Qing City Base’s internal defences were extremely lax. Basically, once Fu Erdie’s group slipped inside, there was nothing that could effectively stop their attack.
The base’s ability users did want to do something, but Fu Erdie used the wind to carry her teammates and easily dodge. Those attacks landed directly on their own people instead. In an instant, before Fu Erdie had even attacked, the base was already filled with explosive battle damage.
Close-combat ability users came forward to block them, but the moment they got a little closer, wind blades sliced them open until their flesh split and blood poured out. People who had been perfectly intact a moment ago immediately turned into bloody figures.
Bullying the weak and fearing the strong was the instinct of Qing City ability users. Once they realised they were no match, the sharper ones had already hidden far away and stopped getting involved. Most of the others gathered everyone they could and looked for chances to harass them from the side.
The zombie king breeding area was a vast square. Iron cages surrounded it on all sides, and there were guards everywhere.
Fu Erdie saw the miserable scene inside from far away.
Xin Nuo had said these zombie kings had their legs cut off, but that was putting it lightly. Most of the zombie kings had been turned into human swine… no, zombie swine.
They had no limbs. Aside from a small number of zombies with sharper control over their abilities, still trying to release abilities with their torsos and teeth to attack the people and zombies around them, most were only writhing on the ground like maggots.
There were many guarding ability users around the iron cages. They also saw Fu Erdie’s movements, but their first reaction was not to come over. Instead, they stayed at their posts.
Now that she had found this place, their first reaction was not to fight her head-on but to look toward one of their companions.
That person’s expression changed drastically. He turned and ran. Seeing this, the others stopped guarding too and immediately fled.
Fu Erdie: “?”
She did not look closely into those ability users’ attitudes. She directly attacked the zombie kings, who had already become fish on the chopping board. It was extremely easy. One blade for each little friend. In less than five minutes, she killed all forty-six zombie kings.
By then, many ability users had gathered around. Those with long-range abilities attacked wildly. After all, this square was no residential area. Even if it was destroyed, it would not affect the others.
More importantly, the most valuable zombie kings here had already been killed.
Qing City Base’s ability users attacked in many ways: from the sky, from underground, physically, chemically. They turned the zombie king breeding area into total chaos.
Fu Erdie drew clean wind from high above, formed a wind wall around the four of them, and blew away all smells. In the thick smoke, she quickly dug out the crystal cores.
Another seven or eight minutes later, when Ying Da arrived in a furious rush, he saw Fu Erdie digging out the last zombie’s crystal core and absorbing it on the spot.
His eyes bulged. His gaze nearly split with rage. With an explosive shout, his ability brought rolling thunderclouds straight toward Fu Erdie.
Ying Da was not tall. His whole body was stocky and solid. His lightning ability was just like him, carrying a heavy pressure as it pressed layer by layer toward Fu Erdie’s group.
The surrounding ability users scattered in fear, afraid of being caught in the crossfire.
But Sang Wenhao held Fu Erdie’s hand. “You don’t need to act. Leave this person to me.”
Everyone needed to train through battle. Last time, at the riverbank in Jian City, facing a seventh-rank zombie king, Fu Erdie had naturally chosen to fight personally, leaving Sang Wenhao with little room to act.
But here, Sang Wenhao and Ying Da were both sixth-rank ability users. Judging from their attributes, metal conducted electricity and could not withstand lightning head-on.
Sang Wenhao did not treat this as an enormous threat. He treated it as a challenge to temper himself. Of course, the most important thing was that even if he lost, his girlfriend was nearby to cover for him.
He had room to make mistakes and see just how refined his control over metal elements could become.
Fu Erdie nodded and quickly left with Cen Xiyang and Han Zhi.
Seeing this, the others subconsciously assumed Sang Wenhao was the strongest one, while the other three were small fry. So they grew bold and surrounded them.
Cen Xiyang and Han Zhi exchanged a glance, nodded, and took the zucchini with them into a training-style battle.
Fu Erdie flew in the air, splitting her attention between her companions’ situations and searching for high-rank ability users fleeing nearby.
With that search, she found the mental-type ability user who had run the farthest, as well as one of the people from the zombie king breeding area.
Without another word, Fu Erdie sent two wind blades over and knocked them down, communicating with the zucchini to split off a root and break open their skulls to retrieve the crystal cores inside.
Fu Erdie raised an eyebrow. It turned out that aside from the mental-type ability user, the other fleeing person was also mental-type. His attribute was detecting the rank of ability zombies or ability users. Because his crystal core did not have instrument support, it began turning a vivid red just by approaching Fu Erdie. When it approached the others, the colour gradually faded and paled.
Clearly, the higher the ability rank, the deeper the red of the crystal core. In Qing City Base, this person must have been specifically responsible for monitoring the rank of the zombie kings.
He and the mental-type ability user had both directly sensed Fu Erdie’s danger and ran even faster than the speed-type ability users in the base. Unfortunately for them.
Fu Erdie would not give them a chance to escape.
Her attack on the fugitives was like a signal. The other ability users began attacking or fleeing even more wildly.
The base had many people and all kinds of abilities. Fu Erdie was currently controlling wind abilities, and in order to see her surroundings clearly, the second ability she chose to use was Han Zhi’s vision.
Wind and vision together were not as offensively powerful as metal abilities.
But against small fry, this was already enough.
She opened her ability wide, enclosed all ability users within a ten-kilometre radius inside wind walls, then gradually compressed the encirclement, driving everyone toward a relatively wide crossroads.
Fourth- and fifth-rank ability users had no ability to fight back in front of Fu Erdie. The slight trouble they caused was no more than ants shaking a tree. It did not touch Fu Erdie’s foundation at all.
When these ability users were forced together, hundreds of them panicking at the crossroads, Fu Erdie began the push-pull.
In that instant, every ability user felt their scalp go numb.
Fu Erdie’s face was expressionless.
The one who had caused trouble for her was Ying Da.
But none of that mattered. She did not have the patience to compare them one by one, to decide who was an “enemy” she had to deal with, and who was like Xin Nuo or Tan Haoge—people who had done bad things, but had their own helplessness and still retained some humanity.
Fu Erdie only needed to judge by looking at their energy spaces.
She forcefully invaded the energy spaces of this group of people. Those ability spaces filled with blood, slaughter, and brutality were directly destroyed. From the source, she shattered those people’s ability systems and killed them outright.
Some people had a strong scent of blood, but still fell within a range Fu Erdie could accept. She spared their lives.
Some had little blood energy, but their energy spaces reflected not slaughter but pure black despair. Fu Erdie preserved their abilities and let them go.
For these hundreds of people, Fu Erdie had no absolute standard of judgement. She relied only on her instinctive likes and dislikes, deciding life and death with a single thought.
For a moment, she looked down from high above.
Proud, arrogant, looking down on everything, cold.
It was as if she had detached from her body and become a god observing everyone from outside the world, watching all their struggles without sorrow or joy, without caring about gains and losses.
If I can tolerate you, you live.
If I cannot, you die now.
The ants had no room to resist. Everything was for the sake of the peace she wanted.
After dealing with the ability users, the ones she had judged and allowed to survive were filled with terror. None dared to move.
That feeling of having their souls invaded, of having their entire past seen through and judged, made them almost unable to stand.
And those whose abilities had been stripped away but whose lives had been left intact looked at their hands, unable to recover for a long time.
So… abilities could be stripped away.
Their abilities were gone?!
Would they become like the ordinary people they had once wantonly abused?
This guess—no, to them, this already seemed like their future reality—made them stand up in a frenzy even though their bodies were weak and drained. They screamed and cried, their language systems disordered, unable to say anything coherent.
Until one person raised his head. His hoarse, unpleasant voice poured out, finally forming a sentence everyone could understand.
He said, “Why didn’t you kill me? Why didn’t you just kill me?! You demon!”
Hearing this, Fu Erdie pulled herself out of that strangely detached, cold state. She lowered her head, glanced at the man collapsed in the blood, tilted her head, and thought for a moment.
“So? Do you want to die?”
“If you have the guts, kill me!” the man screamed in pain.
In the apocalypse, abilities were everything. Without abilities, everything was gone!
“Even now, you’re still pretending to be a good person! You might as well just—”
Before he could finish speaking, the man slid to the ground. A wind blade had pierced a hole through the centre of his skull. The shattered crystal core flickered with a faint dark light.
The people who had been shouting just now instantly fell silent.
Without abilities… they still had one life. They… did not entirely want to die either.
Fu Erdie shifted her gaze away and looked toward Ying Da and Sang Wenhao, who were still fighting. But in her heart, she was thinking about her state just now.
She did not know when it had begun. Perhaps it was on the first day of the apocalypse. Perhaps it was the day she learned the true nature of her ability. Perhaps it was the day she became a seventh-rank ability user…
From time to time, she would feel as if she had detached from her body and was looking at the world from the perspective of a god, an entirely external observer unrelated to everything.
On one hand, she felt this was nothing major.
On the other hand, she vaguely felt that something was wrong.
Why would she feel like she was a god?
If others tried to kill her, she could naturally and without burden kill them in return.
But when others had not killed her, had not killed her companions, and she had no evidence proving what those people had done, she still killed many of them.
All based on likes and dislikes.
At the moment she made the choice, she had her own reasons. But faintly, she still felt that something that did not belong to her was gradually changing her.
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