Chapter 2 The Next Morning

Outside Xinmeng Town.

On the winding dirt road, three figures in full black can-style leather armor, draped in dusty gray cloaks and carrying long sabers, carefully patrolled the road, inching their way into the distance.

"I didn't expect the blood-bodied monsters to have invaded so close. I hope the Blood Watch arrive as soon as possible. We probably can't hold out for long on our own."

The figure in the lead said in a low, aged voice.

"Are you sure they're invading?" one of the others asked suddenly from behind.

The other two fell silent.

After walking another hundred meters, the lead figure spoke again.

"Less talk like that in the future."

"Hey, I heard that Granny Sun from North Second Street disappeared suddenly the other day. Her husband, two sons, and daughter were all found brutally murdered at home. The injuries looked like they were beaten to death with clubs. But when the authorities were notified, Officer Wang was all set to investigate, but the town..."

"Careful what you say! Liu Zhao, there are some things that are best not mentioned, even out here in the wilds," the old leader interrupted sternly.

"..." Liu Zhao's face under his helmet was shadowed, his lips twitching, but he didn't speak again.

The three walked another three hundred meters before the old leader slowly drew the slender silver saber from his back.

The blade was thick on one side and sharp on the other – a single-edged sword.

The tip was also ingeniously crafted into a hook shape, so that once it pierced a wound, it would tear out a large chunk of flesh.

It was extremely vicious.

All three sabers were like this.

The nearly two-meter-long silver single-edged sabers, held in their hands, clearly gave them a greater sense of security.

"From here on out, everyone be on high alert. Keep a firm grip on your guard sabers!" the old leader instructed.

"Yes!"

The two responded in unison.

The sabers in their hands were called guard sabers, and they were the patrolmen's specialized weapons for dealing with blood-bodied monsters.

The three continued on in silence, heading towards the area where Wang Yichen and the trade caravan had run into trouble.

A cool breeze blew, and the crows cawing from some of the withered trees on the surrounding black earth sounded strangely eerie.

By now, the three were two kilometers outside the town.

They were still a long way from where the trade caravan had been attacked.

But inexplicably, a peculiar and indescribable atmosphere slowly permeated their hearts.

All three were experts in the Iron Gate Horizontal Saber technique. Within Xinmeng Town, apart from the town general and a few older seniors, they were among the strongest.

After all, more practical experience meant faster improvement in martial arts.

Normally, ordinary beasts and blood beasts were just free meals for them.

But now...

*Whoosh!*

A red shadow flashed past.

"Kill!!"

The old leader gripped his saber with both hands, his muscles suddenly expanding slightly.

He unleashed four silver flashes with the 'Revolving Four Fans' technique from his saber art.

At the same time, the other two used the same move, creating a total of twelve blades of light that completely covered the three of them, forming a huge circle.

*Clang clang!*

Just then, two single-edged sabers accurately struck something.

Before the two could rejoice, an immense force pulled them away in an instant.

"Ah!!"

The screams were cut short in less than a second.

The last remaining leader staggered back, gasping for breath, his eyes under his helmet filled with terror.

"This... How could it have entered its complete form so quickly?!"

Cold sweat poured out of him, soaking his inner clothing.

Just then, a red shadow appeared beside him in an instant.

Fast!

Incomparably fast!

Almost weightless. The red shadow suddenly appeared to the old man's left, raising a hand to stab.

*Pfft!*

Blood splattered everywhere.

Soon after, the sound of a corpse hitting the ground.

* * *

The Wang Residence.

Li Cheng Yi sat at the stone table in the backyard, looking up at the blood-red morning sun. Even the morning sun here gave off an unsettling, viscous feeling.

Unlike the clear and vibrant morning sun of his original reality, this one, despite just rising, still carried a sense of twilight.

He wore simple gray cotton underwear, covered with a black rat pelt cloak to ward off the wind.

Sitting in the courtyard, he drank the ginger tea that this body's mother had just brewed and sent over.

The steaming ginger tea, with red dates and wolfberries, made him realize that the basic food ingredients in this place seemed similar to those in other places.

"How are you feeling today? Are you recovering a little?"

Wang Yifeng, the constable, strode into the courtyard in his black boots, a dark red and white waist-tied outfit, an arm-wide thick-backed official saber hanging from his waist, and a square black hat inlaid with jade. His face was full of fierce flesh.

"Much better. Thanks to mother for brewing the ginger tea," Li Cheng Yi replied, using Wang Yichen's tone, and stood up respectfully.

"That's good. Train hard in martial arts in the future, and don't go wandering around. The world isn't what it used to be. Even bandits and robbers don't dare stay out there now; they're all building walled strongholds. If you run into a red-eye, you'll die without even knowing how you died," Wang Yifeng warned.

"Father, what exactly is a red-eye? If you encountered one, could you kill it?" Li Cheng Yi asked, his face showing seriousness.

"I don't know..." Wang Yifeng shook his head. "All I know is that this disease is completely transmitted through blood. In other words, you won't have a chance to hurt them. If that thing flicks some blood at you... if you get infected... then it's certain death."

He paused.

"Also, red-eyes are generally divided into three stages: incubation, red-eye, and blood-body. Each stage produces terrifying strength that increases by leaps and bounds. Your old man here has been practicing the Loose Deer Saber Technique for nearly twenty years; I can handle the incubation stage no problem. As for the rest, that's beyond us; we can only rely on the Blood Watch."

He sat down on the stone bench next to Li Cheng Yi.

"This is all too far off for you. Just focus on practicing martial arts at home, so you don't end up seriously injured and having to recuperate like this all the time."

"Since the red-eyes are so powerful, why don't they come to town to kill people? Why do they only appear in the wild?" Li Cheng Yi asked, voicing his inner doubts. "The Blood Watch hasn't come yet, right?"

"Because there's the town general," Wang Yifeng laughed. "The town general usually doesn't interfere, but at critical moments, he can hold back even a blood-body."

"The town general is that powerful?" Li Cheng Yi was taken aback.

He was about to ask something else.

Suddenly, a constable rushed into the courtyard, also wearing dark red and white trimmed clothing and black boots, but without a hat.

"Constable! The town guard wants you to come over immediately!"

"I know, do you know what it's about?" Wang Yifeng asked casually, standing up.

"It's about the three Iron Gate Horizontal Saber patrolmen... When it was time for their shift change, they didn't return to the town guard. Someone was sent to investigate and found a lot of blood where they were patrolling..." the constable said solemnly.

Wang Yifeng's expression turned serious upon hearing this.

In terms of strength, he was only slightly stronger than these three patrolmen. If he fought them one-on-three, he would definitely lose.

Yet such a group had disappeared together outside?

"Let's go!"

He stood up and left.

He took a few steps, then turned back to look at Li Cheng Yi.

"You stay here at home and focus on practicing martial arts and recuperating. You're not allowed to go out. You hear me?!"

"I understand."

Li Cheng Yi nodded.

"I'll have Second Brother keep an eye on you in a bit," Wang Yifeng said, then led the constable quickly toward the town guardhouse.

Leaving Li Cheng Yi sitting back in his original position, lost in thought.

'This place actually has martial arts... I wonder how its power compares to that of combat techniques.'

In his memories, the former Wang Yichen had only learned some basic fist and foot techniques, and hadn't even entered the gate of the family's Loose Deer Saber Technique.

In his memories, when his father, Wang Yifeng, practiced the saber at home, he could occasionally unleash a wisp of saber energy.

This was much stronger than the combat skills of Yi Country.

That place mainly used genetic drugs and various scientific instruments in conjunction with monitoring to pursue the limits of the human body.

Here, however, they seemed to be following a completely different path.

Thinking of this, Li Cheng Yi calmed down.

Now that he had come to this place, he would first learn the unique skills of this world.

He had gained great benefits from this in the City of Dying Angels.

Having tasted the sweetness of success, he didn't plan on letting it pass him by this time.

He moved around in the courtyard.

He got up and strolled around.

The black soil on the ground was no different from the outside.

The air temperature was around twenty-three or twenty-four degrees Celsius, neither cold nor hot. The humidity was probably around sixty or seventy percent, comfortable.

It was just that the wind was a bit strong, and when it blew through the surrounding cracks, he could always hear a strange howling sound from who knows where, which was a bit scary.

After wandering around the courtyard, Li Cheng Yi walked to the courtyard wall, reached out, touched it, and pressed it.

The wall was full of granules, gray-black in color, with a rough surface that had not been smoothed. It seemed to be mixed with a lot of gray-white hard objects, and he didn't know what material it was.

Several centipede-like multi-legged insects crawled slowly in the corner of the wall.

Li Cheng Yi pinched the head of one with his hand, picked it up, and examined it carefully.

'This is a centipede, but... the size seems a bit too big.'

He had only seen dark red centipedes as thick as two fingers side by side in the laboratory in his previous life, and had never seen them in the wild.

He dropped the insect, checked the environment, and walked out of the courtyard. Outside was a larger square garden.

To his left was the main house, where Wang Yifeng and his wife had their living room, study, bedroom, and so on.

To the right was the main gate.

And directly in front of him were the residences of his second sister, Wang Yiheng, and his eldest brother, Wang Yijue.

The two small courtyards were next to each other. Looking from here, his second sister, Wang Yiheng, was watering flowers.

Flowers!?

Li Cheng Yi's heart stirred, and he looked more closely.

Sure enough, in his second sister's small courtyard, a kind of small purple and white-edged flower was planted.

Each flower had five petals, with the center and outer edges pure white, and the petals pure purple. The colors were extremely pure, with high contrast.

Looking at it from a distance, it gave people a fresh and comfortable feeling.

'That's... *Ruellia simplex*.' Li Cheng Yi didn't expect that he could still see familiar flowers here.

This quickly dispelled a faint trace of worry in his heart.

As long as there were familiar flowers, he might be able to further collect the flower energy within them, and then acquire a new main flower.

"Second Sister," he strode over. "Are you taking care of the flower garden?"

"Yeah, Little Brother, is your body feeling better?" Wang Yiheng was a little absent-minded.

But seeing Li Cheng Yi approaching with a brisk stride and looking spirited, a trace of relief appeared on her face.

"Much better, but I lost too much blood and I'm still a little weak," Li Cheng Yi replied. "Where's Big Brother?"

"He's the same as always, still in the old house, locking himself in his room, practicing martial arts like crazy," Wang Yiheng sighed.

"What exactly is Big Brother thinking?" Li Cheng Yi frowned. Fragments of memories in his brain resurfaced at this time.

The purpose of Wang Yichen's eldest brother, Wang Yijue, locking himself up and practicing martial arts like crazy seemed to be to practice a martial art called Frenzied Blood Art.

Once this martial art was mastered, it could allow a person to gain enormous power under great life-or-death stimuli and emotional stimuli.

Wang Yijue wanted to achieve this step, but unfortunately, after five years, he still hadn't accomplished anything.

"He's going crazy. Last night, after we came back from handling affairs, Father and Mother went to see him and told him about you, but he wouldn't open the door. Father beat him twice on the spot, but it was still useless. He won't give up even if it kills him," Wang Yiheng shook her head.

She looked at her younger brother and said softly.

"Now everyone in town is panicking. If everyone didn't know that it was even more dangerous to go out, I'm afraid that most people would have run away. I'm not saying this to you, Little Brother, but you should calm down. After this incident, you should follow Father and us and practice martial arts properly, so that in case something unexpected happens in the future..." She didn't finish her sentence, but the meaning was clear.

"This time, I almost lost my life coming back, and I've figured things out. It's time to practice martial arts properly," Li Cheng Yi said.

"You've figured it out? Can you stick with it this time?" Wang Yiheng raised her eyebrows.

"Yes, I definitely can this time!" Li Cheng Yi nodded seriously.

He merged with this body, gradually replacing it with himself. With his own Triple Dragon Realm state, which had reached its limit, coupled with the Radiant Force Field that could restore injuries and stamina at any time, as well as the various superimposed enhancements of the Seven Emotions Sacred Spirit Art and the Flower Scale Clothes and Flower Language Beads.

And finally, the Shadow Dragon Bloodline boost.

With such physical qualities, practicing the martial arts of this place would definitely be easy and effortless.

Once he had a bit of foundation, he could blend in with the crowd and try to face the various anomalies here together.

Most importantly, only by integrating into this place could he investigate the situation of the Iridescent Dragon through various channels, and whether the Divine Limit Heart Formula was really what he thought it was before.

If it was, then how was it connected to his reality?

(End of Chapter)