18: Chapter 18 Under the Tree

When the dawn halo seeped down from the top of the gray fog like blood...

Jiang Ming was still suppressing the surging mass of energy within his body.

Preventing it from crossing the threshold.

Because the progress bar of the Great Evolution had already exceeded the limit.

That prompt line on the panel, "Do you want to enter the Great Evolution immediately?", flashed out every so often.

Annoying the tree like a pop-up ad.

But he could not sleep.

This hunting ground had just swallowed an entire three-man team plus three anomalies, and the bloody smell would take at least a whole day to dissipate.

Closing his eyes to hibernate for four to six hours now was equivalent to hanging his tree heart bare out in the wilderness, waiting for someone to come and dig it out.

Forcibly shifting his attention away from the evolution threshold, he began to check the status of his tree body.

Last night's combat intensity far exceeded any previous time.

Controlling Spore Infection, Tree Domain suppression, and Root Spike Raid simultaneously, while also maintaining the movement of the infected entities, stretched the energy consumption curve both steep and long.

Although the energy replenished by high-intensity devouring filled up the values, the physical bearing capacity of the tree body did not upgrade synchronously.

A few fine vertical cracks appeared on the main trunk, cracking into the surface of the bark by about half a centimeter.

Dark green viscous sap oozed from the edges of the cracks, solidifying into a translucent gelatinous substance in the morning light.

This was the sequela of growing too fast.

The bark could not keep up with the expansion rhythm of the tree heart, like a piece of clothing worn too small being stretched out at the seams.

If another fire attack came, these cracks would be natural fire-accelerating points.

The pain from Brother Liu's axe splitting his lateral root previously was still remembered in his tree heart.

And now he was nearly twice as tall as back then, with a larger target and thinner bark.

Once a torch was pressed against him, the consequences would be much more serious than the previous fire attack.

He needed a defense entry, needing it much more urgently than an attack entry!

The panel lit up.

[Daily Entry Unlocked — Obtained New Entry: Lignified Skin (Green)]

[Effect: Bark fiber density increased by 100%, fire resistance slightly enhanced, superficial root epidermis toughness + 50%. Passive: The exudate on the bark surface automatically condenses into a protective gelatinous layer, which can slow down moisture evaporation and slight physical scratching.]

Green.

The level was not high, the effect was not flashy, and it did not have cool words like "Critical Hit", "Piercing", or "Plunder Conversion Rate".

But when Jiang Ming saw this entry, his inner priority ranking directly pulled it to the same tier as Root Spread.

Because this was what he lacked the most right now.

Not attack power, but fault tolerance rate.

He equipped it immediately.

Then he did something he absolutely would not have done a few hours ago: taking the initiative to use a shallowly buried lateral root to touch the burning-sparked residual charcoal.

By the edge of the Wooden Cabin ruins, there were still a few pieces of incompletely burned hay and residual charcoal, dark red on the surface, not very high in temperature but definitely hot enough.

He extended a lateral root out from under the mud, the root tip gently touching the edge of the residual charcoal.

The burning pain was transmitted back, but it was completely different from last time.

Last time, as soon as the fire touched it, it burned through the epidermis, directly deducting fifteen points of energy value.

This time it was a slow, insulated dull pain. The root tip epidermis was baked until it was burning hot, but it did not crack immediately.

That newly secreted layer of colloid became thicker under the high temperature, like a transparent heat insulation film.

He held it motionless for about ten seconds, and the energy value only deducted three points. A few small blisters appeared on the root tip epidermis, but it did not break.

"Enough!!!"

The flame temperature of an ordinary torch was a bit higher than residual charcoal, but the fire resistance of Lignified Skin was not immunity; it was fault tolerance.

Previously, being burned by fire once would break the root.

Now, being burned by fire once, he could endure without retreating, could counterattack, and could hold on in the fire for a few more seconds to pull the root back.

In actual combat, the difference of these few seconds meant that he could launch an attack right under the feet of the person holding the torch.

Instead of having to shrink back the moment he saw the firelight.

It took a few minutes to integrate the effects of Lignified Skin with the existing root network.

The epidermis of all superficial roots gained an extra layer of dark gray fibrous material, which felt less like tree roots and more like aged leather.

The cracks on the main trunk were filled in by newly secreted colloid. Although it could not completely eliminate structural fatigue, at least it no longer oozed fluid.

No longer exposing weaknesses!

After patching the defense shortcomings, the conservative thought in his heart of "whether to first gather the hunting ground and temporarily not expand" was dispelled.

Strike while the iron is hot; this hunting ground had just swallowed three people, and the remaining traces and supplies were enough to attract another round of prey.

He categorized and processed the equipment left behind by Xu Hes Team.

Spear: Xu He's homemade bone spear. The spear tip was polished extremely well, and the bone density was very high, probably sawed and polished from the leg bone of a certain medium-sized anomaly.

Do not devour.

He inserted the spear diagonally into the ground at the entrance of the Wooden Cabin, with half a meter of the spear tail entering the soil and the spear tip facing outward, which was the optimal 45-degree angle.

Viewed from a distance in the fog, this angle looked like someone had hurriedly stuck the weapon down and ran into the house.

Ah Tang's rope hook was still entangling that fallen tree, with the hook stuck in the bark and unable to be pulled out.

Do not devour.

Leave it as it was, and scatter a few pieces of dry ration crumbs spilled from the backpack on the ground, pointing in the direction of the water source trail.

Tinder box: a small iron box flipped out from the side of the backpacker's bag, containing flint and carbonized cloth. One corner of the box was smashed flat, but it was still usable.

Devoured halfway: the carbonized cloth and tinder were devoured, while the flint was left behind and thrown onto the muddy ground, with a few messy footprints stepped beside it.

The logic of the entire scene had been rearranged: it was not that three people were eaten by a tree, but that three people encountered something here.

They fought, dispersed, some things were dropped on the ground and didn't have time to be picked up, and some things were stuck at the door and didn't have time to be pulled out.

When searchers saw this scene, their first reaction was not to run, but to rummage forward to see if they could pick up equipment.

As long as they rummaged, they would stay in place.

As long as they stayed, Tree Domain would take effect.

After arranging the supplies, he began to lay out the reconnaissance network.

The control upper limit of Spore Infection expanded from three to five; this was quietly updated on the panel after devouring the backpacker and the two infected entities.

There was no big pop-up prompt, hidden in the small text of the entry's detailed data.

He infected two Grey-haired Rats and one Carrion Crow.

The first Grey-haired Rat was placed by the mud pit in the middle section of the water source trail, half-hidden under the rotting leaves, specifically monitoring the movements of the water-fetching route.

The second one was placed under the bed board of the Wooden Cabin ruins, facing the direction of the back window to guard inside the house.

The Carrion Crow landed on the scorched thatch of the Wooden Cabin roof.

Standing in the exact same position as the one yesterday, monitoring the open space in front of the Wooden Cabin and the outer edge of the fog in the southeast direction from a high vantage point.

"Three-point reconnaissance network!"

It was just a prototype; the range covered by the three infected entities combined was less than a hundred-meter radius.

But it was already much stronger than previously relying entirely on root perception to passively wait for prey to step on his face.

With eyes, he could judge in advance whether what was coming was a human or a beast.

Whether it was a lone traveler or a team, whether to fight, and where to fight.

After laying out the reconnaissance network, he began to tally his battle results.

The data on the panel jumped two tiers in succession.

Maximum health value 620, maximum energy value 580, agility stacked from the initial single digit to 31.

Strength stacked to 45, Root Spike cooldown 8 seconds, spore control 5, Fear Perception directional tracking within one hundred meters.

This was no longer within the ecological niche of an F-grade anomaly.

The standard combat power reference for F-grade was the Three-Eyed Corrupt Wolf: thick-skinned, fleshy, possessing a certain degree of mutation ability, but lacking tactical intelligence, relying on instinct when fighting alone.

If he faced a Rot Wolf now, he could fight it head-on.

The lethality of Root Spike's frontal piercing already exceeded ordinary iron short spears, and an 8-second cooldown meant that two to three spikes could be produced in a single skirmish, not to count the weakening effect of Tree Domain suppression.

The estimated combat power was around the mid-upper tier of E-grade. After a while, if the Great Evolution was completed, touching the edge of D-grade was not impossible.

The reconnaissance crow transmitted back a new signal.

Not a large predator, but small things: two Grey-haired Rats came from the direction of the water source.

A hedgehog-sized hard beetle crawled out of the bushes on the east side of the Wooden Cabin, and three Carrion Crows flew past in the southeast direction.

The appearance frequency of small creatures was obviously higher than the previous few days.

It was not because of good luck, but because his patch of land had fought three major battles in a row.

The Rot Wolf plus the three-man group half-crippled, the three Hyenas plus Brother Liu completely annihilated, and Xu Hes Team plus two Hyenas and a rotten deer wiped out.

Every battle would permeate a large amount of blood and tissue fluid into the soil. These nutrients fermented and diffused in the foggy environment, forming a high-concentration life signal belt with a radius of over two hundred meters.

Small scavenging creatures were attracted, small scavenging creatures then attracted medium-sized predators, and medium-sized predators attracted even larger things.

The local ecological vortex had already formed.

The value of the hunting ground was naturally rising; it was no longer him actively going outside to find food, but the food swimming into his mouth by itself.

Following the path when Xu He's three came, he pushed his root system further in the southeast direction.

The advancement efficiency of the lateral roots reinforced by Lignified Skin in the gravelly soil layer was slightly lower than before.

The epidermal hardness had come up, so penetrating power would naturally be sacrificed a bit, but its advantage was that it was not easily scratched by sharp gravel and could continue operating in more complex soil textures.

When pushed to a position about ninety meters away from the main body, the root system encountered traces of artificial logging.

Not one or two axes, but a whole patch.

Several dead trees as thick as a wrist were chopped off at the roots, the cut surfaces were flat, the logging direction was consistent, and the trunks were dragged away.

Nearby, there were also several simple marking stones, piled into palm-sized small piles with white stones, spaced about every thirty meters a pile, obviously used as road signs to locate routes in the fog.

Pushing further forward, more footprints were discovered—not one or two groups, but mixed, compacted dirt paths formed by repeated stepping with different sole textures.

The number of people in that sanctuary in the southeast direction was at least five, and more likely even more.

Moreover, they were not the type to hide and not come out.

They had stable outgoing routes, logging operations, a road sign system, and secret codes.

These were not survivors; they were settlers!

Jiang Ming did not let the root system continue to feel forward.

Further ahead was the perimeter alert range of their sanctuary. Xu Hes Team had just gone missing, and the other party had a high probability of having raised their guard.

Stepping in now was equivalent to exposing the extension distance and direction of himself.

The optimal solution was not a hard attack, but cutting off the road.

Turn all passages between their sanctuary and this area into hunting grounds, making them lose people every time they came out.

Every time they went back, they would bring lower sanity and fewer supplies, until they voluntarily gave up this road, or took the whole nest out.

And taking the whole nest out was what he wanted: accepting a team fight in a hunting ground he was completely familiar with.

It was much more cost-effective than attacking a well-defended sanctuary.

The reconnaissance crow suddenly transmitted back a burst of rapid wing-flapping feedback, followed by an interruption of vision.

It wasn't that it flew far away; it was directly cut off, and the infection signal jumped from "normal" to "none" within fractions of a second.

That Carrion Crow landed on the branch of a dead tree in the direction of the water source, about sixty meters away from the main body.

The picture last transmitted back by vision was that a large shadow suddenly covered down from above, and then there was nothing.

Something in the air bit it to pieces in one bite.

In the fog of the Outer Ring, there was still a threat he hadn't figured out yet, in the air.

Its size was much larger than the Carrion Crow, and its flight made no sound, or at least the Carrion Crow didn't hear any sound.

This in itself was the most terrifying point.

He pulled Fear Perception outward to its maximum range.

There was indeed a fear signal in the direction of the water source—not human, medium intensity, moving extremely fast. After diving from the air, it pulled high again, and within a few seconds, it escaped the hundred-meter range. It didn't come back.

Probably uninterested in the tree demon, or just passing by. But he marked this direction.

Further out from the water source, deeper in the fog, there existed an aerial predator capable of instantly killing E-grade combat power.

At dusk, the Outer Ring root system touched new movements again.

On the west side, about eighty-five meters away from the main body, a string of footsteps.

Lighter than humans, the indentation of each step was shallower, but the rhythm was very neat, not the irregular short steps of beasts wandering around.

Instead, the landing points of the front and back feet almost formed a straight line, with uniform spacing, like marching in a formation.

Scavenger types were not this large, Hyena types had a more scattered stride than this, and it was neither a deer nor a bear.

There were no other living people nearby!

They were coming!