Exploring the Outer Domain truly consumed energy, to the point that the vast majority of his consciousness had been invested in the Demon Sword. Most of his remaining bodies had taken a portion of consciousness with them into sleep to replenish their strength, while the main body, which no longer even had time to play with Lika, stood guard before the cheat screen, ready at all times to provide the Demon Sword with intelligence support.
At this moment, at the end of that dark, deep-purple sky, a thin line of pale dawn had already begun to appear. The Demon Sword climbed onto a small hilltop and gazed out over the environment at the foot of the hill.
Along the way, he had discovered quite a few small animals, but not a single one that could actually be eaten. It seemed the common survival strategy of the small animals here was to make themselves unappetizing.
Thinking of that “squirrel” that could easily leap more than ten meters in a single bound, yet whose body was almost entirely filled with “water,” the Demon Sword was speechless. More than once, he had begun to suspect whether this Outer Domain was truly on the same planet as the Gelian where his main body was located.
“High-energy reaction detected!”
Suddenly, the life-sensing system issued a warning. In order to avoid those fungal carpets, the Demon Sword had raised the threshold of the life-detection system, and now, at long last, the system had produced a result.
The Demon Sword, who had been traveling all night, felt his spirits lift. Source energy reset the fatigue in his body, and his bright, gleaming eyes locked firmly onto the map. It was a location roughly eight hundred meters away. From where the Demon Sword currently stood, all he could see was a cluster of stone pillars tinged with a hint of green.
Judging from the feedback of the life detection, this thing’s life energy level had to be higher than that earlier cockle. With an ecological niche like this, it probably wasn’t the sort of passive layabout that relied on being unappetizing to deter predators. So… it should have a sufficiently safe nest, right?
Without the slightest hesitation, the Demon Sword directly activated Mirage. Although it would reduce his speed to one-tenth, at the very least, it could prevent the possibility of being discovered in advance.
A distance of eight hundred meters, for the current Demon Sword, was something he could reach calmly in just over ten seconds even after slowing to ten percent of his normal speed. He unhurriedly circled around a massive boulder, but the sight before him made him pause slightly.
It wasn’t that this thing was especially strange. Rather, compared to all those bizarrely shaped things he had seen after entering the Outer Domain map, the creature before his eyes was simply far too normal!
Its bear-like, burly body was around ten meters tall. Thick, hard, brownish-gray fur covered it, and layered keratin plates overlapped around its joints. Its limbs were stout, its claws sharp. Its head was relatively small, with a protruding mouth that revealed a row of sawtooth-like teeth.
If one had to point out something incongruous, it would be the long, flexible tail trailing behind it, far longer than its body, covered in segmented bone plates. The end had fused into a bone spike more than three meters long, giving off a metallic sheen.
And at this moment, this fellow that looked combat-capable no matter how one viewed it was using its enormous claws to scoop up fungal carpet from the ground and stuff it into its mouth, looking utterly pitiful, as though, unable to catch prey, it had no choice but to eat dirt.
“This thing looks pretty normal. It should be in the illustrated guide, right?”
Although the plant guide he had bought last time had been utterly useless, Feng Xue still directly placed an order for an illustrated guide to mutant beasts. Compared with the plant guide, this thing was more than eight times as expensive, but the amount of data it contained was also worthy of that price.
Using his artificial eye to export the image in his mind, after a brief search, a string of information surfaced—
Scientific name: Brown Bear Symbiotic Mutant, Type C
Common name: Plate Bear Beast.
Rank: Four-star
Physical strength: Standard
Intelligence level: Ordinary
Mobility: Ordinary
Special abilities: Defective
Subjugation yield: Average
Recommended material price: Live capture without injury: 2,000,000 per head; intact long tail: 200,000 each; intact tail spike: 80,000 each; bear paws (front): 50,000 per pair.
Recommended challenge configuration: Four-star standard mecha squad ×2
Evaluation: A relatively common four-star mutant beast possessing a certain degree of intelligence. Its physical strength exceeds that of conventional four-star mecha. It possesses no special abilities, and the difficulty of subjugation is relatively low. Personnel must be specially assigned to defend against sneak attacks from the tail. Its forepaws possess a certain degree of edible value and it is a frequent fixture in major arenas.
……
“These bear paws are kind of cheap…”
Looking at the information in the guide, Feng Xue could not help feeling somewhat speechless. In Shengluotan, where natural leafy green vegetables could sell for eight hundred per jin and natural pork started at five thousand, two bear paws that together weighed nearly three tons were only fifty thousand? Wasn’t that price even lower than synthetic meat?
“Looks like this so-called ‘certain degree of edible value’ probably means it doesn’t taste good.”
The Demon Sword grumbled inwardly, but still continued slowly approaching.
Although this thing’s life energy level was somewhat higher than that of the Rock Mountain Cockle, it did not possess sufficiently formidable defense, nor did it have any mechanism-type attacks. That meant the difficulty of hunting it was much lower. As far as the Demon Sword was concerned, if he truly wanted to kill it, all he needed to do was charge up one defense-ignoring [Concealment-Breaking Strike · Energy Release · Hell Decapitation Sword] while in Mirage state, and he could take it down for certain. But what he needed was not a corpse whose entire drop value could not add up to five hundred thousand. What he needed was the nest it lived in.
Compared to the Rock Mountain Cockle, which could simply lie on the ground and disguise itself as a stone, the Plate Bear Beast clearly did not have all-weather defensive capabilities. Its nest would definitely be safer.
The only problem was that the guide did not mention this thing’s habits, making it impossible for the Demon Sword to confirm whether, at this hour of dawn, it had just come out to forage or had already been gnawing on dirt all night. And his Mirage would only last four minutes.
The Demon Sword calmed himself and waited silently. If Mirage ended and this thing still did not move, then he would have no choice but to take action!
“Body adaptation complete. Use Sword-Man as One?”
Just as the Demon Sword was waiting in silence, the inorganic mechanical voice of Suxin · Pseudo rang through his mental connection and into his mind, only then reminding the Demon Sword that this fellow had still been running calculations.
As the saying went, good omens never worked but bad ones always did. After Suxin · Pseudo completed its deduction, sure enough, it entered shader compilation… fine, “body adaptation.” After all, since it was going to fuse, it naturally had to incorporate all aspects of the body into the algorithm.
As for Sword-Man as One putting the sword in the lead… Feng Xue was not worried about that. Leaving aside the fact that the Demon Sword’s mind had the two entries [Human] and [Plague] as a foundation, first and foremost, he possessed absolute control over his game character.
The relationship between him and the character was like that of a player outside the screen and a character inside the game. Even if the character was afflicted with debuffs such as “confusion” or “loss of control,” there was no way for the player outside the screen to become confused and lose control along with it.
Seeing that the duration of Mirage was already nearing its end, while the bear was still uselessly gnawing away at the fungal carpet, the Demon Sword simply stopped waiting and said directly:
“Conduct live-combat testing of Hell Sword · Modified and Sword-Man as One!”
“Understood!”
Accompanied by a concise response, Suxin · Pseudo stabbed straight into the Demon Sword’s body. At the instant of contact, the Demon Sword only felt a burst of stinging pain, but in the next moment, he successfully entered a state of fusion similar to his usual Man and Sword as One.
Looking at the shallow wound on his arm, the Demon Sword very much wanted to make a retort, but in the next instant, a wondrous sensation spread through his consciousness.
The sensation was so profound and mysterious, as if his entire mind had become transparent. The world began to turn rational, and everything in his eyes seemed to become simple, straightforward equations.
Feng Xue’s main body, objectively sensing this feeling, raised an eyebrow slightly and said in surprise:
“This is… mechanized cognition?”
As for the taste of cockles… since they will definitely be eaten later, set that aside for now. First of all, taste is actually the least important factor in the price. Are bear paws delicious? To be fair, any well-made braised beef tendon from any decent restaurant tastes better than bear paw. Or to put it the other way around, if you used the seasonings for braised bear paw to braise a leather shoe, it would taste good too. The reason it is valuable is more because bears are fierce beasts and require powerful force to overcome.
As the saying goes, mountain delicacies are about mushrooms, and sea delicacies are about shellfish. All wild game, excluding those forms of added value, is inevitably inferior to domesticated meat of the same species raised scientifically—not the kind produced through industrialized farming. Wild meat is bound to be dry and tough, because in the wilderness animals go hungry one meal and full the next, without much fat. Even powerful predators, because they must possess sufficiently strong muscles, are most likely coarse in texture and difficult to swallow. In the end, once food rises to the luxury class, its flavor actually no longer matters. In essence, it is the same as those bags worth tens or hundreds of thousands. Their value as something to hold things is basically nonexistent; they are mainly for showing off, to tell you: I can afford to eat this. That is its true meaning.
Of course, the powerful and wealthy in the world of the book are not fools either. If they eat it, it is definitely delicious. But with their power and resources, even a stone could be processed by technological means into a supreme delicacy of the mortal world, so deliciousness instead becomes the part least involved in pricing.