Chapter 23: Milky Jade Bone

The burly man, who had boasted of having taken down several zombies, now found himself utterly powerless.

Gushing blood fell like a shower of petals, and the terrified screams sent the nearby crowd into a frenzy. The man's corpse was swiftly dragged back into the supermarket by those grotesque tentacles, leaving behind a trail of viscous blood that looked like a scarlet graffiti.

"Oh? An unexpected harvest?"

Li Ye casually decapitated several zombies drawn by the noise and headed toward the direction of the tentacles.

Unable to bear watching someone throw their life away, Tang Xiaoxiao stepped in front of him. "Don't go. That monster... there are many of them."

Li Ye paused, looking at her familiar nurse's uniform with a look of recognition. "It's you? You actually made it through. You must have awakened, right?"

"Huh?" Tang Xiaoxiao, surprised that Li Ye still remembered her, fidgeted with her fingers awkwardly. "I... I don't know."

"There are whispers when you awaken. Didn't you hear them?"

Tang Xiaoxiao replied in a small, embarrassed voice, "I was so muddled at the time, how could I have heard any whispers?"

Li Ye froze again. *Sigh, I really hadn't considered that scenario.*

"Forget it. Go to the city center. No matter what type of God-Chosen you are, you'll be highly valued at the Dongming Military District right now. If you wait until the entire military district is fully established to try and get in, it won't be this simple."

A meeting is a matter of fate. Having said this, Li Ye walked past the nurse he had met once in the early days of the apocalypse.

He knew exactly what kind of monster was in the supermarket. Judging by those disgusting tentacles, they were undoubtedly the variants that had inhabited the Jiangning underground sewer system in his past life.

Tang Xiaoxiao watched Li Ye's back helplessly, then secretly waved her hand at him. A faint, yellow, phantom-like war banner appeared on his back, silent and unnoticed.

"Phew..."

As if she had completed a grand task, beads of cold sweat quickly broke out on Tang Xiaoxiao's forehead, and her steps grew noticeably unsteady.

Li Ye, however, remained unaffected, his figure disappearing into the pitch-black entrance of the supermarket.

...

The bloodstains from the burly man extended deep into the supermarket. Li Ye made no effort to muffle his footsteps, following the obvious trail until it vanished in front of a restroom.

A rustling, scraping sound emanated from within. Had Tang Xiaoxiao been there, she would have recognized it as the prelude to the tentacles' hunt.

Tentacles as thick as pythons emerged from the darkness of the restroom, carpeting the floor near Li Ye. Yet, he seemed not to notice, remaining sideways to the restroom while rummaging through some overturned shelves.

Unlike the ambush on the boy eating bread, this time it wasn't just one tentacle monster that rose up; nearly half of them converged toward Li Ye. Just as he picked up an item and stood up, the sky-filling tentacles lashed out. Only when they were inches away did the sound of them tearing through the air reach his ears.

Li Ye’s expression was one of bewilderment, as if he had been caught completely off guard, and he let them bind and wrap around him without resistance.

A few tentacles, perhaps overextending, accidentally touched the slivers of sunlight leaking into the supermarket. They recoiled instantly, as if a barefoot person had stepped into boiling water.

Confirming that Li Ye had no power to resist, all the tentacle variants swarmed in, encasing the human body in a ball of flesh. This was their standard method for consuming large prey, allowing them to digest the massive energy within the victim's body as quickly as possible.

Inside the ball of flesh, the bewildered look on Li Ye’s face vanished completely, replaced by a gaze of absolute calm. He was certainly not a reckless man; daring to ignore the nurse's warning to enter here meant he already had full knowledge of these variants.

In his past life, Li Ye called these variants "Filth Demons." They lived in the shadows and feared the sunlight. Thus, the confined space actually made it easier for him to act.

The black dragon mark on his right arm gradually brightened, and Li Ye revealed that terrifying smile that chilled one to the bone. The small yellow banner behind him slowly faded until it disappeared entirely.

Outside, Tang Xiaoxiao, who hadn't gone far, turned around instantly, staring in horror toward the supermarket.

The variants, currently in the process of swallowing Li Ye, suddenly stopped. Their sharp, canine-like teeth began to tremble inexplicably.

From within the mass of tentacles, a sphere of deep red flame erupted, hanging there like a true sun. The dim interior of the supermarket was instantly illuminated as if it were broad daylight!

"Hiss—hiss!"

The sound of pythons flicking their tongues emanated from the ends of the tentacles. The fire of the "sun" splashed onto the Filth Demons, burning them to charcoal in an instant.

The tentacles on the outer perimeter retracted rapidly toward the restroom, attempting to flee back into the sewers. A wall of fiery red light, however, blocked their path. Li Ye emerged from the ball of flesh, pointing his right hand toward them and pulling back with a phantom grip.

The sound of crackling explosions filled the air with a manic energy that did not belong to this world.

This was the power of a god!

Li Ye wiped nonexistent sweat from his forehead, panting. He was only a First-Tier God-Chosen; using a power of this magnitude was still quite a strain.

"Hmm? But the consumption is much lower than I imagined."

Li Ye looked curiously at the God-Chosen mark on his right arm, which had not yet fully faded.

Dismissing the thought, he picked up a charred tentacle from his feet. He shook it twice, and the blackened remains crumbled away, leaving a long, thin, white jade bone in his hand.

This was the "Milk-Jade Bone," which possessed even more potent properties than blood crystal marrow.

If it took at least twenty-five First-Tier blood crystal marrow shards to promote from the first to the second tier, it might take only about half that amount in Milk-Jade Bones. Li Ye didn't understand why such foul variants could produce such pure jade bones—"Nature" always loved to play harmless jokes on her subjects.

There were three ways to absorb these God-Chosen materials:

The first was to channel one's own supernatural perception to assimilate and absorb the energy within.

The second was to shatter them, causing the contained energy to be released directly. However, both blood crystal marrow and Milk-Jade Bones were extremely difficult to destroy; it was quite possible that the energy gained from breaking them was less than the energy spent to do so. Thus, this second method was only used in special circumstances.

The third, and the one that preserved the most energy, was refinement. Of course, at this stage, no one had the leisure to develop such things. In his past life, Li Ye didn't learn of the existence of refinement machines until a year into the apocalypse.

Collecting all the Milk-Jade Bones, Li Ye sat cross-legged on the ground. The light around him lifted the bones, and one by one, they turned to ash under his voracious absorption.

The candlelight hidden beneath his skin grew steadily brighter and redder.

One, two, three...

It wasn't until the thirteenth bone that Li Ye realized something was wrong. An average person would have promoted to a Second-Tier God-Chosen by the fifteenth bone, so why hadn't the intensity of his "Candlelight Guidance" increased at all?!