Chapter 119: Nightmare-Level Difficulty

Southern District, Heavenly Mystery Workshop, the meat shop residence.

In the master bedroom, Li Yu was checking the items he needed to carry into the Weird Domain.

The most important ones were the ten spirit pills currently suspended before him.

Four Sword Pellet Pills.

Six Heartless Pills.

The latter should have been more numerous; after all, they were refined after his skills had greatly advanced, and he had prepared enough materials for ten full portions.

However, the refining difficulty was even higher, and even the slightest imperfection in heat control would lead to failure; being able to produce six was already a result of good fortune.

Besides these two types of pills that guaranteed combat power, other large quantities of pills, stamen nectar, holy book knives, and the handwritten notes of Zhu Zhu Zhishan could also be packed into the storage sachet to be brought inside.

This made Li Yu faintly perceive a small bug in the Demon Star Order and the Reincarnation Heavenly Net.

"Items such as the sachet, the handwritten notes of Zhu Zhu Zhishan, and the book knives are not from my sequence, yet they can still be brought in and out of the Weird Domain, simply because these exotic items were obtained by me within the Weird Domain."

"Doesn't this mean: all Order Holders and Reincarnators can use this trick to bypass the rules, such as exchanging exotic items with each other, to obtain more powerful combat strength, thereby increasing the pass rate and plundering merit points from the Demon Star Order and the Reincarnation Heavenly Net?"

This thought arose.

Li Yu pondered for a while, then shook his head and denied it:

"It is feasible, but the effect is not great, and it might even have the opposite effect."

"After all, in every mission, the participants are at most one sequence apart, and the exotic items that can be exchanged will not have too large a span; plus, the weakening of the exotic items' power by different paths makes it a waste of effort."

"Another thing is that using this loophole to increase the pass rate will inevitably trigger the rules and be thrown into high-risk dungeons by the two great artifacts, leading to a faster death."

When Li Yu figured this out and handed the Holy Nest Rubik's Cube, the Compassionate Heart Knife, and other items in the sachet to Hongdou for safekeeping, the long-awaited voice in his mind arrived.

"The time has come!"

"Please, Order Holder with the codename 'Calamity Star', prepare yourself; this summons will take effect in ten breaths."

"Ten!"

"Nine!"

"Eight!"

"Hmm?"

Having just broken free from the trance of teleportation, Li Yu fell into horror and terror without warning.

The moment he opened his eyes, Li Yu shuddered violently, goosebumps rising all over his body, and an indescribable sense of weirdness swept over him.

He saw people, many people.

Men, women, the elderly, and children were surrounding him incredibly closely, all with their eyes open, blinking not even once, just staring straight at him.

Moreover, there were more and more people, with more constantly arriving.

From top to bottom, they were surrounded tightly, with almost no gaps, and Li Yu could not even see the surrounding environment.

Even though Li Yu knew that every "birth" would be protected by the Demon Star barrier, he could not help but shudder continuously due to the surging, endless cold malice.

One must know, he was now a Sequence Seven Alchemist.

And these people staring at him seemed to be mere mortals?

Before he could understand the reason, the notification sound of the Demon Star Order in his mind arrived belatedly:

"Mission opening... Opening failed!"

"Every Order Holder must complete a prerequisite mission before triggering a conquest mission: 【Survival】."

"Please, Order Holder, leave the drop-off point alive within half an hour."

"Upon success, you may obtain two hundred merit points."

"..."

When the notification sound faded, a strong desire to complain also erupted in Li Yu's heart.

What the hell?

One must leave the drop-off point alive to truly trigger the mission?

What if one dies?

Can just the drop-off point kill a Demon Star Order Holder who is at least on their third conquest?

Question after question surged in Li Yu's mind.

But he had no time to think at all, because he discovered that the barrier in front of him was becoming thinner bit by bit, clearly about to disappear soon.

And those "Weird Domain residents" who looked like mortals seemed to have discovered this as well, all revealing looks of greed and longing.

The bodies of every one of them suddenly changed.

In just a few breaths, Li Yu watched with his own eyes as a young girl with fair skin began to grow a large number of black spots and holes on her body, and the same on her face, dense and numerous, as if countless sesame seeds had been pasted on her... and another man, in an instant, grew pustules all over his body; without needing to be squeezed, a crackling sound was heard, and pus splattered like raindrops...

Amidst the drastic changes, Li Yu heard the malicious pleas that the men, women, old, and young spat out toward him.

"Outsider, the savior has come."

"It's finally our turn; stay, Outsider, we can satisfy you with anything."

"Take it away, take the curse on my body away."

"Give it to him, give it all to him."

Listening to these words and watching arm after arm reaching out toward him, Li Yu only felt a chill rush straight to his forehead.

He had a premonition: being touched by any hand would lead to infection or being cursed.

Even if he was Sequence Seven, even if an Alchemist possessed strong resistance, it would still be ineffective.

The next moment, the barrier disappeared.

Although Li Yu was extremely fast and used his last Skin-Peeling Weird Pill to enter a void state, avoiding being touched.

Yet in that instant, Li Yu still felt that he had been hit.

Because his eyes involuntarily watched a woman with a dull expression and another man who was equally dull, their bodies suddenly sticking together, twisting from head to toe like a twisted dough twist.

The intense shock brought by this scene made his scalp tingle. Following closely, the prompt sound in his mind confirmed this:

"The Order Holder has been infected by the 【Spiral Curse】... You will be affected by the curse at irregular intervals, and your body will undergo a spiral entanglement phenomenon."

"If you cannot resist, you will die."

"Infected just by looking?"

"This kind of pollution curse, even my Alchemist body cannot resist it?"

In the past two conquest missions, the Demon Star Order only popped up during the triggering and settlement stages.

This time, however, it gave a prompt very considerately.

But precisely because of this, Li Yu did not feel it was a good thing; instead, he felt an extremely terrifying omen of death flickering.

And, it was soon fulfilled.

Li Yu had just used his void body to break out of the encirclement and saw clearly the environment he was in; it seemed to be a dilapidated ancient town built along a river.

All the buildings were gray-white, ancient and dim, and the sky was also a grayish color, as if the sun hanging high above was fake.

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Apart from the piles surrounding him, the rest of the townspeople were also dull-faced, moving slowly, like walking corpses.

And before he could take a few more looks, that group of townspeople carrying various pollution curses scattered with a clatter, their heads turning to search for Li Yu's tracks everywhere.

Shouts rose one after another.

"Outsider, where are you?"

"Save us, please."

"Stay, you can do anything to us."

"Found him... over there!"

As the last sentence entered his ears, while Li Yu felt it was incredibly absurd, he also felt a long-lost fear.

The reason?

He had manifested.

Normally, the Weird Pill, which could last for a hundred breaths, had actually failed in just a few breaths.

Li Yu's flesh-and-blood body appeared on a rooftop.

At this time, he had just escaped less than ten zhang.

And at the same time as he appeared, a "click-clack" sound suddenly came from within Li Yu's body, and an invisible force was actually trying to twist him from the inside out.

It seemed to want to use his two legs as two strands of a dough twist to wring him into one.

Although in the blink of an eye, it was forcibly offset by the resistance of the Alchemist's dharma body itself and the power of the demon body.

But Li Yu still could not help but spit out a mouthful of blood; this was the side effect of his internal organs being twisted into a ball.

"What kind of hellish place is this?"

Li Yu could not care about anything else and dared not look around anymore.

After cursing loudly, he directly swallowed a Sword Fiend Pill, perfectly disguised as a sword cultivator, and fled headlong toward the outside of the ancient town.

But before long, he was forced to fall out of the sword light, as the medicinal effect of the Sword Fiend Pill had also been shortened.

And at this moment, the clicking sound of his body twisting came again, the force even greater than before, and Li Yu vomited blood again.

What was worse, as soon as he turned his head, he immediately saw the large group of men, women, old, and young townspeople behind him, each of them transformed into "abnormal species," running wildly toward him in pursuit.

They grinned and laughed, shaking their faces and tongues, their eyeballs with too much white bulging out, calling for Li Yu, this outsider.

No matter how handsome or beautiful.

Revealing such expressions and postures would make them become extremely ugly.

And as luck would have it, when Li Yu turned his head to look, he was struck once again.

He watched with his own eyes as many of the slow-moving townspeople behind him suddenly underwent a strange transformation; in the blink of an eye, their bodies became bloated, viscous, and slick, turning into snails with human heads that dragged long, corrosive trails of slime as they crawled onto rooftops and walls.

"The Order Master has been infected by the 【Vortex Curse】... from now on, you will be affected at every moment."

"If you cannot resist, you will be assimilated."

In an instant, the world in Li Yu's eyes changed.

Previously, this ancient town had only seemed dilapidated and old to him, as if it had been forcibly dug out from the years of the past.

But now, it was more than that; he began to see vortices everywhere.

The vortex patterns on the wall bricks and blue tiles, the whirlpools in the river, the vortices in the eyes of the men and women chasing him—even their hair seemed to curl up into vortex shapes, and the sky was no longer a great sun, but a massive, constantly rotating vortex...

On Li Yu's face, just like those townspeople, a look of dull obsession began to emerge, as if he too had found his final resting place.

Until the next moment!

He blinked his eyes, and clarity returned.

The last shred of reason he had forcibly locked away was still effective in this situation.

At the same time he broke free, those strange creatures behind Li Yu had already leaped up one after another, pouncing toward him.

"Even just a single glance will result in being tainted by the curse."

"It cannot be removed... it stacks... and it will become increasingly severe."

"No wonder the mortality rate of this strange domain is so absurdly high; no wonder neither the righteous nor the evil factions have been able to conquer this place. This is already nightmare-level difficulty."

"Entangled slaughter is likely not the path to survival; to pass this survival mission, one needs to..."

Li Yu did not say a word, his mind racing with thoughts.

Outwardly, he directly closed his eyes and began to consume elixirs.

A full dozen Sword Fiend Pills were stuffed into his mouth all at once, his teeth clattered together, and the elixir fire within his body erupted violently.

A streak of fiery sword light!

In this gray and dim ancient town, it exploded.

(End of chapter)