Chapter 16: The Plum Blossoms Twice
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“Of course! Why wouldn’t it be? Who told you that infiltrating a place to assassinate someone means you can’t use the front door, my dear brother?”
Lu Wenwu was genuinely astonished. Without missing a beat, he crushed two more patrolmen and gained 0.2 free attribute points.
“As a qualified comrade-in-arms and partner, I have to correct that mistaken line of thinking, Brother Yuan. Your understanding of infiltration is simply far too shallow!”
After storing the corpses in his backpack, Lu Wenwu turned to Yuan Shi and reprimanded him with righteous conviction.
“What is infiltration? As long as nobody discovers us, it’s a perfect infiltration.”
“I killed every witness and made sure they couldn’t notify anyone else. Nobody discovered us until I reached the assassination target. How is that not a perfect infiltration?”
Yuan Shi fell silent.
It sounded annoyingly reasonable.
Lu Wenwu patted him on the shoulder and said with the air of a sage, “Those who accomplish great things do not concern themselves with trifles. Don’t worry about these minor imperfections, my friend. Just tell me this: did the two of us make it inside?”
“We... we did.”
“Did Lai San discover us?”
“No...”
“Then there you have it! The operation was a complete success!”
Lu Wenwu threw back his head and laughed heartily. With a standard forward stance, he punched and exploded the head of a grotesque-looking Corrupted.
He received another 0.1 free attribute points.
If one ignored the scene around him, his smile was actually rather sunny and cheerful.
“Strength creates miracles! Just charge ahead and get it done! If no miracle occurs, that only means you weren’t forceful enough!”
“Don’t waste time worrying about concealing your presence. Time is precious. Life doesn’t give you enough of it to sneak around at your leisure. If you aren’t the protagonist, you’ll be discovered sooner or later!”
“Once you’ve confirmed your target, charge straight at them and use your abundant martial virtue to teach them the laws of physics until their skull is shattered and their body lies humbled beneath your feet.”
With that, Lu Wenwu headed toward the second floor without even looking back.
Yuan Shi was left standing alone in the first-floor corridor, which was coated in thick blood and gore, utterly bewildered.
He had a feeling that Lu Wenwu had completely redefined the word “infiltration.”
His ten years as a soldier might as well have been for nothing.
...
Near the survivor camp.
On the roof of a distant building, Ye Hongyuan and Wei Long stood side by side.
“Director Ye, is this instance an advancement trial?” Wei Long asked.
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Ye Hongyuan nodded slightly. “Yes. This is the seventh one I’ve taken part in. I’ve been stuck at Level Ten for a long time.”
“I thought I was certain to die, but by sheer luck I ran into Fifth Brother. I suppose I’ve managed to coast through this one.”
“If things go smoothly on their end, then once this is over, you, Little Yuan, and Niu Niu should start preparing for your own advancement trials.”
“How do you feel? Confident?”
Wei Long gave a bitter smile. “To be honest, not in the slightest. An advancement trial requires entering an instance far above your own level. That’s the first hurdle.”
“Not only will it inevitably match you with the type of instance you’re least suited for, you also have to obtain a Good rating to pass. It’s far too difficult. Both Little Yuan and I have obvious weaknesses.”
Ye Hongyuan said nothing.
The difficulty of advancement trials was something he understood all too well.
Perhaps this was meant to prevent incompetent people from advancing by merely tagging along.
If he had not been one of the finest doctors in all of Shenzhou, equipped with life-saving and emergency-extraction items issued from above, he might already have died.
And without Lu Wenwu, the chief disciple of the Wind Sect, this trial would probably have ended in failure as well.
Without making the ruthless decision to use survivors as bait, even bringing in a C-rank player who had cultivated a martial art might not have been enough to complete the main quest.
As for achieving a Good rating, that would have been even more impossible.
Even ants could bring down an elephant through sheer numbers.
Seeing that the atmosphere had grown somewhat stiff, Wei Long deliberately changed the subject.
“By the way, Director Ye, I heard that the advancement trial from D-rank to C-rank has a chance of granting you a cultivation art suited to you personally. Is that true?”
“It isn’t a chance. It’s guaranteed.”
Ye Hongyuan nodded slightly, a trace of anticipation appearing in his eyes.
“As long as you obtain an Excellent rating, the system will grant you a suitable basic cultivation art—one that you can freely switch to other cultivation paths from later on.”
“That’s wonderful...” Wei Long sighed. “I’ve heard that cultivation arts add a tremendous number of personal attributes, along with various additional enhancements.”
“Don’t get your hopes up too high. Those things are even harder to level up than skills.”
Ye Hongyuan decisively poured cold water over his enthusiasm.
“Without an astronomical amount of resources, even someone who has cultivated an art will still be at the bottom of the C-rank.”
“Judging from what I’ve observed, Fifth Brother’s current strength is enough to surpass the vast majority of C-minus players who have cultivated an art.”
“Unless something unexpected happens, you’ll be the one he surpasses.”
“Ah... The road ahead is treacherous... Let’s talk about something else.” Wei Long sighed again. “Director Ye, do you think the higher-ups gave Fifth Brother a life-saving item or an emergency-extraction item?”
Ye Hongyuan shook his head. “Impossible. Those things are only issued to support personnel like us.”
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“Huh? Why is that?” Wei Long asked, puzzled.
“You cannot raise an eagle in a greenhouse. What Shenzhou and the world need are genuine strongmen.” Ye Hongyuan spoke with unwavering certainty. “If someone is forced to use an emergency extraction method during a normal instance, that means their abilities are not enough to shoulder great responsibility. If they die, then they die.”
“I see.” Wei Long looked somewhat dejected. “As expected, I’m only suited to being an ordinary foot soldier.”
While the two of them chatted, Super Niu Niu came racing down a distant street on a wildly flashy Harley.
The furious roar of its engine and the turbulence of its passage were loud enough to be heard clearly even by deaf people several blocks away.
“Damn it, I’m fired up!”
Super Niu Niu had always hidden his timid, trouble-averse nature beneath a facade of bluster. Now, however, a strange excitement faintly appeared on his face.
Leading the grotesque creatures behind him on a desperate flight, Super Niu Niu felt that he had become a brave man himself.
“You bunch of spineless dogs, how are you no better than actual dogs? What kind of damn Evolvers are you? Evolved, my ass! Where did you get the nerve? Every one of you looks like a ghost, and you still want to fight people? I bet you’d struggle even to—”
A series of beautifully obscene Shenzhou curses blared nonstop from a gigantic loudspeaker mounted behind the motorcycle seat.
Even the Harley’s enormous engine noise could not drown out Super Niu Niu’s terrifying mastery of profanity, honed through dual enrollment in Zu’an and Sun Bar.
The Corrupted were enraged beyond reason. They chased him relentlessly, heading straight for the underground fortress where the survivors were hiding.
Any person from Shenzhou would probably understand exactly what Super Niu Niu was doing.
“Sir, this way, please.jpg”
Although the method was crude, it was the only option available.
These Corrupted, who had nearly evolved all the brains out of their heads, were extremely powerful, but they were astonishingly incompetent when it came to finding people.
They had spent more than ten minutes circling the block without finding the actual entrance, sensing only vaguely that it was somewhere nearby.
Compared with them, even Sea God Tang San would have seemed brilliant.
With no other choice, Super Niu Niu had volunteered to lure the monsters away.
And that was how things had come to this.
At last, with someone to lead them, the Corrupted surged through the bunker entrance in a single mass.
Countless pairs of scarlet eyes were filled with ravenous longing for food.
Seven or eight of the strongest leaders resisted the temptation to feed. They brought nearly a hundred men to guard the bunker entrance, preventing any ambush from wiping them out in one stroke.
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