Blood splashing onto them would waste water when they washed it off.
Fu Erdie only looked at them indifferently and continued absorbing her crystal cores.
Sang Wenhao merely moved his fingers slightly. A string of metal spikes pierced into the ability users’ skulls before they could react.
The teeth-aching sound of skulls cracking rose one after another. After several short screams, more than a dozen ability users in the front row instantly collapsed to the ground, twitched a few times, and then went still.
The ability users behind them hurriedly stopped in their tracks, cold sweat soaking their backs.
They stared at the people ahead in terror. Even when they had faced that enormous zombie tide earlier, they had not been as frightened as they were now.
Just what level of strength did these people have…
In that instant, the overwhelming, completely crushing pressure had not even struck the people in the back, yet they still felt stabbing pain in their brains and numbness across their scalps.
After that, no one in this area disturbed Fu Erdie again.
The ability users fled miserably with their surviving relatives. Crystal cores, supplies — none of that mattered anymore. They only wanted to live!
After all, these people did not look as easy to provoke as the people in the base!
Especially that woman. She looked clean and pretty, and she did not show any fierce or violent aura.
But precisely because of that, the ability users felt even more alarmed.
When it was not fighting, only a chihuahua barked and screamed. A lion would only sunbathe, then bite through your throat when it felt you had offended it.
The base’s people cleaned the battlefields in the other directions.
Now, after driving away hundreds of ability users, the base still had over a hundred combat ability users left, and another hundred or so logistics ability users inside the base, such as plant-type, water-type, and strength-type ability users.
After confirming the surroundings were safe with detection devices, they organised ordinary people to transport corpses outside the city while also collecting crystal cores, then gathered them at a designated location so Fu Erdie could go directly to absorb them.
By now, the news that Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao were fifth-rank and fourth-rank had already spread. Those who had once worked with her cousin Cao Yuanbai and had made sarcastic remarks about Fu Erdie now had pale faces. While working, they did their utmost to avoid the fifth-rank boss, afraid they would be recognised and then driven away or dealt with somehow.
Fu Erdie was not bored enough to settle accounts with these people. Besides, she had only heard Cao Yuanbai mention them briefly and did not recognise their faces.
She simply found the ordinary people working nearby rather interesting. Some looked at her with great eagerness, some had little schemes and wanted to come over to talk, some looked frightened and took detours around her, and some were afraid and awkward, keeping their heads down while working without looking up.
While absorbing the piled-up crystal cores, she touched her own face. This feeling of being surrounded by different emotions was strange.
This zombie tide had a relatively high ratio of ability crystal cores. Compared with the usual ratio of one in ten thousand, it was three times higher, reaching around three in ten thousand. The crystal cores piled together numbered five or six hundred.
Fu Erdie first distributed the psychic-type and metal-type crystal cores, then absorbed the broken cores wrapped in black cloth. After that, she put the remaining two hundred or so intact crystal cores into her backpack and carried it to the metal cover where the fourth-rank zombie king was trapped.
At this point, the base’s people had already piled ten thousand zombie corpses beside the metal cover.
Fu Erdie nodded. Sang Wenhao used the remaining scrap metal nearby to circle these corpses together with the metal cover in front. Then he opened the original inner metal cover. This way, Fu Erdie’s group and the newly dragged-over ten thousand zombie corpses were in the same space as the person inside, isolated from the outside.
D City Base’s fourth-rank ability user, Liu Yingyao, also came in with Fu Erdie’s group.
He watched as Fu Erdie released the zucchini and the box van full of dandelions. They rapidly spread out, covered the surface of the zombie corpses, and released a green liquid to begin corroding and absorbing the zombies.
Liu Yingyao scratched his head.
He had been handling zombies elsewhere earlier. By the time he rushed over after hearing the news, the battle here had already ended and they had begun collecting crystal cores.
So he helped collect crystal cores for a while and transported corpses for a while. Only then did he wait until Fu Erdie came over, wanting to see whether there was anything else he could help with.
Fu Erdie thought about it. “Since you’re ice-type, can you protect the zucchini and these two companions of mine?”
She gestured roughly at a position. “Just circle this area. Use an ice wall to create a shield around them. It shouldn’t block everyone’s view, but it should guard against the zombie king’s impact.”
Liu Yingyao nodded and did as asked. “Do the dandelions not need protection?”
“No,” Fu Erdie said. “The zombie king can’t hurt them.”
Liu Yingyao did not quite understand, but he did not ask further.
After discovering it was trapped, the zombie king probably saw that there were no people around, so it did not rush to come out. Instead, it ate zombies inside its space to level up.
Now that Fu Erdie had returned, it still had not discovered her.
Fu Erdie was not in a hurry either. She stood leaning against the metal wall, waiting for the zombie king to realise something was wrong outside and come out, while chatting with Liu Yingyao.
Liu Yingyao had trained in the army for many years. He could be considered upright and deeply rooted in principle, with a strong spirit of dedication. Even after the apocalypse, this had not changed, and he was very grateful for the base’s cultivation.
The base chose to raise him to fourth rank not only because his personal character and qualities were solid, but also because his ice-type ability could attack and directly produce water.
“At most, I can produce fifty tons of water in one day,” Liu Yingyao said, very proud at this point. “I can cover the drinking water for the entire base for a day. But this kind of massive consumption can only happen occasionally. Usually, it’s about thirty tons of water, about the same as a thirty-cubic-metre container.”
Fu Erdie admired him. “That’s already a lot.”
If it were her, even now that she was fifth-rank, if she spent all day pushing and pulling with the plants to produce thirty cubic metres of grain, she probably would not be able to bear it.
But looking at it this way, the base pushing the ice-type Liu Yingyao to fourth rank was truly worthwhile. He could fight, and he could provide logistical support by ensuring the basic water needs of most people in the base. He was indeed very practical.
While they chatted, Han Zhi did not activate shared vision, but he had been paying attention to the spatial energy mass.
A few minutes later, he suddenly opened shared vision. They saw that the energy mass had finally noticed the situation outside. It was instantly enraged, and a wave of spatial energy charged violently toward the dandelions.
Corpses! These corpses were the food it had worked so hard to obtain, and they were being eaten by these rotten flowers?!
Damn flowers!
Damn humans!
The space surged. Amid huge energy fluctuations, the zombie king tried to pull the corpses and dandelions into its space together.
However, although the surface area its space could touch was large, its height was not enough.
The dandelions flew up in great sheets with the corpses, completely ignoring the zombie king’s powerless rage on the ground.
Fu Erdie smiled, hugged her backpack in front of her, and pulled open the zipper. Inside, crystal cores of all colours and attributes glittered, instantly stimulating the zombie king.
It changed direction and lunged fiercely toward Fu Erdie.
Those crystal cores were its! All of them were its!
These thieves had stolen its things!
Fu Erdie watched the fluctuating spatial energy and quickly zipped the backpack shut, stuffing it into Sang Wenhao’s hands. Instead of retreating, she advanced, voluntarily leaping into the fluctuating energy field with such speed that even the zombie king froze for a moment.
Liu Yingyao shouted anxiously, “Principal!”
Sharp attacks shot toward the zombie king’s direction.
However, Fu Erdie quickly disappeared. The fluctuating space was struck by ice spikes, creating ripples, but nothing more followed.
Liu Yingyao still wanted to rush over, but he lost Han Zhi’s shared vision.
He looked at the two men beside him in shock and suspicion. In an instant, all the filthy stories of internal strife in other bases, where leaders were killed by their own people, flooded his mind.
Could these people be…?
Before he could think too much, Sang Wenhao explained, “This is our tactic. Inside the energy field, she’ll be fine.”
The zombie king sensed Fu Erdie entering its space and immediately gave up on the bag of crystal cores, turning back into the space to deal with Fu Erdie.
It could feel that this person who had voluntarily entered its space was valuable. More valuable than that bag with who knew how many crystal cores inside!
In its own space, it was the master. Crushing an ignorant outsider to death would be easy.
However, what the zombie king did not know was that wherever an energy field existed, it was Fu Erdie’s home ground.
After all, this was the place where her ability worked.
Fu Erdie looked at the scene before her and smelled the rotting stench around her. It felt like she had arrived on the set of a horror movie filled with mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Compared with the corpse mountain outside, the corpse mountain inside was clearly even more terrifying. These severed limbs and heads seemed alive. The moment they sensed Fu Erdie’s entrance, they instantly grabbed and bit toward her.
A giant hand directly covered Fu Erdie’s mouth and nose from the front, pressing her into the corpse pieces tearing at her. Very quickly, her entire body was submerged and disappeared.
However, the next second, Fu Erdie’s figure turned into tiny, colourful firefly-like lights. They scattered apart, rising through the gaps between the corpse pieces, then re-condensed into shape while floating one metre in the air.
The zombie king secretly controlling the corpse pieces was shocked.
This was the first time it had encountered such a situation!
It panicked a little and quickly controlled the corpse pieces across the entire space. From the sky, ground, and all directions, they surged in, trying to block all of Fu Erdie’s paths and crush her inside.
However, the same situation appeared again. Fu Erdie once more turned into points of light, easily escaping and vanishing, then re-condensing elsewhere.
After this tug-of-war repeated several times, Fu Erdie began strolling through this space as if she were walking through a back garden.
Just as she had imagined, the zombie king’s space was actually the same kind of space she came into contact with when pushing and pulling with Sang Wenhao, Cen Xiyang, and the plant babies.
Only back then, it had felt like a part of her consciousness entered someone else’s territory along with her ability. Her physical body had not entered the energy space.
This ability zombie, however, used its own energy space as a space capable of holding physical entities. The moment Fu Erdie entered the space, she felt the subtle change of physical matter and energy converting into each other.
Now, she was very at ease. While strolling around, she continuously switched forms under attack, familiarising herself with the differences between her physical body and energy body under the effect of her ability, as well as the transformation points between them.
Turning from a physical body into an energy body was like breaking herself down into individual particles. Turning from an energy body back into a physical body was like assembling the particles back into human form.
The source guiding this transformation was her ability, which Fu Erdie could control at will. Almost every time she used her ability to turn herself into an energy form, she could feel the zombie king’s agitation and discomfort.
It was like when she had previously used her ability to directly pierce through the energy barrier of an ability user or ability zombie, causing sustained damage on the ability level. Now that she had been pulled into the zombie king’s space, she had even skipped the piercing step. Her very existence was like a knife the zombie king had swallowed into its stomach.
Clearly, although the zombie king did not know how all this was happening, its instincts wanted to “spit” Fu Erdie out.
Fu Erdie felt the repelling force and laughed.
“It’s easy to invite a god in, but hard to send one away. You don’t even understand such a simple principle?”
She simply stopped turning into human form. Under layers of resistance, she remained in energy form and slowly strolled through the space.
Zombies did not feel pain, but changes to their ability body could make a zombie extremely uncomfortable.
It exploded with rage and frantically resisted Fu Erdie’s invasion. Yet Fu Erdie still wandered around as if strolling through a park, visiting every place.
After she walked through this enormous space with a radius of over a thousand metres, she ignored the furious zombie king’s frantic attacks and came to the boundary of the space — the bottom line deep within the entire space.
With a strong sense of ritual, she turned her energy glow into the vague shape of a finger and lightly poked the bottom line.
Pop.
After a crisp sound like a balloon bursting, the space collapsed.
The zombie king’s spatial domain had broken.
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