Chapter Ninety: Uproot It Completely

The raging surge of energy threw the woods into complete chaos.

The two were locked in an uneasy stalemate.

Yet the grass figure remained full of confidence. Since the day it first took root and began to grow, it had fed on flesh of all kinds, from insects and mice to fierce beasts, including zombies and human beings, and only by devouring so much had it developed to what it was now.

The energy it had absorbed was absolutely greater than that of most living things.

"Let’s see how long you can hold out!"

Lin Dong was surrounded by a storm of vines, endless in number, impossible to cut down or kill out of existence, yet his expression remained calm and collected.

By his judgment, the grass figure’s strength was definitely at Grade A, perhaps even higher. It was indeed a little troublesome, but only a little.

"Well, that’s all it amounts to."

Lin Dong suddenly stepped forward, unleashing the full force of his powerful physique. The instant the sole of his foot struck the ground, there came a deafening boom.

Cracks spread across the earth like the trembling of an earthquake. The ground began to collapse, and the corpses buried beneath it were shattered one after another.

Rotten flesh and bones flew everywhere, along with the roots hidden within them.

When one cuts down the grass, one must remove the roots.

After that single stride, Lin Dong’s terrifying field of death surged forward with him, and an overwhelming pressure spread out for more than thirty feet at once, about to envelop the grass figure completely.

With his mighty physique fused to his domain of death, Lin Dong at this moment was unstoppable.

"Hm?"

The grass figure was shocked at once. Sensing the anomaly, it felt a faint omen of disaster from that destructive power.

The creature before it was formidable.

The growth of those vines slowed sharply in an instant. The grass figure continued to pour out its energy, but it was already visibly at a disadvantage.

Yet Lin Dong remained fierce, his momentum surging like a rainbow.

Such a violent clash did indeed consume a great deal of energy. By now, he had already used up a fifth of his reserves.

But he could clearly feel that the other side’s resistance had weakened considerably.

Lin Dong took another step forward. His knees bent slightly, his body coiled, and he changed to a two-handed grip on his blade, like a leopard crouching to pounce, ready to strike.

The domain of death continued to spread ahead, already covering the grass figure. Behind it, the villa seemed to disintegrate on its own, collapsing in an instant into dust that drifted away on the wind.

"Slash!"

Lin Dong tightened his grip on the long blade. As energy surged through it, searing flames burst from the edge.

He drove power through both legs and stomped hard. The tremendous recoil caused the ground beneath him to sink even further, and Lin Dong’s body shot forward like a cannonball, carrying the terrifying might of his death domain as he charged at high speed.

The scenery on both sides flew backward in a blur, while roots, branches, leaves, and foul blood scattered wildly through the air.

To the grass figure, it looked as though a storm was racing straight toward it.

A disaster had descended.

"No!"

A fierce sense of unease arose in the grass figure’s consciousness. The aura of death was drawing near.

"I don’t want to die..."

Its heart was full of unwillingness.

It had begun as a blade of grass, starting by devouring ants, and had grown to what it was today. More than that, it was not content with the mountain’s current state and wanted to expand into the city.

It had even dreamed that one day it would spread across the entire world.

It never expected that just after coming down from the mountain, it would provoke such a terrifying existence.

In the blink of an eye, that scorching aura was already before it. The sharp edge was about to sever it in two, but beneath the shroud of the terrifying field of death, the grass figure had no way to evade.

Whoosh!

Lin Dong swung his blade horizontally through the grass figure’s body.

"Aaaaah!"

The grass figure let out another hysterical scream, its agony extreme.

At the same time, all of its resisting energy vanished. The serpentine vines began to withdraw rapidly, withering and rotting away.

In the span of a breath, the chaos in the woods came to a halt and returned to stillness, leaving only a field of ruins.

The grass figure’s body had been cut in two and lay on the ground. The consciousness it had only just managed to awaken was now fading away.

Lin Dong leaned in for a closer look, wanting to see exactly what sort of monster this was.

Upon careful examination, he found that it really was just a mass of grass, only it had woven itself into a human shape. In its chest was a round crystal flickering with light, the source of its energy. It looked like a core, though there were some differences.

"Just how strong are you...?"

A signal was transmitted from the grass figure’s consciousness.

"I’m not sure."

Lin Dong did not know how to answer. So far, he had not encountered a being on equal footing with him.

The grass figure’s soul was deeply shaken.

Were the creatures beyond the mountain all this terrifying?

What a pity... it would never grow across the whole world now...

Even a blade of grass could dream of ruling the world. As it was about to perish completely, its final thought was this: the city was too dangerous. It should have stayed in the mountains.

Then its broken remains began to shrink, rot, and turn to drifting ashes.

After the grass figure died completely, it left behind a glowing crystal at the spot where it had fallen.

Lin Dong picked it up and examined it repeatedly. The energy within was powerful, but extremely chaotic. This was indeed not a crystal core.

The crystal was not entirely transparent. Inside it were some threadlike structures, making it look more like a seed.

"Can this be eaten?"

Lin Dong analyzed the matter in his heart.

As a zombie by nature, what he cared about most was still whether something was edible.

The grass had devoured a bewildering mix of flesh and blood: insects, animals, zombies, even the nutrients of other plants.

"It shouldn’t be poisonous..."

Faced with this thing that resembled a seed, Lin Dong did not feel much appetite. After all, he was not a herbivore.

So he considered that perhaps he could take it home, plant it, and see what it might grow into, and how far it might develop in the end...

Driven by curiosity and a desire to learn, Lin Dong stored the seed in his spatial storage.

But while he was handling this matter, his nostrils twitched and he caught the scent of humans approaching.

Of course there were humans still alive in North Mountain. Clearly, the commotion caused by his battle with the grass figure had been too great, and that was what had drawn them here.

At that moment, two people were indeed crouched sneakily behind a rock, peering ahead.

"What the hell happened? Those man-eating vines actually all withered away!"

"No idea. The vines really are gone. Look... there’s still someone standing there!"

One young man said.

"Mm-hm."

The other nodded repeatedly. If the man-eating vines were still there, there could not possibly be a human, or any other living thing, standing in that place.

"Could it be... that he took them down?"

"What are you thinking?"

The young man asked back at once. In his understanding, the man-eating vines were horrifying beyond measure, spreading everywhere across the mountain. They were by no means something a single individual could solve.

"He probably, like us, came here drawn by the noise."

"But then why did those man-eating vines die for no reason?"

The other found it unbelievable.

The young man thought for a moment and said, "Plants are still plants. Some of them stop growing once they mature and just die. Or... maybe those vines ate something poisonous and were poisoned to death."

"Oh, oh."

Both of these men were Awakeners at the Brain Core stage. They had little in the way of sensing ability. Before the apocalypse, they had worked as security guards for wealthy residents in the villa district.

At the moment, the two of them were thinking the same thing: the man-eating vines had devoured countless bodies and absorbed so much energy that they must have condensed a super crystal core.

If they could get hold of that...

Wouldn’t they soar straight into the sky on the spot?

...