Chapter 43: Bull Horns and Hooves? Well, Now I’m Not Sleepy at All
Wait… Why did his body still hurt so damn much?!
Hall was just about to smile when he realized that the slightest twitch sent a tearing, agonizing ache rippling through his internal organs.
Wasn’t heaven supposed to be free of suffering? How had all his mortal wounds tagged along into the afterlife?
“Don’t move.”
The striking woman spoke.
Her cool, detached voice drifted down to him: “You’ve got quite a few wounds on you. Stop squirming and just eat like that.”
Another mouthful of roasted potato was shoved right into Hall’s mouth.
Er… this emissary of God had a rather rough bedside manner, but heavens, this potato tasted incredible.
So he simply stayed pinned to the floor, dutifully swallowing the mouthfuls of potato bit by bit.
“By the way, this is well outside regular operating hours. Adding my service fee, everything is double price. No objections, right? Your crystal pouch was hanging right off your hip, so I helped myself just now. One roasted potato is 8 City Coins, one serving of pickled radish is 2 City Coins—10 City Coins in total. I’ll give you your change in a minute.”
Hall listened in a daze to the divine emissary’s words.
City Coins? Ten City Coins?
Why did this currency unit sound so agonizingly familiar?
Did you still have to pay money in heaven?
Did heaven not save the broke?
Haha. He couldn’t remember where he’d first heard that morbid joke, but who would’ve thought it was actually true?
Hall swallowed the mouthful of potato with great difficulty, mumbling incoherently, “Emissary… in heaven… do you really have to spend money in heaven too?”
What is this guy babbling on about?
Crouched over to feed this uninvited guest, Ling Jing couldn’t make out his muttered nonsense.
The fellow looked severely injured, hovering on the brink of death.
His voice was so faint that the only word she caught was “heaven.”
Heaven? Please, this certainly wasn’t that.
For a proper Chinese soul, even in death, one went to the underworld to meet King Yanluo, not float up to heaven.
“This isn’t heaven. It’s a restaurant—the Chinese Restaurant,” she informed the man sprawled on the floor.
With that, she shoved another bite of roasted potato into his mouth.
Hiss… Back when Long Qian and the others brought that unconscious man over, she’d shoved roasted sweet potatoes into him just like this.
It should work fine, right?
Ling Jing wasn’t entirely certain.
Last time, that fellow named Gerry had been covered head to toe in sickly green, visibly on the verge of being completely corroded away by toxins.
Roasted sweet potatoes and roasted potatoes purged poison, which made them the exact remedy Gerry needed.
As for this guy… it was hard to say.
No matter how she looked at his skin, there wasn’t a trace of emerald rot, which was downright bizarre.
Did he need meat to see real results?
—The Chinese Restaurant had been in business for five full days now.
Though the system had never spelled it out, Ling Jing had observed through experience that plant-based and meat-based ingredients yielded distinctly different buffs.
To put it simply, plant ingredients primarily provided Purification.
Animal ingredients, on the other hand, granted Enhancement.
Potatoes and sweet potatoes purged accumulated toxins, pickled radish reduced inhaled poisons, and even the Malatang skewers converted poison into energy.
Pork cracklings, by contrast, boosted the body’s natural recovery speed, and the meat-laden one-pot stew offered a flat boost to physical strength.
If the fellow before her wasn’t suffering from toxic corrosion, maybe she ought to feed him some meat instead?
…
A short while later.
Having regained some vitality thanks to the potato, a still-weak Hall sat inside the spotless restaurant. Placed before him was a fresh plate of pork cracklings that Ling Jing had just fried up.
“Double charge, remember? Late-night hours come with a service fee. Normally, an order of pork cracklings goes for 8 City Coins, so I’m billing you 16.”
This guy who had collapsed on her doorstep in the dead of night was surprisingly loaded. His pouch had held four medium-grade energy crystals and one large-grade crystal.
Cashed out together, they yielded over fifty City Coins.
Ling Jing had tossed them directly into the Item Exchange Box to convert the currency and deducted her tab on the spot.
What a joke—working overtime in the middle of the night meant she wasn’t doing charity.
She wasn’t running a soup kitchen; not leaving him to die and refraining from charging triple or quadruple was already the height of moral decency.
Hall, however, still hadn’t fully recovered from the shock of learning that “this is not heaven.”
What did that even mean?
This secure haven, this fragrant pork-whatever-crackling, this warm interior—none of this was paradise?
They were outside the West Wall of Seed City?
Total nonsense! He had lived inside Seed City for so many years; how had he never known such a place existed beyond the West Wall?
Yet the food in front of him was real, and the mouthwatering aroma was just as real.
Even though his head was spinning with a million questions, all he could manage right now was gulping down his own saliva.
“Eat them while they’re hot. Pork cracklings boost your physical and stamina recovery rate for one minute per piece. Eat one, you get a minute; eat four, that’s four minutes… It won’t knit your wounds completely, but it should take the edge off the pain.”
Before Ling Jing even finished her sentence, the young man snatched a crackling from the bowl and jammed it into his mouth.
He took a crunchy bite, and his eyes instantly went wide.
“@#¥%¥!”
With his mouth stuffed to the gills, Ling Jing couldn’t make out a single syllable.
Judging by his expression, though, he was almost certainly screaming, “This is ridiculously good!”
With her sleep interrupted and having randomly reeled in an unexpected customer, Ling Jing wasn’t the least bit sleepy anymore.
Instead, she propped her chin on her hand across the table, leisurely observing this wild specimen.
He looked fairly young, barely in his early twenties.
Deep-set eyes, a high, straight nose—somewhat resembling a Westerner from her old world.
Most of the patrons around here shared this kind of bone structure.
His hair was an ash-blue tone, and his face was completely free of any green discoloration… Yes, under the bright lights, she could confirm it: his skin bore zero signs of corrosion from the emerald mist, a stark contrast to Long Qian and Lina.
His eyes, however—his pupils were an unmistakable, vibrant emerald green.
Very prominent.
Ling Jing asked bluntly, “Why are your eyes green?”
Gorging himself on his second piece of pork crackling, Hall had already elevated this mysterious woman to the status of a living deity.
—Even if she claimed this wasn’t heaven, anyone in this ruined wasteland who could prepare dishes from plants and animals—and make them taste this divine—was a god in every sense that mattered.
He answered the deity’s question without hesitation.
“Because I awakened an ability.”
Chew, chew, chew.
“Once an ability awakens, all traces of corrosion across your body vanish, and your irises turn green.”
Chew, chew, chew, chew.
“Ah, so you’re an Awakener?”
“Mm-hmm!”
Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew.
“Awakeners don’t have to return to the city at night?”
“No, no, that’s not it. We were ambushed while on a mission, and I got dragged away before I could make it back.”
Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew.
“Our mission was given by the Commander himself—to cull a mutated beast outside the North Wall whose threat level exceeded the safe zone’s limits. God knows how many mutated plants and animals that thing had swallowed. It had twisted vines bursting out of its back, bull horns on its head, bull hooves for feet, and a mouth like a lion’s… Oh, right!”
Hall spilled the beans like water from a broken dam. The young man was clearly missing the chip for basic caution.
Only after blabbing the whole story did he suddenly freeze, quickly adding, “Wait, the Commander explicitly forbade us from talking about this! Lord Deity, you have to keep this secret for us!”
“Wait, what?”
Ling Jing caught the crucial detail, her eyes instantly lighting up.
“Keep it a secret for us!”
“Bull hooves and bull horns? Where is this beast? Is it far from here? How big is it? Can a tricycle haul it back?”
She had just been lamenting how absurdly expensive beef marrow bones were in the Mall! And here was a mutated beast delivering itself right to her doorstep.
Hall’s hand froze halfway to the third pork crackling. “Huh?”
