Chapter 30: This Mad World

That night, Ye Chao drifted in and out of consciousness, fainting and waking again and again, as waves of nutrient and restorative injections coursed through him, one after another.

The teachers were at their wits’ end.

Although Yao Dexian, the main subject teacher, and his colleagues were displeased that Ye Chao had taken first place, the matter was already settled. There was no covering it up, since the entire exam process had been recorded and could not be altered.

Which meant, above all, that nothing could be allowed to happen to Ye Chao.

But that was easier said than done. Ye Chao seemed to have encountered some kind of energy-draining demon—his vitality and mental strength were being endlessly siphoned away, unstoppable, and even when they tried to rouse him, he would wake for a moment, only to slump back into unconsciousness. The only thing the teachers could do was keep replenishing his strength; there were simply no other options.

At this point, they finally began to believe that Ye Chao’s rapid triumph over the Lumina Seed exam was genuine—his imagination had simply outstripped the test’s capacity.

It wasn’t obvious at first, the whole process was both thrilling and slightly absurd, but it seemed—just maybe, probably, perhaps—that Ye Chao… was evolving.

Yes, evolving again.

Such situations were not unfamiliar in the age of cataclysms. That was why they always kept IV nutrient drips and such on hand; overuse of abilities and the sudden triggers of evolution during battle were both common.

Judging by Ye Chao’s repeated teetering between life and death, it seemed he had gone into overdrive, evolving more than one level… An outcome worth anticipating.

He truly was evolving.

And not just Ye Chao—Alpha Ji was evolving too.

It was just like when she had first appeared, knocking Ye Chao out cold with her presence.

Only this time, the updates were far more extensive, and the required energy even greater. The evolution process could not be interrupted or powered down, so Ye Chao had no choice but to endure the endless cycle of collapse and revival…

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By the time Ye Chao finally regained consciousness and escaped his state of endless vertigo, it was already noon the next day.

The midday sun fell upon the densely interwoven leaves overhead, cleverly blocked so that not a single ray reached the forest floor. Even the refracted and scattered light was caught by the branches and leaves, leaving the ground in perpetual twilight.

But for survivors who had evolved night vision, it was enough.

Ye Chao slowly opened his eyes to see a canopy of swaying leaves intertwined above him—that was the sky. Instinctively, he felt beneath him: a thick, soft pelt, under which the elasticity of powerful muscle was clearly discernible.

He pushed aside the arms and legs draped over him and sat up, finding himself in a basket atop the back of a giant beast. Beside him were Fang Ju and several other classmates, all sleeping soundly like children weighing over two hundred pounds each.

And this was not the only giant beast—each carried a saddle-basket laden with students. Dozens of these giants marched in a long, swaying line through the shadowy depths of the forest.

Teachers, wielding weapons like pocket suns, compressors, and propellers, walked alertly on either side of the beastly convoy.

The world seemed subtly changed, yet it was still the same world.

The exam was clearly over. Though Ye Chao had spent the night in a state of awkward slumber, the other students had also been trapped in the Lumina Seed exam hall, enduring an all-night “extra test” that couldn’t have been much easier than what he’d gone through.

Ye Chao let out a small sigh of relief, closed his eyes, and prepared to test how much stronger his abilities had become.

He was used to the dizziness by now—it had happened every time before, and this time was no exception.

Suddenly, Ye Chao jerked his head upward.

Above, a bird silently spread its wings and swooped down from the branches, fierce and predatory, its target clearly the students in the beast’s basket.

Yet this bird, with its hooked beak and round eyes, looked like the bizarre offspring of an owl and a penguin, over a meter in length, with a wingspan to match—a ludicrous figure, really, and where it found the confidence to swoop down from such a height was anyone’s guess. Once down, it surely couldn’t ascend again!

“Take this!” came a sharp cry, and a jet-powered sledgehammer spun through the air like a returning boomerang, aimed directly at the outlandish bird.

There was no time to dodge. The plump bird flapped its wings at the sledgehammer, and inexplicably, the hammer’s exhaust veered off course; the head brushed past the bird.

“Tsk!” Xu Tiange clicked her tongue, pointed two fingers at the sledgehammer and flicked the air; the jet instantly jerked in a different direction, looping around in midair before homing in on the fat bird once more.

It was like sword control—no, hammer control.

Remote control!

Xu Tiange had grown even stronger—her ability was now at three-star plus level.

“Coo… coo…” The fat bird, out of options, flapped its wings again and changed the hammer’s trajectory. But its flying skills were never that strong; harried by the hammer, it had missed its chance. Nudging the hammer aside, it flapped awkwardly backward, ready to retreat.

Suddenly, a wide, thick pink band shot through the air.

The fat bird couldn’t dodge or deflect it—“oomph!”—it was caught and bound, then swiftly retracted into the maw of the giant beast. The pink band was actually the beast’s tongue, three or four meters long and nearly a foot wide, snapping out like lightning and striking true.

“Woof! Woof!” With the bird in its mouth, the giant beast chewed with a satisfied crunching, letting out a contented bark, as if to say: Not bad, not bad, what a mouthful—nice and plump!

“What the heck! What the heck! What in the world is all this?” Alpha Ji had appeared at some point.

Her eyes were wide as she took in the scene around her, above and below, all directions, utterly dumbfounded—like a groundhog seeing a mountain of nuts.

She pointed at the beast beneath her, and at another nearby, still chewing its bloody prey: “Is this a dog? It’s a dog, right?”

Four or five meters tall, over ten meters long, weighing at least a dozen tons—like an elephant, but not an ordinary elephant, more like a woolly mammoth—yet still a dog? Judging by its shape, a giant dachshund…

“Yes, that’s what we call them—though I’m not sure why…”

“And the penguin-like bird that can fly—is that really an owl?”

“As far as I know, yes…”

So it could fly, had bizarre confidence, and could repeatedly redirect Xu Tiange’s hammer—was its power not in its wings, but in some kind of superpower?

Alpha Ji’s astonishment was far from over.

For instance, the vibrant, restless forest canopy—a living sea of greenery, never still, surging and undulating like ocean waves!

If there were wind, of course the canopy would move, but here, it moved on its own—actively chasing sunlight, like a field of sunflowers, but with far more personality! When blocked, the branches would twist away; if they couldn’t reach the light, they would swell and shift like engorged animal limbs—constant, ceaseless, everywhere…

So fierce was the competition for sunlight that the entire upper forest seemed alive. Not a single ray of sunlight could slip through.

Then there were the flowers, leaves, grasses, and fungi blanketing the forest from top to bottom, dazzlingly colorful, many glowing with phosphorescence, as though a camera filter had been layered on hundreds of times—or as if it were all rendered in CGI.

It was incredibly reminiscent of the world of Avatar, in both hue and splendor.

When Xu Tiange hammered the owl, Alpha Ji had even seen a tree and the thick vine entwined around it writhing together—like two colossal serpents, one green and one white, locked in a passionate embrace.

Alpha Ji knew the world had changed. She had encountered and adapted to the extraordinary more than once, and had built up a certain amount of psychological preparedness.

But now, standing on the ground and seeing this new world with her own eyes in the sunlight, she realized how woefully inadequate her expectations had been.

“What else—”

Unable to contain herself, she turned to look at Ye Chao, and instantly words poured out in a torrent.

She was so excited she’d forgotten herself entirely.

With a thought, she projected Ye Chao’s head as a dachshund’s, whoosh whoosh whoosh…

[Affection +22]

She was about to ask another question when Xu Tiange’s voice cut in: “Ye Zichao, you’re finally awake? Last night you even cleared the test faster than me—I challenge you to a du—huh?!”

The long-legged heiress swung her jet sledgehammer and leapt onto the dachshund’s back in a burst of vapor, then shuddered in midair: “You—you monster, what have you done with Ye Zichao?!”

What she saw was this: sitting cross-legged in the basket on the dachshund’s back was a strange creature with the head of a dachshund, human in posture but unmistakably canine in appearance—

Truly, a man in dog’s form.