Chapter 95: Samadhi (Part II)

Could Kongzhe have misread the star rating of the card?

He let out a sigh and dismissed that possibility. In the New World, the rule had always been simple: the more resources you invested, the greater the return. In skill gear, this was especially true. If this card required such a massive amount of experience, then by rights it should not have been this weak.

Could it be that he still hadn’t truly understood the card’s potential?

Then he noticed one line in the card description: “Base Skill.” The word “base” was used so subtly. If it was only a base form, could there be advanced stages later?

Kongzhe could not be certain, but he found himself believing it.

No matter what, he had already traded for it. If this card held further abilities to develop, he could investigate them slowly later. For now…

Kongzhe lifted his gaze and looked again at the restless swarm of bristle-mice outside the ring. With a group attack skill, farming experience from these creatures could increase by several times.

And right then he had just spent all the saved experience; his experience gauge was empty. He would no longer suffer any experience loss penalty. Facing so much readily available experience, this was the best time to farm. If he didn’t make the most of it, he would be wasting the skill he had just learned.

At the front line, Tuan Tuan was still fighting. After two days of hard honing, her monster-killing technique had become even more mature, and her use of her own power was nearing consummate mastery. In these days they had been traveling on the Great Serpent, but whenever Kongzhe went into battle, she always followed.

Though Kongzhe had told her more than once that her technique was already good, she could not gain experience and therefore no amount of monster slaying would level her up.

Still, she remained unsatisfied. After each battle, when she wanted a round of praise, Xue Feifei and Kongzhe would play along, but the Angel Saintess was always the one to douse her spirit. She would point out endless mistakes and leave her feeling utterly worthless.

This left Tuan Tuan seething. Each time she vowed to do her best next time so the Saintess could not find fault with her. But what could she say then? Hmph.

With that thought, Tuan Tuan felt driven by stubborn resolve, as if winning Xue Feifei’s approval had become a meaningful and formidable challenge.

When to hold back and when to release power, how long to maintain it—she kept hammering these basics over and over until they were almost instinctive.

In truth, driven by spite as she was, she did not realize that it was Xue Feifei’s constant urging that had quietly but continuously raised her strength despite the absence of leveling.

Tuan Tuan caught sight of Kongzhe returning from the battlefield in her peripheral vision. Her heart leapt—she was ready to compare who could kill faster. Kongzhe had usually been slightly quicker than her, but at this moment she was in top form. Perhaps she might beat him this time.

Yet when she looked full-on at Kongzhe, her mouth fell open at what she saw.

From a distance, Kongzhe’s whole body was wrapped in flame. Unlike her blue fire, his was red, and every movement left behind elegant trails of fire that looked dazzlingly cool. And then there was the way he attacked.

Wielding the Apocalypse Sword, also wrapped in flame, Kongzhe moved like someone who had been given an unfair advantage. One swing, and entire clumps of rats fell dead.

He stood there with his mouth open, forgetting to strike. Fortunately, with the Great Serpent’s pressure and her own high-rank presence, the rats at her feet dared not attack—otherwise that single lapse would have been fatal.

“Hey, hey—what are you doing?”

A worried voice came from behind. Xue Feifei, at last, snapped her out of it.

She turned to see Xue Feifei, face tight with annoyance, pointing at her. “Can you focus? You dare to distract yourself in the middle of battle? Don’t you value your life?”

“I hear you, I hear you. You’re such a stickler,” Tuan Tuan muttered. She knew the situation had truly been dangerous. No wonder the Angel Saintess had been so anxious.

Coming back from the shock of Kongzhe’s display, Tuan Tuan plunged back into her own fighting. This time, she pulled a face and gave up any thought of competing with him.

Could a person truly do that? Impossible! No, absolutely not. She didn’t need to measure herself against a madman.

Though she told herself so, her eyes still drifted toward Kongzhe, and she began handling the monsters before her perfunctorily. Her farming efficiency dropped at once.

Kongzhe did not know Tuan Tuan’s thoughts. Immersed in the thrill of a slaughter spree, he had now truly activated “Samadhi,” and indeed it was different from merely reading the description.

When the skill was in use, his body, as now, would erupt in a fierce halo of flame.

More importantly, he could control those flames as he wished. Whether shaping them or fastening them to any part of his body, he did so as he pleased.

A moment ago he had estimated that attaching flames to his weapon had increased his attack by around fifteen percent. That value could fluctuate; the more flames attached, the larger the increase. There was, of course, a cap: at most it could reach forty percent. Beyond that it would not rise—not because of the system limit, but because with Kongzhe’s current abilities he could not attach any more.

Perhaps with greater mastery, it might rise a little later.

That was not the main point. Most important was that this skill cost very little mana, unlike the water-wave and space cards with their high mana costs. Even counting the fifteen percent fire-bonded attack bonus, maintaining it for a minute would consume less than ten mana. That single factor made the skill vastly more practical.

Taking advantage of the wide field of targets ahead, Kongzhe used this chance to refine his handling of the skill.

With a light shake of his hand, all the flames on his body surged toward the sword he held. In an instant, the Apocalypse Sword turned a full furnace-red.

When the shimmering, multicolored blade struck a rat, it hissed, searing the animal’s fur with extreme heat, then easily cut through its flesh and split it in two.

At the same time, it was as if many tiny invisible swords of flame surrounded the blade and slashed every bristle-mouse within a meter of Kongzhe at once.

Though this splash damage was lower than Kongzhe’s own body damage, it was still about half as strong, and with Samadhi’s flame bonus it was enough that these zero-level creatures could not withstand it. A single sweep could easily annihilate swaths of rats.

The fire on the hilt burned at an extreme temperature, yet Kongzhe felt nothing. Even when flames coated his whole body, he only sensed a faint current of air moving across him.

Samadhi seemed made precisely for him, allowing him to fully apply the swordsmanship he had refined in his former life. That made Kongzhe deeply thrilled. Much of his earlier frustration at awakening this card vanished.

Under his frenzied massacre, he soon cleared a true vacuum around him. Gold and silver coins lay scattered across the ground, with a few white pieces of equipment among them, though Kongzhe had no time to pick any of it up.

The nearby rats were exterminated. The survivors, seeing his method of slaughter, felt instinctive terror despite their lack of intellect, and for a while none dared to attack him.

Kongzhe frowned at that—had the rats truly become afraid of him?

He shook his head. A leveling opportunity this good would not come easily, and he had no intention of holding back. Since the rats did not dare to attack him, Kongzhe stepped out of the Nine-Headed Serpent’s pressure zone and charged straight into the horde.

Sure enough, once he moved beyond the safety circle, the rats seemed to forget their fear and rushed toward him in a blind stampede.

Kongzhe’s lips curled. He wielded the fiery Apocalypse Sword in a blur, and in moments of flame and gore, flesh flew in every direction.

Every mouse that came close died. Not one reached him.

If it had been earlier, he would never have done this. But with the crowd-kill skill, even if he stayed inside the swarm, he now had confidence in his own safety—as long as his mana held.

The rats near him had already gained a trace of fear, but those farther back, ignorant of that panic, continued rushing forward recklessly.

As Kongzhe kept hunting, time passed.

Tuan Tuan had already exhausted her mana and had retreated into the safety zone to rest. From there, looking at the figure in the distance nearly buried in the rat heap, she could not help but mutter inside that he was truly outrageous.

“Hey, is he all right? Should someone go help him?”

Yang Fang watched the lone fighter in the distance, her eyes flickering. She had tried to overestimate this young man, but his strength turned out to be far beyond what she had imagined.

If the End Times were a game, then for her and many others it was a death game. Only someone like him could call it a casual game. Watching him stroll through the rat swarm, cutting down whole groups with a casual swing, Yang Fang felt a wave of envy. If she had such combat power, her students would never have to go hungry.