Chapter 553 Double Kill and Re-evolution

Those selected by the ritual and pulled into the secret realm were all veteran adventurers who had already attained a Class Level.

Having honed themselves in this highly dangerous profession for years, none of them were fools.

In fact, much like Xia Nan upon his initial descent, quite a few adventurers guessed that the ritual had likely been set up by "Algae Scale" Dodd.

Fink was one of them.

As the deputy captain of the Windforged Squad, right before being swept into the ritual, he and his captain, Zephyr, had been on the coast facing off against those damned bastards from the Raging Tide Warband.

They had even braced for battle, only for a pillar of light to shoot into the sky from the center of the island, bringing down a curtain of light.

He and several teammates were simultaneously pulled into the secret realm.

He wasn't sure whether to call it good luck, but the beast Fink possessed upon his descent belonged to the category of "monster."

—An Ulcer-Melting Poison Toad.

He could name this creature because many years ago, right after obtaining his Class Level, he and his teammates at the time had accidentally stumbled into a swamp teeming with them during a mission.

The result was that out of a six-man squad, only two members made it back to the tavern alive.

One of them was him, and the other was the current captain of the Windforged, Zephyr.

As a monster, the Ulcer-Melting Poison Toad's official Challenge Rating in the bestiary was exactly Level 1.

It was on the same tier as the Bugbear, harpy, and Dire Wolf.

But obviously, as just a slightly larger toad, the Ulcer-Melting Poison Toad lacked the formidable physical attributes of those monsters.

What truly made adventurers fear it was its highly corrosive venom—a lethal toxin that, upon contact, could send a healthy adult human to the afterlife in a single breath.

Going from a veteran adventurer to an ugly, relatively weak toad left Fink in a mood hard to describe with words.

Fortunately, the frozen human perspective he observed upon focusing his attention quickly made him realize this was likely temporary.

As long as this large-scale ritual—presumably set up by Algae Scale—ended and the secret realm collapsed, he would return to his human body.

Having figured this out, Fink began to act, just like the hundred other professional adventurers swept into the ritual.

Due to differences in upbringing, background, and capability, the ritual participants took distinctly different approaches after descending.

A few focused on familiarizing themselves with their surroundings and eliminating dangers, while others invested time and energy into their beast bodies to improve their combat and survival abilities.

Fink leaned toward finding his teammates, seeking to gather his squad as quickly as possible to capitalize on their numerical advantage.

His luck was indeed quite good.

Less than a week after familiarizing himself with the area, he stumbled upon the first adventurer he had encountered in the secret realm by pure coincidence, right near his descent location.

—A giant honey badger brawling with a jungle leopard twice its size.

As for how he determined it was also possessed by an adventurer rather than an ordinary beast—that wasn't difficult for the vast majority of those pulled into the ritual.

With just a little observation, one could sense the disjointedness of a human soul driving a beast's body.

Fink stepped in to help the honey badger, turning the jungle leopard into their dinner for the day.

His proactive intervention clearly broadcasted his own identity as a ritual participant.

At the time, neither Fink nor the honey badger adventurer had yet discovered the ritual's mechanism of evolving through killing.

Otherwise, their first contact would have undoubtedly been far more cautious.

Regardless, after this battle, the two had essentially connected.

Then came the most critical and troublesome issue: how to communicate?

Perhaps higher-tier monsters, or special species like the worg, possessed throat structures capable of speech.

But obviously, a toad and a honey badger certainly couldn't speak.

The two could only communicate by writing.

After mutually verifying a few secret codes known only to Windforged Squad members, Fink was pleasantly surprised to confirm the other party's identity—the Rogue, Leslie!

He was also a core member of the Windforged professional squad.

Belonging to the same adventurer squad and having verified each other's identities, their cooperation became a matter of course.

With their formulated plan making gradual progress, Fink felt his actions had been the right choice.

After carefully searching the area near their descent points and ensuring no clues were left behind, Fink the Poison Toad and Leslie the honey badger embarked on a journey to find their teammates.

However, perhaps because the group had all been on the same coast in the real world, before finding any teammates, they first stumbled upon the wooden board engraved with the Raging Tide Warband emblem that Xia Nan had seen earlier.

Divorced from the real world and no longer constrained by external factors, given the animosity between the Raging Tide Warband and the Windforged, the subsequent development went without saying.

Using his rich adventuring experience to confirm that the creature the other party possessed was an ordinary goblin, and that there were no elite individuals in the tribe...

Fink brought Leslie, who acted as his temporary mount, and entered the goblin burrow—one noticeably cleaner than a typical nest.

With a single glance, they spotted the bizarre Goblin wearing clothes woven from bark and leaves.

Facing the honey badger's powerful physical attributes, which far exceeded those of a normal goblin, alongside the toad's venom, the battle was practically bereft of suspense.

The green-skinned Goblin—the incarnation of the Raging Tide Warband adventurer—had its neck snapped with a single bite.

But the very second it died, a familiar fluorescent blue light surged from its body and was drawn into Leslie the honey badger.

Finding his body seemingly undergoing reinforcement, Leslie informed Fink through writing.

Realizing that this might be the secret realm ritual's mechanism, Fink made a prompt decision, instructing Leslie to drag the corpse out of the burrow and leave the area immediately, lest the bloody scent of the kill attract other forest predators.

But just as they crawled out of the burrow, the Ulcer-Melting Poison Toad's monster-level Perception attribute made him detect a prying gaze from directly above.

"Sizzle!"

Venom shot out.

It pierced and corroded through the leaves and branches.

A black wolf with a pitch-black coat rarely seen in the forest landed gracefully on the ground from the canopy.

Looking at the calm brilliance in those golden wolf eyes—a look no beast would possess—Fink's heart suddenly tightened.

'An adventurer!'

He let out a loud frog croak, alerting Leslie beneath him.

At the same time, the honey badger, realizing the other party's identity, swiftly swiped its claws across the soft earth as if it had practiced the motion countless times.

In just a few seconds, it drew a crude yet recognizable Windforged emblem to distinguish friend from foe.

One could clearly see that the instant the emblem appeared on the ground, the black wolf's gaze involuntarily hardened. Then, its body suddenly relaxed, and the hostility and vigilance filling its eyes seemed to dissipate.

'It looks like... a teammate?'

Fink thought, though he still felt an inexplicable sense of strangeness.

Meanwhile, Leslie the honey badger beneath him didn't think too deeply. Seeing the black wolf react to the emblem, he assumed it was a Windforged teammate.

He had just taken a step forward when a frog croak from his back halted him.

"Croak!"

The drum-like, resonant croak made Leslie subconsciously pause.

But the black wolf ahead seemed completely unaffected, approaching them with light steps just as before.

'Something isn't right!'

'This black wolf is very wrong!'

Fink was just considering using written words to further verify the other's identity when a high-pitched wolf howl abruptly rang out from ahead—a sound that didn't seem produced by flesh and blood, but rather formed by surging gales.

Clinging to the back of the honey badger's head, he couldn't clearly see the full scene ahead.

Yet he still caught sight of that pitch-black energy tearing through the meadow like a scythe, as well as the blurry Wolf Head rapidly taking shape in the air.

Driven by the biological instincts of the Ulcer-Melting Poison Toad, a fatal sense of peril subconsciously erupted in his heart, making his body tremble uncontrollably.

Without even enough time to warn his teammate, his two powerful toad legs kicked hard off the honey badger's back.

Using his teammate's body for leverage, his dark purple, pustule-covered body flew backward.

Because he acted in haste, Fink failed to carefully control his exertion of force.

Leslie the honey badger was stomped straight to the ground, while Fink himself momentarily lost his center of gravity due to overexertion.

He flipped almost three hundred and sixty degrees in the air before landing on the ground in an incredibly miserable posture.

"Buzz-Boom—"

Accompanied by the high-frequency hum of energy, an ochre-red light flashed fleetingly through the forest.

Fink raised his head, his gaze subconsciously turning toward the source of the sound.

Leslie the honey badger was still in the prone posture from being kicked to the ground.

Having just been infused with the blue fluorescence, he hadn't yet had time to complete his life-level evolution; one could still see the muscles writhing and expanding beneath his fur.

However, that body—far more robust than others of its kind—had already lost the ability to move freely, stiffening and convulsing.

Blood, mixed with the thick white fluid from inside its skull, flowed slowly across the meadow.

A wolf's claw pressed onto the honey badger's head.

Or rather, pressed onto where the honey badger's head should have been.

That ochre-red light from just a moment ago had erupted and exploded right there.

And the result was a headless beast corpse.

'Why?'

'What is this!?'

'Did he descend into the body of a high-tier monster?'

'No! I've never even heard of a wolf-type monster that can manipulate forcefield energy!'

'And that movement speed just now was absolutely not something an ordinary beast could possess.'

'So... is it a combat technique?'

'How is that possible!?'

'I've clearly tried many times before. Real-world combat techniques can't be used in the ritual at all, but—'

"Whoosh—"

A cold wind suddenly sweeping through the forest brought Fink's chaotic thoughts to an instant halt.

Not far away, the shadow-like black wolf cast its golden eyes toward the purple-skinned toad in the woodland.

This was their second time locking eyes.

Barely thirty seconds had passed in between, yet the situation on the field had completely reversed.

Feeling the indescribable killing intent ahead, which was even more piercing than the cold winds of deep winter, Fink opened his mouth wide toward Xia Nan from afar as a stress response. On the ugly, wrinkled skin of his back, pustules emptied one after another, transforming into lethal venom that gathered in his throat sac.

But before he could fire, right during his brief accumulation of power...

"Crack."

A faint sound of fluttering wings came from above his head.

A petite brown silhouette could be glimpsed flying through the woods.

Flitting from one side of the treetops to the other, it didn't pause.

It merely dropped a small broken branch, still thick with lush leaves, from the air.

Fink was at the critical moment of channeling his strength and had no time to dodge.

And in reality, given the weight a brown sparrow could carry, this branch wasn't enough to interrupt his channeling process.

It only caused the dense, lush leaves to block the toad's line of sight.

"Sizzle!"

The next second, the corrosive venom, compressed like a high-pressure water gun, shot out in a thin stream.

But what closely followed was not the agonizing howl of the wolf beast being struck that Fink had imagined.

Instead, it was a high-pitched, drawn-out wolf howl that had already circled to his flank.

With a buzzing boom, the ochre-red light erupted in the forest once again.

Only this time, it genuinely landed on his own body.

Fink didn't even feel any pain.

His vision simply went black, and he completely lost consciousness.

In the real world, following the fall of the Raging Tide Warband adventurer who had possessed the goblin, two adventurers in the Windforged squad also lost the blue light wrapping around them one after another, floating down slowly from their suspended state with bloodless faces.

Confirming that the other party hadn't lied about their identity and that he hadn't killed the wrong target, Xia Nan withdrew his attention from his human body in the real world.

His Wolf's Maw slightly open, he raised his head while panting, his gaze turning toward the treetops overhead.

There, a brown-feathered sparrow barely the size of a palm was quietly looking at him, its tiny claws gripping the branch.

There was no hostility in those avian eyes, which clearly gleamed with human intelligence.

Xia Nan wanted to speak, but only let out a low howl unique to wolves.

Realizing that he currently lacked the ability to speak, and wanting to confirm the other's identity, he pondered how to communicate further.

From the mangled corpses of the purple toad and the honey badger in front of and behind him, two streaks of fluorescent blue light floated up, pouring into his body.

Before his eyes, the characters symbolizing the Attribute Panel flashed by rapidly.

"[Proficiency +2]"

"[[Gravity Control] lv1 (50/100) -> [Gravity Control] lv1 (52/100)]"

"[Acquiring partial life essence. Life tier elevating...]"

"[Perception attribute has mutated! Current Perception: 10...]"

"[Wolf Head evolution complete! Reshaped: [Wolf's Maw]]"

The attribute characters representing advancement scrolled rapidly before his eyes.

And along with them came an astringent sensation welling up from deep within his eyes, as well as an indescribable, agonizing pain at the crown of his skull, as if something had been suddenly burst open.

"Grrr..."

A low, pain-filled growl echoed from deep within his throat as Xia Nan forced himself to stay standing.

But even so, the excruciating pain of the forcefully infused evolution still caused his vision to blur.

On the treetop above, the brown sparrow that hadn't left tilted its head as if possessing sentience.

Looking at the wolf beast undergoing evolution, a hint of hesitation flashed in its eyes.

But soon after, sensing something else, it flapped its wings and flew off toward the horizon.

And less than ten minutes after it left...

...two rugged men wearing the attire of the Raging Tide Warband emerged from the shadows of the forest.

They looked at the messy meadow: the headless honey badger, the purple-skinned toad split in half, and even the green-skinned goblin corpse in the burrow.

The two exchanged a glance, both seeing a trace of solemnity in the other's eyes.

"Cleared out three at once?"

The slightly scrawnier man among them walked forward holding a short dagger, using the tip of the blade to flip the toad's corpse a couple of times, even propping up half of its body.

"The cross-section is somewhat blurry and charred. It's not the Windforged's 'Wind Blade,' and it wasn't even caused by a sharp weapon."

"So, another tough nut to crack has appeared?"

In the back, the muscular man holding a sword frowned upon hearing this.

"Let's go. Take the news back to Boss Battle Standard. The waters in this secret realm look even deeper than we imagined; it's not something just any random nobody can handle."

The scrawny man nodded in agreement upon hearing this.

"The motes of light on those three unlucky bastards have already disappeared. The other party has likely left here as well."

"Let's retreat quickly before we get surrounded by those elf bastards from the Windforged!"

"..."

After a brief conversation, the two adventurers from the Raging Tide Warband once again vanished into the forest.

On the meadow, apart from the three mangled corpses, it seemed only the rustling sound of the breeze brushing past the leaves remained, covering up certain traces.

...

'My head hurts!'

The agonizing pain felt as if someone were violently stirring his brains with a rusted iron rod.

When Xia Nan woke up from his coma, the very first thing he felt was this agony that nearly tore his soul apart.

"Hiss..."

He subconsciously tried to reach up and rub his temples, but only managed to make his front limbs swipe weakly across the damp soil a couple of times.

It took several full minutes before that excruciating pain subsided slightly.

Xia Nan opened his eyes, scanning his surroundings with slightly blurry vision.

He was in a dim and cramped space.

A heavy, fishy scent of dirt lingered at the tip of his nose, along with the faint, distinct stench peculiar to goblins who hadn't bathed in a long time.

Combining this with his previous memories, Xia Nan quickly realized that he was currently inside the burrow dug by that goblin.

Right before falling unconscious, upon sensing others approaching, he had relied on his last ounce of strength to hide inside this relatively concealed nest.

Fortunately, although the scale of this goblin burrow wasn't large, it was more than sufficient to accommodate his currently medium-sized wolf body.

Feeling the restlessness in his body finally calm down, Xia Nan let out a long breath of relief.

Immediately after, he focused his attention and summoned the Attribute Panel.

Compared to before he fell unconscious, the data on the panel had clearly undergone significant changes.

"[Perception: 10 (Extraordinary Senses, Elemental Affinity)]"

"[Combat technique: [Gravity Control] lv1 (52/100)]"

"[Bodily Mutation: [Wolf's Maw] (Sharpness, Armor Piercing, Tearing)]"

Looking at the particularly conspicuous line "Perception: 10" on the panel, Xia Nan slightly raised an eyebrow.

He remembered very clearly that before entering the secret realm, his Perception attribute had only been a mere 6 points.

Even after possessing this black wolf, he had only gained the stat bonuses of its original physical attributes; his Perception attribute hadn't fundamentally changed.

But now, it had directly skyrocketed to 10 points, and had even spawned two brand-new traits?

An attribute value of 10 points might not be considered an insurmountable number in the eyes of magic-casting professionals.

After all, even for the most basic Level 1 apprentice mages, their spirit or Perception attributes were usually above 10 points.

But for a warrior like Xia Nan, who walked the path of melee combat, a Perception of 10 was already considered a rather terrifying stat.

It not only meant his insight into his surroundings would experience a qualitative leap, but his ability to foresee danger would also be greatly enhanced.

Furthermore, when facing low-level illusions or mental attacks, he would possess stronger resistance.

'Is it because I absorbed that unlucky bastard who was turned into a toad by a spell?'

Xia Nan guessed.

He remembered that after the purple toad died, an extremely dense cluster of blue light had poured into his body.

The intensity of that light was several times stronger than what he had obtained when killing the ordinary goblin earlier.

At the time, because he was in a hurry to deal with the possessed honey badger next to it, he hadn't had the time to experience it closely.

Thinking back on it now, it was highly likely that the purple toad, before its death, had been a spellcaster or ranger of considerable level with rather high spirit or Perception attributes.

This was what caused his Perception attribute to undergo such a drastic mutation after absorbing the other party's life essence.

Shaking his head, Xia Nan stopped dwelling on this question.

After all, in this dangerous ritual, the enhancement of strength was what mattered most.

He turned his gaze to the other change on the panel—"Bodily Mutation: [Wolf's Maw]".

At a thought, Xia Nan felt a faint, numbing tingle from his lower jaw.

Immediately after, his originally normal Wolf's Maw underwent an astonishing transformation in an instant.

His upper and lower jawbones seemed to be pulled by some invisible force, protruding and elongating outward slightly.

His already sharp canines suddenly grew a segment longer; like two curved daggers, they flashed with a chilling, eerie white light.

Not only that, inside his mouth, along the inner edges of his upper and lower jaws...

...rows of fine, sharp, barbed teeth had also spawned.

These barbs interlocked with one another, resembling a precise meat grinder.

Once bitten by these teeth, prey would absolutely be instantly torn into minced meat.

What pleasantly surprised Xia Nan even more was...

...that faint energy fluctuations were circulating implicitly at the roots of his teeth.

Combined with the "Armor Piercing" trait on the panel, he could be certain that this mutated Wolf's Maw absolutely possessed the terrifying bite force to tear through magical defenses and even crush steel!

'I finally have a bit of self-preservation ability.'

Feeling the robust sense of power coming from his lower jaw, Xia Nan felt slightly more confident.

He retracted the mutation, and his Wolf's Maw returned to its normal size.

Following that, Xia Nan peeked outside through a crack in the burrow.

The sky had completely darkened, and the forest was terrifyingly silent.

Only the occasional hoot of a night owl brought bouts of palpitations.

He didn't intend to rashly head out before figuring out the situation outside.

After all, in this cruel slaughtering ritual...

...the identities of hunter and prey could switch at any moment.

'I'll stay in this burrow for the night.'

Having made up his mind, Xia Nan curled up his body, closed his eyes, and began to digest the gains and exhaustion brought about by these two consecutive battles...