boarding, everyone’s bodies were in a translucent, intangible state.
Any attack was completely meaningless.
Several players even walked straight through his body.
Bai Qiu found it rather astonishing, but at the same time couldn’t help praising the system for its foresight.
With such an overwhelming crowd of players gathered here, even a twenty-four-hour boarding window couldn’t guarantee that everyone would immediately find the correct ship.
Arguments and conflicts between players would have been inevitable.
Without safeguards, even a minor dispute could easily escalate into chaos—or a duel.
Bai Qiu looked down at his ticket and followed its guidance to Cruise Ship No. 00077.
His assigned room was No. 1145.
The entrance to the cruise ship was extraordinarily spacious, wide enough for a hundred people to walk through side by side.
The ship itself was equally immense, capable of accommodating ten thousand players while still providing generously sized rooms.
Bai Qiu’s cabin was located on the uppermost deck.
From the promenade on the deck, he only had to descend several hundred meters via the stairways to reach it.
Curious about the ship, Bai Qiu didn’t head straight to his room.
Instead, he made his way onto the open deck.
Quite a few other players had apparently had the same idea.
By the time he arrived, dozens of people were already standing there, enjoying the sea breeze.
Even with several dozen people present, the deck still felt incredibly spacious.
After choosing a spot, everyone remained four or five meters apart—some even several dozen meters from the nearest person.
There were also players of the same class chatting together.
Among the Lancers, besides Bai Qiu himself, there were another eight gathered on the deck.
What surprised Bai Qiu even more was that every player he had seen since boarding the deck was above Level 30.
Perhaps only those who were supremely confident in their own strength would dare stand openly on the deck like this.
As for those lacking confidence in their abilities, they would probably have hidden in their cabins the moment they boarded.
Keeping out of sight reduced the chances of provoking disputes—or becoming someone else’s target.
Indeed, Bai Qiu had praised the system a little too soon.
Once players boarded the cruise ship, the system’s intangible protection disappeared.
As a result, there was no shortage of players who had begun extorting “tolls” from passersby.
Some even resorted to murdering others outright to seize their resources.
Fortunately, things were relatively peaceful around Bai Qiu.
A group of would-be extortionists had chosen the wrong targets.
The people they tried to shake down responded by skewering them with a few swift thrusts of their spears, killing them on the spot before they even had a chance to flee.
— The end of the Chapter–
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