Chapter 92: Red Ling’s Crisis

“Why, are you questioning my ability?”

Noticing the expression on Han Ke’s face, the woman in the raincoat turned cold and said sharply, “Want me to test its power on you?”

“No, no, of course not...” Han Ke hurriedly replied with a placating smile. Yet inwardly he felt a trace of contempt. Clearly, both of them were somewhat arrogant, far too confident in their own supernatural abilities.

“You’re still not leaving?”

Han Ke was roused by the voice. Turning back, he realized that the two of them had already reached the doorway and were now looking at him impatiently.

“Oh, I’m going right now.”

As he spoke, Han Ke moved toward the door as well. But just before stepping out, hesitation flashed across his face. After a moment’s thought, he took two large buckets of gasoline from his inventory and quickly splashed every last drop across the room.

Inside the secret chamber, Hong Ling’s heart jolted at the sight, and a bad premonition rose in her chest.

“You really are careful,” the explosion man said with a strange look on his face. Then he split into a grin. “But I like it!”

As he spoke, he reached out and grabbed the doorknob of the room opposite 601. With a slight twist of his wrist, he ripped the entire metal handle off at once.

“Hahaha! Explosion is an art!”

Amid the explosion man’s ferocious laughter, he casually hurled the handle into the room.

Boom!

A deafening roar followed. Under the force of the explosion man’s ability, combined with two full buckets of gasoline, a chain reaction was triggered, and the entire sixth floor erupted in violent explosions.

Even the whole floor seemed to heave as though struck by an earthquake, making Hong Ling deeply fear that the building might collapse right then and there.

The surveillance screen not far away had already been drenched in firelight and soon turned into a field of static, clearly meaning the camera inside the room had been destroyed.

Hong Ling could not see anything outside, but even by imagining it, she could guess what the scene out there must be like.

There was no need to say it: everything had surely become a sea of fire.

And she was trapped inside this sealed space, where most of the materials were metal. What would happen next was obvious enough.

In her mind, she cursed Han Ke and his entire ancestry to the eighteenth generation. Damn it, I never did anything to you. What the hell is wrong with you, having nothing better to do than go after me?

Sure enough, before long, the entire room became like a steamer. The temperature rose sharply and quickly surpassed the limits the human body could bear.

Hong Ling only felt sweat pouring from her entire body, yet even so, it still could not lower her temperature. It seemed as though the moisture within her body had been drawn out in an instant. Very soon, her face went pale and her lips cracked.

“This is bad. This really is terrible. At this rate I’m going to be roasted red...”

She hurriedly grabbed a bottle of mineral water from the provisions stored nearby, unscrewed it, and poured the water over herself.

“Ah!”

But the water inside had already turned scalding hot. Instead of lowering the temperature, the splash made Hong Ling cry out in pain.

She quickly covered her body with magic, and threads of cool blue light flowed across her skin, greatly resisting the invasion of the heat. Only then did she feel somewhat better. But her magic was limited, and using it like this would exhaust it very quickly. What would she do then?

Open the door and rush out now?

Impossible. Not to mention that the three of them might still be waiting outside, she was only an ordinary human at the moment. Once she opened the door, she would not even need those people to lay a hand on her; the fire surging in would turn her into charcoal on the spot.

What was worse, the shock from the earlier massive explosion had actually split the secret chamber door open by a crack.

Though it was only a tiny fissure, so small that it was nearly impossible to notice from outside, it was still a gap. Thick smoke had been pouring in since a moment ago, and by now the entire room was almost completely swallowed by black smoke.

Under the intense heat, Hong Ling was coughing nonstop.

She hurriedly tore off a strip of cloth from her clothes and covered her mouth and nose. At the same time, she lay flat on the floor, trying to breathe in the layer of fresher air near the ground. But that could only buy her a brief reprieve.

Soon, as more and more smoke filled the enclosed space, the temperature climbed even higher, and the remaining magic in Hong Ling’s body was about to be completely drained.

Hong Ling only felt her consciousness blur.

Vaguely, just like the time when she had nearly fallen from the broken bridge, she seemed to see Death once again waving at her from the darkness.

“...Is it really going to end like this?”

Feeling her life force draining away at terrifying speed, Hong Ling could not help letting out a sigh, her eyes growing wet. Yet under such searing heat, her tears had no chance to fall before they were already evaporated dry.

Inside the secret chamber, the food stored earlier had already begun to catch fire. That only made Hong Ling’s situation even worse.

“...In the end, is it still going to be such a miserable... ending...?”

Murmuring under her breath, Hong Ling was already on the verge of losing consciousness. Images from before her death began to surface one after another in her mind: flower-covered stages, bright lights, wine and neon, all flickering before her eyes like a revolving lantern. Those scenes were blurred and distorted, and in the end they gradually took the shape of a face.

It was Kong Zhe’s face.

She had never expected that at the very last moment, the one she would think of would still be him... Hong Ling stared blankly at that face. On that refined countenance, a pair of black eyes shone like obsidian under lamplight, brilliant and deep, as if they could see through everything.

“If it were you... at a time like this... what would you do...”

Kong Zhe slashed down with his sword and killed a level-one fishman, then rose from the snow and looked into the distance with some doubt.

For some reason, just now he had suddenly felt a pang in his chest, as if someone in that direction had been calling to him. But that strange sensation vanished in an instant.

An illusion, perhaps...

He shook his head, amused by his own reaction. Maybe the journey had been so dangerous these past few days that he had grown too tense, to the point of imagining things.

It had now been two days since he subdued the nine-headed hydra. Over those two days, because the giant serpent had been clearing the way ahead of them, the journey had gone astonishingly smoothly.

Kong Zhe and the three women simply rode on the hydra’s back, not even needing to walk.

To be honest, Kong Zhe had never expected the trip to be this smooth. He had thought this would be a road fraught with danger at every step, yet it had turned out to be so peaceful that he almost let his guard down without meaning to.

Of course, it was not without drawbacks.

The most obvious was that the hydra he had subdued moved at an excruciatingly slow pace, and its speed in the snow was even lower than on level ground.

Though they could now head straight toward the new district instead of taking the long detour they would have needed before, the hydra’s turtle-like pace meant they were not much faster than they had been originally. Still, their safety had indeed been firmly guaranteed.

The second drawback, and the one that gave Kong Zhe the most headaches, was the hydra’s overwhelming oppressive aura. So strong was it that every monster, upon catching sight of it from far away, would immediately flee. That made it very difficult for Kong Zhe to hunt monsters. Only when he occasionally encountered one that reacted a beat too slowly could he pick up an easy kill.

Thus, over these past few days, the number of monsters he had slain had clearly decreased.

A large portion of his experience had originally been divided with the tarot cards, and this was the early stage of the apocalypse, when awakeners were leveling up very quickly. At times like this, experience was the most valuable thing of all.

So, with no other choice, in order to ensure he could kill enough monsters and not fall far behind in level during the early stage, he had to stay alone at the edge of the hydra’s oppressive range while traveling, hunting monsters all the while.

At that spot, he was nearly a hundred meters from the hydra. The monsters were affected far less there, and with Kong Zhe deliberately drawing them in, they generally did not run away when they appeared. Instead, they would charge at him as they always had, shouting and screaming all the way.

Only by using this method had he barely managed to maintain his experience gain. Although the experience bonus had been greatly diminished because his stored experience had grown too high, at least he was still gaining some. After these two days of hunting, he was already very close to his ten-thousand-point goal.

“Help!”

At that moment, a faint cry for help came from the distance.

Kong Zhe turned his head in that direction. Far away, a thin figure was running wildly toward him, while behind that figure trailed a vast, dark mass of rats.

Yang Fang felt as though she had been unbelievably unlucky.

She had once been a university teacher. When the apocalypse broke out, she survived only because she and her students hid in a classroom, and by good fortune she awakened on the third day of the apocalypse.

Later, because so many people gathered at the school, a small safe zone was formed, and monsters were unable to enter. That finally allowed the teachers and students to breathe a sigh of relief.

But although their safety was temporarily secured, another major problem soon followed: food.

With over a thousand students, the supplies stored in the cafeteria were simply nowhere near enough to distribute.

Though there were also many people among them who had awakened like she had, most of those awakened individuals had gone off in small groups within the first two days. Only a handful remained.

As a teacher, she truly could not bear to see her students go hungry. So during these past few days, she had been searching for food around the school.

Because all the nearby food had already been scavenged clean, today she had no choice but to run to a supermarket some distance away from the school.

Fortunately, that supermarket had not yet been visited. Its shelves were still well stocked, and there was plenty of food inside. Very quickly, she gathered several large bags of supplies.

But today, something unexpected happened.

On the way back, she ran into a swarm of rats.

These rats were nothing like the harmless ones that had existed on Earth before the apocalypse. They were huge, the largest even reaching the size of a domestic cat. Their mouths were lined with sharp teeth, and the short fur they once had had turned into stiff bristles.

A single one of them would not have frightened her, since they were only level zero.

But this was a whole swarm, more than a thousand rats in pursuit of her.

They ate anything and everything, and wherever they passed, it was like a locust plague. Even powerful creatures would be reduced to a skeleton in an instant.