On the map, Liu Xuan had also marked the various streets and the locations of the portals.
“I’ll need to do a few calculations.” He crouched on the ground, using a small dagger to draw lines.
“For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume it takes the same amount of time to clear the monsters around each portal—call it x. Then one full circuit takes 12x. By the time I return to the starting point, the first portal will have spawned 21 × 12x monsters, the second will have spawned 21 × 11…”
As he sketched and calculated on the ground, Liu Xuan couldn’t help grumbling, “Damn it, is it really this hard to run a campaign? I even have to calculate all this nonsense.”
After working at it for quite some time, he finally arrived at an answer.
“In the ideal situation, if I want the monster population throughout the entire city to fall below twenty percent after one circuit, I have to finish the circuit within twenty-eight minutes. Hmm… I might actually have a chance.”
Of course, there was bound to be some margin of error. The monsters and portals weren’t distributed evenly, after all.
It was impossible for Liu Xuan to spend exactly the same amount of time clearing every portal area, and he also needed time to travel between them.
So he decided to follow the advice of his predecessors: test it through practice.
Was he fast enough?
He would know after one lap.
Looking at the map on the ground, Liu Xuan began planning his route.
Once he had quickly selected a route, he raised his head and glanced at the progress bar in the sky.
Since there hadn’t been any large-scale monster spawns for a while, the progress had climbed back up to ninety-nine percent.
“Let’s get to work!”
After picking a direction, Liu Xuan shot forward.
Along the way, the Ravagers caught the scent of the pheromones on him and charged out of the nearby ruins one after another.
This time, Liu Xuan didn’t bother building up any attributes. He simply hurled Corpse Explosion at them.
The only annoying part was that after every explosion, he had to stop and pick up the Mutagens and equipment.
Fortunately, these monsters didn’t drop money or crafting materials. Otherwise, it would have taken even longer.
So Liu Xuan’s current routine was to rush to a location and use his pheromones to draw out the Ravagers along the way.
Then he would stand still, wait for the monsters to swarm him, and blow them all up in one go.
After collecting the Mutagens, he would immediately run toward the next location.
Whenever he gathered one hundred points, he used them right away.
Just as he was about to finish his circuit, a golden light suddenly flashed over Liu Xuan’s body. He had reached Level 15.
By this point, he had collected more than 1,500 Mutagens.
That meant he would receive twenty free attribute points for gaining this level!
“Draw a skill!”
As Liu Xuan ran, he pulled down the lever. After the slot machine spun rapidly, it stopped, and a new passive skill appeared before him.
[Nimble Body: When your health is full, your movement speed increases by 200%.]
Liu Xuan’s eyes lit up. This had come at exactly the right time!
[Fleet of Foot] only provided movement speed while out of combat. Although its maximum bonus was higher, it required him to build up stacks gradually.
It took a full minute to gain one stack, with each stack adding fifty percent movement speed.
That skill wasn’t very useful in this battle. He was constantly fighting monsters, so the stacks would reset before he could build up many of them.
As for [Nimble Body], it required his health to be full—but that was no problem for Liu Xuan at all.
With the [Celestial] shield’s fixed damage reduction of 200, these Ravagers could barely hurt him.
He also had seventy points of armor, while the Ravagers’ total attack power was only around 300.
What was more, after the previous circuit of monster killing, Liu Xuan’s health had already risen to an astonishing 300,000. Once out of combat, he recovered more than 3,000 health every five seconds, and thanks to [Troll’s Blood], he could regenerate more than 1,500 health even during combat.
He could basically stay at full health the entire time.
With [Nimble Body] in hand, Liu Xuan felt even more confident.
He stretched out his legs and sprinted wildly through the city. When he finally returned to the starting point, he looked up at the sky.
Thirty-nine percent! Time elapsed: fifty-five minutes!
Although he had failed to meet the target—and had even taken considerably longer than his calculations suggested—a delighted smile spread across Liu Xuan’s face.
It was enough! Absolutely enough!
He had only obtained [Nimble Body] near the end of that circuit.
On the next circuit, he would definitely be much faster.
Besides, running another lap wouldn’t hurt. Each circuit gave him several hundred Mutagens.
Not to mention the Ravager sets. With the bonus from [Lucky Rabbit’s Foot], he had already collected enough pieces to complete more than twenty full eight-piece sets.
He had three or four hundred additional pieces that didn’t form complete sets.
If not for the campaign’s progress—and the resurrection chance—he would have been perfectly willing to farm this place until the end of time.
Oh, right. It didn’t matter if he stopped farming for now. He had left several of the portals untouched.
…
Meanwhile, Zhang Meng was leading several hundred people west after crossing the river, exploring the area on the other side.
Teams had also been dispatched in the other directions.
Before setting out, he had issued a strict order to every team: safety first, advance slowly, and focus mainly on gathering intelligence.
After all, the main force was now moving as one. As long as they didn’t run into a boss, they would have no trouble dealing with monsters below Level 15.
Their equipment in this battlefield was simply too good.
If they encountered an area they weren’t sure about, they were not to take unnecessary risks. They could always turn back and investigate later.
Everything could wait until Liu Xuan captured Orenburg.
As Zhang Meng traveled, he kept receiving emails from Liu Xuan.
There were so many that it was almost frightening.
Every one of them contained the same thing: a piece of equipment from a set called [Ravager].
The attributes were incredibly tempting, but the required level was a little too high.
Just as they had finished clearing a wave of monsters and everyone was resting and recovering, Zhang Meng saw yet another email from Liu Xuan. Unable to resist, he sent him a private message.
“Busy? How are things over there?”
At that moment, Liu Xuan was doing three things at once: running, mailing the items in his inventory, and replying to Zhang Meng’s messages.
“Not bad. There are just a lot of monsters in the city, so it’ll take a while to clear them all.”
Zhang Meng knew that if Liu Xuan said there were a lot of monsters, then there were definitely far more than usual.
Still, he couldn’t help asking, “How many are we talking about?”
“Less than ten thousand.”
“Pfft—cough!” Zhang Meng, who had been drinking water while resting, spat it out in one go, startling the companions around him.
He hurriedly waved his hands to show that he was fine.
Then he sent another message to Liu Xuan. “Ten thousand? Can you handle them by yourself? Why don’t you wait until everyone levels up and we’ll fight them together?”
“No need. The monsters here are all above Level 20. By the time you level up enough to come over, I’ll have finished killing them.”
Was that even something a human would say?
Zhang Meng forced a dry laugh. “Well, I guess we’ll have to wait a while longer before we get the experience bonus.”
Ten thousand monsters! No matter how powerful Liu Xuan was, it should still take him at least a full day and night to kill them all, right?
He would have to eat and rest, too.
And if you added all that up, it would take even longer.
Liu Xuan nodded. “Yeah, we’ll have to wait a little.”
Zhang Meng couldn’t help comforting him. “Don’t rush yourself. This is already the third stage of the campaign. Each stage is harder than the last and naturally takes more time. Make sure you rest and sleep when you need to. Don’t push yourself too hard.”
Liu Xuan was baffled. “Why would I sleep? It’s something I can finish in a few dozen minutes. Why would I go sleep?”
“A few… dozen minutes?” Zhang Meng was dumbfounded. “Didn’t you just say we’d have to wait a while before we got the experience bonus?”
“Yeah. We’ll have to wait a few dozen minutes.”
Was this guy even human?
He could kill ten thousand monsters in a few dozen minutes?
Fine, this noob has limited my imagination.
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ver to a world of cultivation and returned invincible. Modern medicine is child's play compared to elixirs; technological might crumbles before true cultivation. My name is Qin Ning, Earth's sole cultivator!
