Chapter 10: A Plea for Aid

Yao Qiming handed the hard bow to Yang Zicang, letting him feel its solid weight and heft.
“This bow can add an extra fifty yards. Combined with Zi Chang’s own twenty-meter range, you should be able to reach that monster on the bridge. But…”
“But what?”
“Forget it. I’ll just shoot the bow myself. You can help me speed it up and aim.”
“What exactly is it?”
Yao Qiming watched Yang Zicang, who kept stroking the long bow as if he couldn’t bear to let it go.
“Drawing this bow consumes thirty years of temporal sequence at once—not the amplified kind, but the principal, true lifespan!”
Yang Zicang and the others were inwardly shocked.
Drawing the bowstring once would cost thirty years of life.
His fondness for the instantly vanished into thin air.
{Captain Yao, have you all reached a decision? That thing has something close to human intelligence. It’s blocking the road, as if it’s waiting for something.}
The person transmitting the images from afar urged again through telepathy.
“We plan to bring the Bow of Extreme Malice.”
{The Bow of Extreme Malevolence? That thing’s range isn’t great, and it consumes time…}
Yao Qiming reassured him, “Don’t worry, there’s an incredibly powerful person here with me who can further unlock the bow’s power.”
{Hah, how strong can he be? Has Zhao Anlong returned?}
“Close enough.”
The expression of the other person obviously shifted. He had only said it casually but received such a response.
Someone comparable to Zhao Anlong? Could he be the new holder of quadrilateral models?
……
In the interwoven space, on the stone platform where these people were staying, one of the dozen or so rescued, panicked men and women spoke with a hoarse voice:
“Hey, are you guys actors or not? This is some kind of variety show, right? There must be a cameraman here.”
“Just shut up. We risked crossing the dimensional rift to save you, and you’re still making sarcastic remarks.”
“Tch, who knows if it’s real or fake. I think that thing in the room earlier was just a machine prop.”
The four teammates ignored him, vigilantly staring down at the cliff below. Dark shadows shifted there, as if something was squirming upward.
“Deploy the force field.” The squad leader commanded cautiously.
One member of the Monster Hunter Alliance suggested, “I think we should retreat if it doesn’t work. We could take a different route.”
“No, it’s too far. None of these people have bred their nightmare avatars, so they’ll definitely keep activating nightmare eggs along the way, and then we’ll all die.”
Suddenly, a fist-sized creature buzzing its wings rushed up from below.
Bang! It smashed headfirst into the force field.
The man supporting the force field changed his expression, as countless buzzing sounds came from below.
……
YangZicang, led by Yao Qiming, rode in a battle-damaged off-road vehicle, jolting along the rocky road toward the attack site, occasionally encountering a few figures on the way.
“Forget the car, but you can still find gasoline?”
“It’s modified. You definitely don’t want to know what it burns.”
Detecting the faint scent of blood, Yang Zicang restrained his curiosity.
He looked around; in the distance, a rugged， jagged mountain range crouched low on the horizon, glistening with a purplish-red sheen under the sunlight.
“Brother Yao， can we ever return to Earth？”
Yao Qiming let out a hearty laugh: “Hopefully we can. Sit tight, I’m about to speed up; it’ll take half an hour from here.”
Yang Zicang glanced at the tachometer; the engine was already roaring, but the reading was still only sixty or seventy.
“How long will it take for the amplification consumption clock to recover?”
“For me, about two days. You should be faster—if I’m not mistaken, probably just over twenty hours.”
“I see. That puts my mind at ease.”
“What?” Yao Qiming, focusing on driving, hadn’t yet realized what the young man next to him was planning.
[Deploy…]
A white ring-like circular halo emerged on Yang Zicang’s chest, from which a quadrilateral pattern spread outward.
Before Yao Qiming could react, the tachometer instantly soared to one hundred and sixty.
A dull “whum” echoed in their ears as the off-road vehicle beneath them surged forward with a roar like a waking beast.
“Ha! Now this is what off-roading is all about!” Yao Qiming excitedly stepped on the accelerator.
Vroom~
By the roadside, two men carrying mineral-laden bamboo baskets heard a roar rushing past them. The off-road vehicle whipped up such a strong gust that their clothes flapped loudly in the wind.
……
Ten minutes later, the off-road vehicle stopped in front of a dilapidated commercial building. Inside, a black mist filled the shattered lobby, with several broken pillars collapsed on the ground.
“Enter from here, and we can reach the other side of the city within two hours. By the way, can you still use that speed boost ability—on me?”
Yang Zicang tried. Yao Qiming jogged in place and felt a lightness spreading through his body.
“We’ll need double the flow. Come on, you lead the way—we need to hurry.”
A triangular pattern emerged on Yao Qiming’s skin, stretching and folding into the void. Within seconds, his expression sharpened.
“Quick, they’re under attack! The monsters below have sensed the ordinary people’s presence and want to trap them all there.”
The rugged man swiftly tossed a bundle of arrow fletchings to Yang Zicang, then strapped a steel sword, three fingers wide, onto his back. The nicks on the blade showed uneven grinding marks—clearly made by cutting thick steel plates.
Yao Qiming raised the seemingly heavy Edge of Wrath, sounding a bit strained: “Let’s go!”
The two sprinted into the building like agile athletes.
The path descended further and further, eventually immersing them in what felt like a ravine, with unknown vegetation covering the slopes. Due to the scarcity of sunlight, a mild chill seeped through the air.
Boom!
From the cave ahead, tremors and monstrous roars echoed—such terrifying sounds sent shivers down one’s spine.
“Zicang, you can deploy the model now. Chu Qiang is ready with your new investment.”
[The Monster Hunter Alliance has invested 1500N in me.]
[Mu Xiaoyu has invested 5N in me.]
Back at the base, Mu Xiaoyu only then realized that she had already exhausted her ability to invest lifespan, and it would take two or three days before she could recover.
She was about to ask something when Chu Qiang said, “In the future, if you want to invest your own lifespan, it’s best to go through me. I’ll ensure safety for you, though it’s not one hundred percent guaranteed.”
He patted a monster “corpse” in front of him that resembled a radio but with scale armor.
“This thing can broadcast our financing requests to farther places. Moreover, few other radios allow ordinary people without models to actively invest from a distance. That’s how we can go so far to save people. It’s also a habit of our former captain.”
Liu Ming and the other two watched him as he explained seriously, a sense of weirdness filling their hearts…
A financing radio—it too was transformed from a nightmare.
Zhang Yang thought, was he trying to make Yang Zicang stay by showing goodwill to the three of them?
……
[Furry Zhao invested 100N for me.]
[Feng Cailin has invested 100N for me.]
Continuous sounds echoed in Yang Zicang’s mind.
{Hey, who is this? How did they get so much investment?}
A stranger’s telepathic voice appeared in his mind.
{Oh, isn’t this Captain Yao of the Monster Hunter Alliance? This place should be the cave passage you control.}
“If you want to invest, then invest. If not, stay away,” Yao Qiming said coldly while running.
Faced with others, this burly man was not as good-tempered.
{I still have to show Captain Yao some respect.}
[Anjixiu has invested 500N in me.]
What boldness this person has—as an individual, investing 500 units of time-sequence just like that.
Yang Zicang felt a flicker of gratitude in his heart.
[Liang Xi has invested 10N in me.]
This kid is still alive.
[Thirty-two anonymous individuals have invested 276.11N in me.]
[Zhang Yang has invested 1N in me.]
[Liu Yang has invested 1Y in me.]
“Year 2493!”
Yang Zicang directly transferred all these invested time-sequences into his grasp.
He did not intend to recklessly use his own few hundred years.
Otherwise, if other situations arose in the remaining day, and he couldn’t amplify his power, he would have to fight using only his “principal.”
The cave grew darker and deeper, but some rocks on the walls emitted a faint fluorescence, just enough to barely see the path beneath their feet.
“Sss~”
“Tsk, sss~”
The faint sound of tongues flickering, enough to make one’s skin crawl, echoed in the air. After turning a corner, the two could already hear the clashing of weapons in the distance.
Suddenly, a black shadow clinging to the wall lunged over.
“Zicang, be careful!”
Just as the claw was about to land in front of his head, the belatedly reacting Yang Zicang shifted his shape, narrowly dodging past it.
[Anonymous individual withdrew 10N.]
It was a gecko the size of half a person. Yang Zicang caught a faint, sweet-scented metallic smell.
[I offset 13N.]
“Poison! Use Time Sequence to protect your nasal cavity and mouth, otherwise your internal organs will be poisoned.”
Losing more than a decade’s worth of Time Sequence from just one breath, this poisonous gas is truly terrifying, comparable to sustained attacks by Time Sequence.
Yao Qiming turned around, stepped on the ground, and thrust out his steel sword. Raising the blade, the faint golden steel cleaved the lizard in two.
“Seventeen years. The monsters here are getting stronger; initially, they only had a few months of lifespan.”
For the rest of the path, the man’s pace slowed slightly, and he dealt with the occasional stray monsters himself.
{What are you trying to do? This guy’s speed looks decent, but his reaction seems a bit lacking.}
Anjixiu said.
Yang Zicang kept his complaints bottled up. His earlier performance was indeed amateurish.
“What do we want to do? We’re of course hunting monsters. This time, it’s a nightmare imbued with bloodline remnants.”
{Bloodline? He hasn’t awakened the Ring of Bloodline yet.}
In the financing model, another voice said.
“You all rest assured!”