Chapter 127 – Cheng Xiaomei’s Past

Faced with Su Lifeng’s question, Xiang Qianyan hesitated for a moment before giving an affirmative answer.

However, their stronghold had already moved to a very hidden place. Su Lifeng could only briefly state his requirements, after which Xiang Qianyan would go back, prepare everything, and bring it to a designated location.

“Don’t worry. At most an hour… half an hour will be enough.” Xiang Qianyan sounded somewhat proud. “Although my strength can’t compare to yours, I’m still very confident in my speed.”

“Right,” Su Lifeng called out to him again before he left. “When did you start following us? According to what you said, you only discovered us after we entered Yushui Teahouse, right?”

“Yeah. After I arrived, I chased after you the whole way. It basically doesn’t count as tailing you, right?” Xiang Qianyan thought for a moment, then answered.

Su Lifeng’s expression immediately became strange. He glanced at Cheng Xiaomei, and Cheng Xiaomei’s expression also changed slightly.

He had originally thought Cheng Xiaomei’s abnormal reaction was because she had discovered Xiang Qianyan, but now it seemed clear that this was not the case.

At that moment, Su Lifeng’s heart suddenly stirred.

“Thump.”

He heard it again. Very faint, yet it sounded right beside his ear: a heartbeat.

This could not be a simple sensing ability. Su Lifeng kept feeling that it was also somehow connected to his Precognitive Ability.

However, this reaction had only appeared once before. This was only the second time.

By the time he came back to himself, a trace of coldness flashed through Su Lifeng’s eyes.

“Come out. How long do you plan to keep following us?”

Hearing Su Lifeng suddenly speak, Cheng Xiaomei immediately showed a nervous expression. Her right arm mutated at once, readying itself.

Tap, tap, tap.

A faint sound of footsteps appeared. Immediately afterward, a figure turned out from around the corner of the wall.

A man in his thirties, dressed plainly, with a wooden expression.

“Xenospecies.” Su Lifeng immediately made his judgment. He glanced at Cheng Xiaomei and found that Cheng Xiaomei’s face had abruptly gone pale.

After the man stopped, he stretched out his tongue and licked the corner of his mouth. His tongue was scarlet, and when he opened his mouth, Su Lifeng saw quite a few blood-red shreds of flesh between his teeth.

“Who is he?” Su Lifeng was asking Cheng Xiaomei.

Cheng Xiaomei struggled to calm herself, then answered, “He… he’s the Xenospecies that was following me. I remember him.”

Su Lifeng immediately understood.

Back then, when Cheng Xiaomei had come crying to find him, it was because she had been followed by Xenospecies all along the border. For some time afterward, he had worried about whether those Xenospecies would keep following her all the way to Ningnan. Later, because they had never appeared, he had forgotten about it. He had not expected one of them to appear at a time like this.

This Xenospecies made Su Lifeng feel that it was somewhat dangerous, but if it was only this one, it still could not amount to much…

At that moment, more footsteps sounded. In the blink of an eye, Su Lifeng discovered that he and Cheng Xiaomei had already been surrounded by over a dozen Xenospecies.

“You hid very well. It wasn’t easy to find you. But I told you back then, didn’t I? Once you became a little more delicious, I would come eat you.” The one speaking was not that wooden-faced Xenospecies, but another Xenospecies, a short middle-aged female. Her appearance could be called somewhat ugly, but the coldness in her eyes was no different from the other Xenospecies.

The feeling this Xenospecies gave off was clearly even more dangerous. And the moment Cheng Xiaomei heard her speak, a strong look of terror immediately appeared on her face. Even her body trembled once.

“Don’t be afraid,” Su Lifeng said.

Cheng Xiaomei glanced at Su Lifeng and said, “I… I didn’t tell you the details back then because… because I felt I was very stupid. I was afraid that if I said it, you would think I was useless. And it was already in the past. I… I didn’t want to mention it either.”

“Back then, she was the one who led Xenospecies to hunt me down. With me, she was like a cat playing with a mouse. Every time she nearly drove me to death, she would stop. Every day when I woke up, I would find other people’s corpses not far from me, but she just wouldn’t kill me. She said I was half her kind, the first one she had ever encountered, but she hadn’t expected me to be so weak. So… maybe she was using me as an experiment, wanting to see how someone like me, someone who was ‘half her kind,’ would behave. I’m… very afraid of her.”

When she spoke of this memory, it was as if she were being forced to recall a nightmare. To her, this female Xenospecies herself was the nightmare.

If Su Lifeng had not been here, she probably would already have been unable to stop herself from running away. But now, because of her trust in Su Lifeng, she barely managed to remain standing where she was.

When Su Lifeng heard this, he immediately frowned. Under those circumstances, Cheng Xiaomei had still been able to summon the courage to escape back, and had not suffered a mental collapse. That was already very impressive. No wonder Cheng Xiaomei had found it so difficult to accept her identity as a Xenospecies. Anyone who experienced something like that would probably develop doubt and denial toward their own changes.

“But this new Mutant beside you looks quite good. She seems far more delicious than you…”

The female Xenospecies seemed very satisfied with Cheng Xiaomei’s reaction. After giving Cheng Xiaomei a meaningful glance with eyes full of killing intent, she turned to look at Su Lifeng. However, before she had finished speaking, Su Lifeng interrupted her. “Enough nonsense. Make your move. I don’t care what purpose you have or what you’re plotting. As long as I kill you, it ends.”

The moment Su Lifeng’s words fell, a red light flashed behind him and he lunged forward.

The wooden-faced man immediately came up to meet him. His jaw suddenly detached, revealing a huge mouth. Countless tentacles like straws instantly emerged from within, each one opening with an incomparably sharp mouthpart. This was clearly a mutation fused with some kind of insect from the jungle. It looked extremely horrifying, enough to scare someone out of their wits before it had even reached them.

The female Xenospecies was startled, clearly not expecting Su Lifeng to attack the moment he said he would. But seeing her companion rush toward Su Lifeng, she smiled and turned toward Cheng Xiaomei. “Food that has been cooking this long should be ready enough. I’ll enjoy you first. I let you live this long. You should feel grateful to me.”

“Bang!”

However, the moment she moved, she felt a dark blur fly past in front of her. Lowering her head, she saw that what had landed was one of the tentacles. The tentacle was still twitching when it hit the ground, but very quickly it began to wither and rot.

“Hm?”

The next instant, the female Xenospecies turned her head and happened to see Su Lifeng’s figure charging right up to her.

In the short span of a blink, Su Lifeng’s entire body was covered in wounds, but his Bone Wings were hung full of blood threads.

Behind Su Lifeng was the wooden-faced man, already dismembered. His huge mouth had been completely torn open, the split extending all the way down to his abdomen. And what was exposed inside was nothing but densely packed tentacles and mouthparts. There was no sign of internal organs.

The female Xenospecies had only enough time to raise her hand before Su Lifeng’s Bone Wings stabbed into her all at once.

As blood sprayed out, the female Xenospecies looked past her raised arm and saw Su Lifeng’s eyes.

“In my eyes, you’re the experimental material.” Another Bone Wing from the side drove viciously into the female Xenospecies’s neck.

The female Xenospecies’s pupils contracted. “You… you’re E-class! You even absorbed a Wisdom Species!”

Although she was also E-class, before Su Lifeng, who had already completely absorbed a Wisdom Species, she had no room to resist at all. Even her companion had failed to play any role. If Su Lifeng feared injury, perhaps they could have dragged things out for a while. But looking at the wounds on Su Lifeng’s body now, anyone could tell he was utterly disregarding every attack from the other side. In his eyes, there was only one word: kill!

Bang!

Su Lifeng’s fist struck her body heavily. She stared dumbfounded as the Exoskeleton on Su Lifeng’s arm fell away inch by inch, while at that moment her own eyes bulged, her skin split open, and Black Threads drilled out one after another from inside her skin.

“Ah!” the female Xenospecies screamed.

This was also Su Lifeng’s first time using the evolved Exoskeleton on a Xenospecies. He had not expected the effect to be so terrifying that it could make a Xenospecies, which fundamentally did not fear pain, let out a cry like this.

Watching a Xenospecies that had terrified her and haunted her nightmares be forced out of its original body by Su Lifeng, and in such a painful way, Cheng Xiaomei was deeply shaken where she stood.

So this was… Su Lifeng’s current strength…