Chapter 71: The Great Benefactor Xu Zhi
Even though Xu Zhi and her familiars weren’t slow in exterminating the spiders, it still took quite a while to finish off the thousands of mutated spiders. By the time the battle ended, there was barely any space left to stand — the entire area was covered in the corpses and blood of the dead spiders.
Once the last few mutated spiders were killed by her familiars, Xu Zhi, feeling drained, found a spot that was barely clean enough to sit down. While the spiders hadn’t injured her seriously, she was truly exhausted.
Besides that, she felt quite uncomfortable. Her clothes were splattered with green spider blood — it looked strange and disgusting. She definitely needed to find a place to shower and change.
After resting a bit, Xu Zhi stood up. Looking at the street now covered with corpses, she felt a bit emotional. She used to struggle just to kill a spider on her ceiling — yet now, she could slay thousands of mutated spiders without batting an eye.
Once her familiars finished retrieving the [Enlightenment]-type cores from the corpses, Xu Zhi tossed them into her warehouse. Most of them were basic cores, but there were close to ten high-level attribute cores as well. However, those stronger mutated spiders hadn’t even reached her before being slaughtered by Yi and Gouzi.
Even those high-level cores only had a single crack in them.
“Still not strong enough,” she murmured. “If I hadn’t discovered this place, in time these mutated spiders could have become a major threat.”
After storing the cores, Xu Zhi led her familiars deeper into the ruins to search for the unburned spider silk.
Along the way, she found several empty cocoons. Judging from their shape, it seemed they once held human prey.
Staring at the human-shaped, hollow cocoons, Xu Zhi sighed. Survival of the fittest — that’s the law of the jungle. This was the current reality of Cloud City. The mutated spiders ate people, and she, in need of spider silk, killed the spiders. It was just one link after another in the food chain.
To make sure she never ended up like those cocooned corpses, Xu Zhi knew she had to stay at the top of the food chain — always the predator, never the prey. To achieve that, she’d have to be even more aggressive. Ordinary transcendents were no threat to her. The things that truly worried her were those the game narrator rarely mentioned — the things still out of her reach.
As she ventured deeper, she finally found some remaining spider silk.
“This has to work, right?”
[Yes. Just store the collected materials in the warehouse.]
Snake skin and feathers were easy to gather. As for moths, Xu Zhi planned to conjure two with her transcendent abilities. Now that she had the spider silk, all she needed was a branch from a level 25 variant creature.
These past few days, aside from traveling and searching for people, Xu Zhi had been feeding cores to the little variant. It was now level 23, still a bit away from 25. Also, she was running low on [Cup]-type cores — it was time to find another batch of fanatics to replenish her supply.
After collecting the spider silk, Xu Zhi unexpectedly discovered a large cluster of spider eggs hidden deep inside the nest. Just looking at them made her skin crawl.
“Can I bring these into the warehouse?”
She had a rather wicked idea: bring these eggs back to the old residential district and find a suitable place nearby to let them grow freely. With her supervision, the mutated spiders wouldn’t get out of control. The area could serve as a monster farming zone for the transcendents — a way to help them grow stronger while also collecting cores. And most of those cores would go to her.
A perfect cycle!
[These spider eggs aren’t considered complete lifeforms. You can take them.]
“So, by extension, I could bring other mutated animal eggs into the warehouse too?”
[Yes.]
Sweet!
Xu Zhi’s mind instantly filled with devious plans. She wanted to create a kind of “mutated animal plantation” — a hunting ground where she could breed and raise a batch of these creatures, preferably ones with high reproductive capabilities.
“Wow, what an evil idea.” Xu Zhi mildly scolded herself, but also felt the plan had serious profit potential. She could even charge entrance fees for transcendents to enter and work for her by hunting these creatures.
Way better than killing all the mutated animal eggs or hatchlings and gaining nothing.
As for just letting the eggs go and doing nothing? That wasn’t even an option in Xu Zhi’s mind.
A high-return plan that only required her to collect eggs and store them, then release them somewhere to breed later.
“I might be a genius,” she muttered proudly.
Thanks to the tenacious vitality of mutated creatures compared to ordinary animals, Xu Zhi didn’t even need to worry about how to nurture the embryos. Just tossing them somewhere would likely be enough for them to hatch successfully.
All she’d really need to do later was have her familiars patrol the hunting ground daily, making sure nothing escaped or evolved into something too dangerous. If it did — just kill it.
With that thought, Xu Zhi started looking forward to encountering more mutated animals on the road.
After all, just the batch of spider eggs she had now numbered over 3,000. That should be enough to keep the transcendents in the old residential district busy hunting for quite a while.
“Today’s been a lucky day.”
Back at the car, Xu Zhi cheerfully cleaned off the spider silk stuck to it.
[Is there ever a day you’re not lucky?]
The game narrator couldn’t help but make the comment.
“You’re right. I must be one of those legendary children of destiny!”
Xu Zhi lifted her chin with confidence.
[Confidence is a good thing…]
“Hmph.” Xu Zhi gave a smug little snort, let Gouzi jump into the backseat, and then started the car to continue her journey.
Over the next few days, she collected more mutated animal eggs and encountered quite a few surviving transcendents. Most moved in small teams — she barely saw any lone transcendents still alive.
Xu Zhi sent all the survivors to the old residential district using her familiars. She always made sure to keep at least one familiar with her, aside from the little variant.
This trip made her realize how few people were actually still alive in Cloud City. Just the Third Ring alone had housed over a million people during peacetime, yet after traveling nearly a third of its length, she’d only found around a hundred rational survivors.
Even if most of the population had evacuated during the lockdown, the number still alive now was shockingly low. It was a clear sign of how dire the survival conditions in Cloud City had become.
“So technically, by relocating everyone to the old residential district, I’m doing a good deed, right?”
Xu Zhi declared this with absolute certainty.
Can mutated monsters survive just on the mist without food?