The giant worm had devoured and plundered the warehouse of a resource exchange point, two border mining sites, and swept through multiple high-value resource points in the creative park. On top of that, its powerful suction had pulled at least several hundred people alive into its ring-shaped maw, devouring them whole—flesh, bone, and all.
The amount of Rune Essence and strategic reserves it had plundered was simply incalculable.
Letting it get away would be a crippling loss.
BANG!
Just then, a high-armor-piercing Rune sniper bullet tore through the air, precisely piercing a weak segment of the giant worm’s underbelly. The resulting Flame Burst Damage ripped a gaping, bloody hole in its body.
A slurry of flesh and gore mixed with undigested bone fragments and scraps of armor gushed out, mingled with a large amount of faintly glowing Rune Essence.
"Grab it!"
In an instant, the assault faltered as more than twenty people broke from the front line, scrambling for the scattered spoils.
The Bloodthirsty Fungus had been dealing with humans for a while now and had accurately grasped this greedy side of their nature.
Soon, the giant worm, its regenerative abilities greatly diminished, suddenly swelled its gullet and violently spewed forth its contents in a wide arc. It was a shower of scarlet spores as thick as a bloody mist, mixed with numerous small vials of Rune Essence and a host of mineral crystals.
It was just like someone throwing money into a crowded marketplace.
Why did everyone risk their necks to kill the Bloodthirsty Fungus’s creations? Deep down, it was all for Rune Essence.
First come, first served.
Because of a single moment of greed, the tide of battle shifted, giving the giant worm a chance to breathe.
A Bear-man chimera, which could travel freely through the earth, even seized the opportunity to kill several people.
Su Chen paid it no mind. His gaze was locked on the figure of a goat-man several hundred meters away, who was now trying to retreat. Its pair of antelope horns was quite conspicuous. The creature had originally intended to use the chaos of the crowd to slip onto the battlefield.
Suddenly, it seemed to sense something. A premonition of danger made its figure vanish in an instant.
’Blink!’
As the Light Element equivalent of Shadow Leap, the goat-man used it to warp away, instantly clearing the city wall. It had no choice but to flee deep into the forest.
Compared to the convenience of escaping by burrowing into the earth, this figure who had inherited the Authority of the Light Erosion Warlock looked rather pathetic, forced to flee by flickering between light and shadow.
Su Chen gave chase, using his Shadow Jumping Skill to stay right on its tail.
The annoying part was that his opponent not only had at least Lv6 Shadow Leap and Blink, but also light-and-shadow-based concealment abilities like the Invisibility Skill and Optical Camouflage.
But it didn’t matter. Under his Elemental Resonance, the forest itself served as his eyes and ears, and the Wind Fluff acted as messengers, relaying the flow of his opponent’s aura.
The light and shadows of the woods were guided by his will. The dappled light on the forest floor no longer flickered randomly, instead invisibly capturing the residual elemental embers his opponent left behind.
Su Chen was exceedingly patient in this game of cat and mouse.
「Thirteen minutes later.」
For some reason, his opponent’s aura weakened and its pace slowed, as if it no longer had the strength to continue fleeing.
SWOOSH!
An orb of Shadow, suffused with a corrosive aura, suddenly shot out from behind a tree.
With a flick of his wrist, Su Chen brought his Holy Sword up to block. A watery ripple of light flowed across the blade, perfectly deflecting the orb. He imbued it with the sheen of Sun Flame, sending it flying back even faster than it had come.
The goat-man’s pupils shrank. In its haste, it had no choice but to activate a holy shield.
But the sacred shield, glowing with incandescent white light, shattered in an instant. The orb, its power undiminished, slammed into the creature’s chest, collapsing its ribcage. Its wrecked body was sent flying back, snapping an ancient tree in two.
That wasn’t all. Su Chen followed through with a forward swing of his Holy Sword. A three-meter-long beam of Divine Sword Radiance shot from the blade, wreathed in Sun Flame. It carved an incandescent white arc through the air and viciously severed his opponent’s neck.
"Any last words."
Su Chen looked down at his foe. With a mere thought, he forcibly extracted a small, umbrella-shaped, emerald-green Lingzhi from its mangled chest.
The Bloodthirsty Fungus, as if accepting its fate, offered no resistance.
Compared to the two massive Jade Lingzhi he had intercepted before, this one was pathetically small. It seemed the enemy was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
"...Impossible."
"Absolutely impossible."
The goat head, which had rolled onto the ground, forced its jaw open. A hideous, fleshy maw extended out from its mouth.
A hoarse, feeble voice squeezed out from it. "Your physical strength is all wrong. That’s not a level a follower of the Elements should have. I understand now. Did you hear Its mad whispers? Or did you glimpse the legacy of the previous epoch’s civilization?
"Hahaha...
"That has to be it. You must have glimpsed this Power in the fissure caves.
"But the price for that Power is too heavy—far too much to bear in this era. You’re going to die! Hahaha! I don’t even need to lift a finger. It won’t even take a day... no... give it two days. If you aren’t dead by then, you’ll have gone insane."
The Bloodthirsty Fungus had suddenly thrown out a whole cloud of confusing information.
By the end, it was laughing with gleeful malice, but its presence grew ever fainter, as if it would breathe its last in the next second.
Su Chen remained cold and silent, quietly processing this unexpected information.
"...So tired."
"The price... is too high... The constant buzzing in my mind is deafening..."
After leaving these last, thread-like words, the Bloodthirsty Fungus’s entire consciousness node was completely annihilated and vanished.
But that wasn’t all.
Beyond Su Chen’s line of sight, unable to replenish its plundered reserves of Life Energy, its entire distributed consciousness network began to collapse.
Across Dongfu City, the flesh-and-blood creations still fighting and plundering began to go offline and shut down on a massive scale.
A werewolf just about to pounce on a large warehouse under the Resource Coordination Department suddenly went limp and collapsed to the ground with a heavy thud.

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