Published: February 9, 2025
Yang Yixi was continuing to reorganize the surging power battle team, uniting, cleansing, absorbing, and expelling... Everything he was doing in the apocalypse was being done by someone every day.
Ye Zhongming was not worried about him; he had already witnessed this young man's ability to control. Now with his support, the surging power team might have individuals who could cause him some trouble, but definitely no one could pose a real threat to him.
Of course, in order for Yang Yixi and the surging power battle team he controlled to eventually be of help, Ye Zhongming still needed to do some things. Even if he didn't want to turn these people into his subordinates due to cost-effectiveness reasons, he clearly needed them to have the capability to assist, which was evidently not enough with the team's current strength.
Ye Zhongming needed to upgrade them to at least a level that could barely be considered competent, and he also wanted to find a few complete corpses to confirm many of his speculations.
Therefore, returning to the surface became a necessity.
However, Ye Zhongming did not plan to go alone; he wanted to take this opportunity to see the power of the Silver Corpse. To create a Silver Corpse, besides needing the elder sister of the twins to have heard about the fifth-level evolution threshold, he also needed the blood of a fifth-level mutated life.
After crafting some white-level weapons and equipment for Yang Yixi, Ye Zhongming inquired about a few matters and then left alone with a sketch in hand.
The entire underground of Linhai City had been dug through by survivors, with almost all camps, except for a few forces, being quite similar.
This effectively avoided the downside of being unable to escape once discovered by powerful mutated beings or corpses.
Just like the surging power camp, there were five routes in and out; some led to the surface, some to deeper underground, and some to other forces' camps.
The two individuals who had previously come here to buy Yama Tree seeds used these passages to arrive.
Following the map, Ye Zhongming passed through several factions' camps and spent most of the day walking through the underground city before reaching his destination.
It was the location of an underground dark river where a type of aquatic mutated life—star guiche fish—lived.
The mutated lives on the surface, like humans, had all suffered under the poisonous hand of the Luo Shen Cypress. Those who survived were mostly strong adaptors capable of living underground, aside from the native mutated lives.
The most famous among them was the mutated rat, an entity that was immensely hated by other survivors even during the apocalypse, yet it was the most popular in Linhai. These mutated rats not only had large numbers and strong reproductive abilities but were also omnivorous. The lack of food did not affect them much; they were the largest source of magic crystals and materials for the survivors of Linhai.
Whether during the darkest days when they were driven underground by the Yama Tree or during the more than half a year of human survival struggles that followed, these creatures were the driving force behind the slow evolution of Linhai's survivors.
Due to the importance of mutated rats, the major factions in Linhai once held the largest conference to prohibit the extermination of these mutated rats, even designating survival areas for these pests, forbidding anyone from crossing the boundaries.
This agreement was the only protocol that all factions in Linhai City had adhered to to date.
When Ye Zhongming first heard this news from Yang Yixi, he was astonished for a long time, but upon thinking it through, he understood.
Being able to maintain a sustainable state of magic crystals and materials—essentials for human evolution—meant that even survivors in the apocalypse, who seemed destined to have no rules, had to comply.
Because they knew that once these resources were exhausted, even if one person obtained them, it would be nearly useless. Countless facts had proven that no one could rely on their own strength to escape Linhai. Over the past year, during several feast days, both the original strong and the outsiders had proven this truth with their lives and corpses.