Chapter 90

[Steel Bone lv2]

One of the many inconspicuous low-level skills in the skill library.

Although it wasn't a recovery skill, just as expected, after equipping this skill and supplying mana, the shattered bones were indeed replaced by the steel bones generated by the skill, effectively achieving the effect of setting the bones.

[Claw Strike lv7]

A skill possessed by most beast-type monsters, but when installed on a Puji, the place where the claws grew out was actually those two little short feet...

After equipping it on Norris at the beginning, his fingernails were replaced by 10-centimeter-long bone claws, and after adding [Steel Bone], the bone claws began to transform into steel bone claws.

Lin Jun had long known about this kind of linkage between skills, and now it seemed it was equally effective on humans.

[Neurotoxin lv4]

After equipping it, he began to be repeatedly paralyzed and lose health from the toxins produced by his own body, and Lin Jun had to add [Toxin Resistance lv5] and [Paralysis Resistance lv5] to him to avoid him becoming a vegetable.

[Mushroom Cannon lv8]

Norris lay on the fungal mat, unaware, as one skill after another was slowly added.

A Puji on the side would occasionally use its bladed tentacles to slice open his skin and flesh, observing the changes inside his body.

Under the swamp area, the Knight rolled up a pen and recorded all of this onto a piece of parchment.

Adding skills was a slow process; Norris's first stage of modification would take about a week.

During this time, Lin Jun naturally couldn't just do this one thing.

As a very busy mushroom, he was also simultaneously controlling the scouts and commanding the battle on the sixth layer.

Things were fine on the scout side for now; with the help of his good big brother, Dylan was doing well for the time being.

And on the sixth layer, the carrot Lin Jun gave the Treant worked; more and more Treants were willing to come out and work, and now there were nearly forty of them.

And the very first Treant had even defected to Lin Jun directly, starting to call him Boss.

To make it easier to call him, Lin Jun even gave it a name—Little Green.

Lin Jun also felt it was strange to name an old piece of tree bark Little Green, but since there was already a Blackie, he wondered if he could form a five-color team; he remembered there was a blue-haired one among the werewolves...

With the addition of the Treants, Lin Jun opened up the situation on the ground.

As excellent pathfinders on the sixth layer, Treants were also qualified meat shields with crowd-control skills.

Lin Jun had them each command at least 10 Puji to clear out Slimes on the ground.

With them, the pressure on the rock walls was greatly reduced, and Lin Jun could lay a larger area of fungal mat at once; now the furthest had reached the dome where Slimes couldn't reach, and they had started to consume the Firefly Grass.

It could be said that the battle on the sixth layer was now a foregone conclusion.

It was just that these mindless Slimes obviously didn't realize this and were still jumping out from everywhere without a moment's pause.

Lin Jun's focus also shifted from advancing the fungal mat to finding the source of the Slimes.

"Boss, come and take a look." Little Green seemed to have discovered something.

Honestly, being called Boss by a Treant's aged voice was still quite awkward, even more awkward than when Dylan called him that...

Lin Jun shifted his vision and found that it and the twelve Puji under its command were guarding a patch of grass.

What did that mean?

But soon Lin Jun understood.

The grass in the middle suddenly swayed, and before long, a red Slime crawled out from inside.

Before the Slime could jump away, Little Green strode forward, and with a [Trunk Heavy Strike], smashed the Slime to pieces.

Afterward, it pulled out all the surrounding weeds, revealing a crack half a meter long and no more than a finger wide, from which the sound of flowing water could be faintly heard.

Underground runoff? No wonder he had such a good view of the rock walls he occupied but couldn't find where the Slimes were coming from; if they were moving to various locations via the underground water network before drilling out, then that made sense.

This could also be considered a blind spot in Lin Jun's thinking.

After all, he was "underground" himself, and there was no such thing as underground water flow in the first five layers, so he really hadn't thought of it for a moment.

But this was troublesome; with that kind of body, Slimes could drill through any kind of crack and move through it unimpeded.

Although Puji could squeeze and deform a bit if they tried hard, they definitely couldn't compare to the former.

Even if he knew the Slime source was hidden in the underground water network, he couldn't find it along this network for a while.

Seeming to see Lin Jun's annoyance, Little Green took the initiative to propose:

"I might be able to help you explore the underground water network."

As it spoke, Little Green stepped on the edge of the crack, and the roots on its feet moved downward, piercing into the soil.

Lin Jun was stunned watching this.

Come to think of it, Treants were different from mushrooms; they couldn't directly collect mana from the air, or rather, they could, but the efficiency was very low.

When they rested in the forest, they were all rooted in the ground, absorbing nutrients and mana from the soil.

He just didn't expect they could also rely on their roots to explore underground!

Little Green proceeded step by step, rooting itself along the underground waterway.

At this time, it had no time to help the Puji clear the path, and even had to be protected by the Puji because it wasn't convenient for it to move quickly.

Facing the monsters that came to the door, Lin Jun wasn't coy, ordering the Puji to decisively fire back.

Clearing out a small number of monsters at this time wouldn't cause any trouble for the sixth-layer ecosystem.

Along the way, using the panel to find those hidden plant-type monsters one by one and taking them out from afar, the Puji didn't even lose a single one.

However, after moving for an hour, the mana ran out...

This was also normal; the team Little Green brought had already been exploring for a long time, and this hour had consumed a large amount of mana.

Just as Lin Jun intended to call for a pause, Little Green stopped first.

"What's wrong?" Lin Jun asked.

"Sorry Boss, the underground waterway is too deep here, my roots can't reach it..."

The Treant seemed a bit embarrassed; after all, the plan it proposed hadn't worked and had wasted so much time instead.

But Lin Jun didn't feel it was a waste.

"Then go back first. I'll give you a map of the sixth layer later. Starting tomorrow, you will set out to explore all the relatively shallow underground waterways of the sixth layer, and then summarize and draw them onto the map."

These words were not only said to Little Green but also conveyed through the fungal network to all the Treants active on the sixth layer.

Lin Jun's idea was that if the Slime production points were in the shallow waterways, they would be found directly by the Treants.

If they were in locations that couldn't be detected, by summarizing the waterway network, Lin Jun could also roughly determine which area the deeper waterways were in, and then he could focus on checking those locations.

If necessary, he would just dig down directly.

He wanted to see what kind of thing it was that could hide so sneakily!

In fact, Lin Jun still had a small fantasy—that this thing could produce so many Slimes meant it had sufficient energy!

And according to experience, maybe... it was another Sunstone fragment?

Now Lin Jun's [Sunstone (Fragment)] was the result of two fragments spliced together, and the amount of mana produced through [Photosynthesis] was roughly equivalent to the total mana production of the fifth layer.

If he added another fragment, wouldn't the mana output increase by at least 50%?

With more mana, maybe his later Elite Puji plan could be mass-produced on a small scale?

"Yes." After receiving Lin Jun's order, the Treants replied one by one in the fungal network.

Hmm?

Lin Jun keenly noticed that one reply was missing.

He sensed it and found that Treant near a Puji that had entered a hang-up state after losing its command, or rather, he found its corpse...