This meant he wouldn’t accidentally crush an egg just by holding it.
"Thanks."
Su Chen looked at the table piled high with supplies and naturally understood that the cost had exceeded his original budget.
Not to mention, this bottle of body-forging Potion wasn’t cheap. For comparison, a Lv4 Rune cost 24 essences plus one portion of Spiritual Materials.
Seeing this,
Su Chen gestured, and an invisible Mage’s hand reached out across more than twenty meters and through the body of the vehicle, precisely retrieving two Runes from his canvas backpack.
One was a Lv5 Wood Escape Skill.
The other was a Lv4 Entanglement Skill.
"Take these. Consider Ruoruo’s share paid for."
Su Chen didn’t beat around the bush. "Beyond my payment," he said frankly, "consider the rest compensation for your trouble."
He could tell that some members of the Jingcheng University team were in low spirits. After the change in their personal circumstances, they were somewhat reluctant to return to the campsite.
If not for their relationship with the Yan siblings, they probably wouldn’t have come at all.
As for the extra compensation, they could consider it a partnership fee or simply reimbursement for their travel expenses—it was up to them.
"Just take good care of Ruoruo." Yan Ziqian fell silent for a moment, unable to hide the disappointment in his voice. He had noticed the signs between the two of them as soon as he arrived.
They weren’t overtly affectionate, but certain details in their body language and the way they looked at each other had already told him everything he needed to know.
Ruoruo was an adult, and he respected her choice. But if his biological sister had been in a normal state of mind when she made this decision, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt so dejected.
In the middle of an apocalypse, romantic vows of eternal love were simply unrealistic. And undeniably, Su Chen’s character was decent, their values aligned, and in terms of strength, it was impossible to find a single fault. He was, without a doubt, a top-tier choice.
"By the way, there’s something else important. Extending from the southern end of Dongfu City all the way to the horizon, you can see the outline of another city," Yan Ziqian shared this secret.
As the two spoke, Ruoruo’s best friend, Zhou Tong, who was also a medical student, came closer. She clearly had a lot she wanted to say.
Seeing this, Su Chen decided to give the two of them some space to talk.
Before long, he learned a great deal of officially unreleased information about classes from his ’brother-in-law’.
There were more than just three conventional Two-Star Wood Element classes.
There was the ’Nature Apostle’, a flexible and versatile class focused on individual Transformation Skills;
upon obtaining a High-Level Life Absorption Rune, one could unlock the ’Life Warlock’;
and for those with a certain degree of archery proficiency, one could unlock the ’Jungle Shooter’, a class that excelled at both crowd control and burst damage.
Even after choosing the same class, huge divergences would appear depending on the chosen specialization branch.
Pang Peng, as a Nature Apostle, focused on transforming into a giant bear, following a tank build. Others chose to put points into the giant eagle transformation to enhance their aerial assault capabilities.
The Life Warlock, meanwhile, had ’Healing’ and ’Wither’ branches. By treating the small spiritual tree as a class skill tree, one could feed it Spiritual Materials to specialize in a personal build.
’The Grand Elemental Master hasn’t shown any signs of having specializations yet.’ Su Chen thought about it and figured it was normal. ’It’s a hidden class built upon all ten Elements, so it’s unlikely to have branches or a specific focus right from the start.’
On the contrary, both his first and second Core Authorities allowed him to flexibly change their bound sequences daily.
’Of course, if specializations did appear, it would be simple enough.
’As long as I have enough Spiritual Materials, I can just choose to have it all.’
"The reason we could deal with the modified humans at first was because their weakness is their very Life Energy," Yan Ziqian explained in detail.
In a way, he had discovered this by a strange twist of fate. His decision to choose the Life Warlock class over Jungle Shooter was not entirely unrelated to his hope of saving his sister.
"The Bloodthirsty Fungus’s modified bodies and chimeras are all imperfect creations, forcibly cultivated by overdrawing their vitality," Yan Ziqian added. "As long as you continuously drain and reduce their Life Energy, you can trigger a total collapse of their flesh and blood."
Of course, the chimeras weren’t as easy to deal with as they sounded. During their assault on the main nest, they hadn’t encountered a fully-hatched human-beast chimera that possessed a Lv7 Rune.
The sheer scale of their forces and the element of surprise had masked many of their deficiencies in individual combat.
Su Chen, however, understood this point perfectly.
"Thanks."
He naturally appreciated the other man’s goodwill.
He was certain the Bloodthirsty Fungus wasn’t making an empty threat; he would definitely run into one of those things today.
In fact, it no longer had a choice.
The extreme temperature swings had already destroyed its environment. The fungal spores on the surface were rapidly deactivating, to the point where they surely couldn’t even form a mushroom cap. As for the sub-nests of the main nest, each one lost was a permanent loss.
Yan Ziqian said, "Early this morning, some Nature Apostles from the combat division braved the cold to scout out the main nest. According to their judgment, the four remaining surface nests couldn’t possibly have survived last night’s extreme cold."
"Not just them—the ordinary flesh-and-blood Parasite Bodies, the parasitized insects, and some of the weaker modified bodies are also unlikely to have survived, unless they were hiding inside that giant worm’s belly."
The -82°C record from last night was just what Su Chen had observed. The actual low point in the dead of night had even approached -96°C.
Putting all the information together, it seemed that besides the human-beast chimeras and the clueless giant "porter" worm, it was indeed difficult for any of the Bloodthirsty Fungus’s other units to have survived.
Regarding this idea, Yu Ziyuan, who was providing the professional analysis, was even more optimistic.
The underground mycelial network needed to accumulate sufficient nutrients and be in a suitable environment to form a mushroom. The mushroom body, acting as a reproductive organ, would then disperse its spores as widely as possible.

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