Chapter 85 - 83: Transfer
[Your first-day rank is 14. Keep it up!]
He looked at the pale blue screen of light projected before him.
The result was both within Lin Ye’s expectations and, in a way, outside of them.
He had stayed up all night, slaughtering his way through half the night in his T-3 Exoskeleton Armor like a perpetual motion machine.
His kill efficiency was much higher than he had estimated.
Even so, there were still 13 people ahead of him.
Lin Ye swiped his fingertip across the virtual screen, and the complete rankings appeared clearly before his eyes.
His gaze moved down, and he quickly found his teammate’s name in the upper-middle section of the list.
[Rank 46: Zhang Yuqing, Dongjiang First Middle School, Kill Points: 185]
Lin Ye’s gaze continued upward.
Name after name he had never heard of occupied the top spots on the list.
Until he reached fifth place.
[Rank 5: Yan Hui, Dongjiang Experimental Middle School, Kill Points: 449]
Yan Hui.
This was the only name Lin Ye recognized.
During the last joint mock exam for the Five Schools of the East District, this person had dominated every single test item with an undisputed, overwhelming lead.
But even so, he was only fifth on the overall leaderboard.
Lin Ye’s gaze moved past Yan Hui and continued upward.
Fourth place, third place, second place... all were unfamiliar names.
Their scores were neck and neck, the gaps between them razor-thin.
However, when Lin Ye’s gaze fell upon the name at the very top of the list—a name that seemed to exist in a different dimension from everyone else below it—his pupils suddenly contracted.
[Rank 1: Xue Wangshu, Celestial Star Martial Arts High School, Kill Points: 1,269!]
This wasn’t a competition on the same order of magnitude.
From second place down to him in fourteenth, everyone’s score was within a relatively reasonable range.
But this first-place score had an extra digit!
Celestial Star Martial Arts High School already had a widespread reputation as a top-tier Martial Arts High School that received the most support from prominent families and the Education Bureau.
Although Dongjiang Experimental Middle School, like Dongjiang First Middle School, was a school that didn’t receive much support from prominent families, it had been following a path of elite education for the past decade, raising its admission standards and improving the overall quality of its student body.
But compared to Celestial Star Martial Arts High School, Dongjiang’s true number one high school, there was still a considerable gap.
1,269...
This was definitely not a number that could be reached simply by killing monsters.
’Did they complete some kind of hidden special mission?’
’Or... did they find some way to slaughter mutated beasts on a massive scale?’
Lin Ye closed the rankings, not dwelling on the matter any further.
He understood better than anyone that there was always someone better out there.
Lin Ye collected his thoughts and turned toward a corner of the ruins.
Zhang Yuqing was curled up there, sleeping soundly, but her delicate brows were knitted tightly, as if she were still fighting in her dreams.
Lin Ye walked over to her and, without a word, gently tapped her armor.
"Ngh..."
Zhang Yuqing let out a muffled murmur. Her eyelashes fluttered a few times as she struggled to open her eyes.
The moment she regained consciousness, a wave of soreness and weakness originating from every part of her body washed over her.
Her mouth was dry.
Her stomach was empty.
She felt like a machine that had been drained of all its energy; even lifting a single finger was an immense effort.
Since yesterday, the only thing she’d eaten were those few humiliating bites of spider leg before she was knocked out by the poison.
The high-intensity battles and forced marches had long since depleted all the energy in her body.
Zhang Yuqing struggled to sit up. She was about to complain when she saw Lin Ye place a few items in front of her.
There were several large pieces of roasted meat from some unknown mutated beast. Although it wasn’t nearly as fragrant as the spider leg, it looked much more filling.
Besides that, there was also a small handful of colorful, juicy-looking wild berries.
"Eat up."
"We need to get moving after you’re done. The monsters in this area are almost cleared out. We’re heading south."
All the words that had been on the tip of Zhang Yuqing’s tongue were instantly swallowed back down.
Last night, she had slept.
Lin Ye hadn’t.
When she woke up, Lin Ye was already awake and had even prepared food.
At that moment, Zhang Yuqing suddenly felt that if she complained even once more, she would be less than human.
Zhang Yuqing picked up a piece of meat and, forgetting any pretense of ladylike decorum, opened her mouth and took a huge bite.
It wasn’t delicious; it was even a little sour.
But Zhang Yuqing saw that Lin Ye was also devouring it heartily.
’That means the meat probably isn’t poisonous.’
Her starving stomach instantly cried out with its most honest desire.
Zhang Yuqing could no longer be bothered with anything else and wolfed down the piece of meat in her hand.
Then the second piece, the third...
The two of them ate quickly.
Three minutes later, all the food had been swept clean, as if by a gust of wind.
A warm current rose from her stomach and quickly spread throughout her body, dispelling her fatigue and bringing with it a pure sense of power.
Zhang Yuqing felt like she had come back to life.
Lin Ye had already stood up.
He attached the spare energy module to the magnetic pack on his back, his long spear in hand.
"Let’s go."
The two did not choose the energy-intensive flight mode.
One figure followed the other as they shot out of their shelter like arrows from a bow, speeding off in the direction Lin Ye had planned.
During the latter half of his nighttime hunt, Lin Ye had climbed the tallest building in the area.
Afterward, he had used his exoskeleton to briefly ascend, getting a bird’s-eye view and roughly memorizing the general landscape of the entire competition grounds.
These virtual ruins were much larger than he had imagined.
Their area was almost equivalent to two or three Dongjiang Ruins.
They were currently in the northwest corner of the entire map.
The hunting ground Lin Ye had chosen for the second phase was in the far south of the map.
The monster density in the central region was undoubtedly the highest, but he knew very well that it would also be the most crowded area.
...
Four continuous hours of long-distance trekking, with no rest in between.
Before the competition, a forced march of this intensity would have been enough to make Zhang Yuqing collapse from exhaustion.
But with the assistance of the T-3 Exoskeleton Armor, their stamina consumption was reduced to a minimum.
The armor’s kinetic assistance system made their every step incredibly energy-efficient, allowing them to run as if flying, at speeds comparable to a car on a highway.
The buildings in the southern district were noticeably shorter and more dilapidated than those in the western district.
Vast stretches of low-rise residential buildings and abandoned factories lay silently under the gray sky like crouching behemoths.
And in the center of that cluster of buildings, a circular sinkhole of unimaginable size tore through the earth.
The sinkhole’s diameter was, by visual estimate, over ten kilometers. It was bottomless, its edges lined with fractured rock strata and twisted steel rebar.
It was as if a meteorite had once fallen from the sky, smashing everything here into the planet’s core.
On the steep cliffs of the sinkhole, dark, gaping openings were faintly visible.
They were the severed entrances to the city’s once-extensive subway network that reached in every direction.
Lin Ye’s gaze swept over the surroundings. He keenly sensed that there were very few people here.
’Looks like I chose the right place.’
’Fewer people means the number of monsters will definitely be higher than where we were before.’
Lin Ye shot up from the ground again, ascending to a height of one hundred meters. He quickly scanned the nearby terrain and selected their next temporary base.
He led Zhang Yuqing to the front of an abandoned convenience store.
The glass door had long been shattered, the shelves were toppled over, and the floor was covered in a thick layer of dust and debris.
The two of them walked inside.
Lin Ye cautiously checked every corner and only relaxed after confirming there were no lurking dangers.
Zhang Yuqing, on the other hand, let out a cry of pleasant surprise, as if she had discovered a new continent.
In the convenience store’s rest area, she had found a two-seater sofa that was covered in dust but whose main structure was still reasonably intact.
Not caring about the dirt, she threw herself onto it, her entire body sinking into the soft cushions as she let out a sigh of pure contentment.
It might be old and dusty, but lying on it was a million times better than sleeping on the hard, cold, and uneven concrete floor.