The Great Merchant in the Cataclysm

Chapter 137: Quantity and Quality Changes

After taking out one of the soul crystal, it appeared that the odor in the air did not change much.
Therefore, the proportion that one crystal held should not be much too.

Zhang Mu thought of it this way.
Meanwhile, his hands already touched many corpses of the Nightmare Worm nimbly.
Using both hands, he pulled the Nightmare Worms on both sides together and used both his nimble hand to wander inside the fat meat.

In no time, Zhang Mu skillfully touched the soul crystals and fished out to take a good look at them.
Sure enough, it was different than the one he had taken earlier.
Besides the color being paler or darker, Zhang Mu guess that it was also related to the power of the Nightmare Worm.
In their group, there should be a gap between their strength.
For example, the ten Nightmare Worms which was abandoned, had overused their power and burned the soul crystal that was bred inside their body for a long time.
Since they were relatively weak, they were sent to bring up the rear for the retreating troops.

However, these Nightmare Worms, which were used as cannon fodder, could not block the attacks from the Obsidian Beetle even when they burned the soul crystals as a fuel for their power.

Zhang Mu thought to himself, “Since that was the case, then why did they bother to block the attacks even though it would all be in vain? Why didn’t they be obedient and become the fish meat on a chopping board? Anyway, even by burning their soul crystal, they still couldn’t escape the fate of being slaughtered.
Now the soul crystals had lost its shine after being burned and consumed, causing the effects to be reduced greatly.”

Zhang Mu had a heartache when he thought of how wasteful these Nightmare Worms were.

He had a regular soul crystal on his left hand and a spoiled on his right hand.
He put them into his mouth one after another and swallowed in one mouthful.
When the energy dissolves and flows inside his body, he knew he had guessed correctly.

The regular soul crystals had tremendous energy while the other was defective.
Zhang Mu merely felt a trace of the remaining power rushed to enter Zhang Mu’s brain.

He looked at the remaining 25 Nightmare Worm’s corpse.
Out of them, 9 of the soul crystals were defective while the remaining 16 were normal.
Zhang Mu made a sudden arrangement in his heart.

He would eat those defective soul crystals first.
Otherwise, when he ate the regular crystals first, there would be a variation of resistance if he consumed too much of them.
Then these defective soul crystals would not come in handy anymore.

Zhang Mu took the initiative and picked out those from the Nightmare Worms that shrank after burning out, then took out all of the defective soul crystals and placed them all on the open space in front of him.

He sat cross-legged on the ground and seemed to make a decision.
He looked up at the dark night sky after the wind was calmed down and reached out a hand to grab the soul crystals placed in front of him, and took them down.

Even though these were defective, but there were 9 of them precisely.
These nine energies whirled inside Zhang Mu’s body.
They would intertwine and separated now and then.
When gathered together, it was extremely overbearing inside Zhang Mu’s body.

Zhang Mu’s face was a little hideous, with blue veins popping out one by one slowly.
He had underestimated the accumulative power of these soul crystals.
Even though they were defective, he had quite a hard time dealing with them.

When he first took it, because there was only one of them, it felt surprisingly pleasant and gave him a misconception that all the soul crystals would felt the same way.
But he never expected that he had assumed too much.

He laughed at himself, luckily he had self-awareness and did not experiment with the regular soul crystals.
If he ate together in one go, he felt that his brain would not be able to hold up at all.

Fortunately, this was still within the tolerance range of Zhang Mu.
Therefore, he was feeling pain and pleasure at the same time.
He could feel his psychic ability building gradually, at a stable and continuous rate.

There was a rapid improvement in his psychic ability.
Zhang Mu opened his eye abruptly, and he could clearly perceive all the things around him.
Furthermore, it was not because of his keen hearing that he was prided of in the past, but it was his psychic ability dispersing around his surrounding slowly.

Right now, he had a crazy idea in his mind.

He wanted to make use of the newly acquired psychological-type ability and advanced to the second rank!

Relying on the evolver’s ability was far more powerful than solely accumulating energy to progress to the second rank.

Zhang Mu was somewhat glad that he did not let himself use the second-rank advancing potion recklessly, as he would miss an opportunity to change himself from the ground up.

This excitement caused Zhang Mu’s heart to boil straightaway.
Now he actually had a chance to use his awakening ability to advance.
Although it was acquired, it was much powerful than most of the innate awakening ability.

Zhang Mu knew that it might take a certain amount of time for this process, so he got up first to inform Yuan Rui while dragging the mutated wolfdog back together and looked for a house to sleep in like before.

Yuan Rui was still sleepy since she did not sleep well for the first time.
Previously, the constructed dream by the Nightmare Worms caused her mind into a jittery state.
Once Zhang Mu told her to sleep, the exhaustion in her body came rushing up.
After telling Zhang Mu to be careful, she turned around and slept.

When they entered the house, the Obsidian Beetle subtly flew out from Yuan Rui’s pocket and rested quietly on Zhang Mu’s shoulder.
It passed a message to Zhang Mu, “You want to rank up? Alone? Do you know that any mutated animal can destroy the process of your advancing? You have such a big gut”.

In fact, Zhang Mu was thinking of giving full control to the Bloodvine Lotus when he was advancing.
But now that the Obsidian Beetle had said so, he would have another layer of insurance.

Zhang Mu nodded his head to the Obsidian Beetle and gestured it to go far away.
Because when Zhang Mu hand over the full control to the Bloodvine Lotus, it would treat anything with flesh and blood equally, and slaughter them all, including the Obsidian Beetle.

When the time comes with no enemy, yet they had fought with each other first, things would get interesting then.

Even though the Obsidian Beetle expressed that it was not afraid of the Bloodvine Lotus, but in the eye of Zhang Mu, it still hid in a quiet corner to protect Zhang Mu obediently.

When the Obsidian Beetle went far away, Zhang Mu lifted up his left arm and summoned the Bloodvine Lotus.
He then took out a bunch of first-ranked crystals around him before he handed over the full control to the Bloodvine Lotus.

The Bloodvine Lotus started to swell up after recovering its ability and natural instincts.
It did not build a cage according to Zhang Mu’s order, instead, it spread out in all direction and drained the corpse of the Nightmare Worms when it passed by, using this method to protect Zhang Mu’s surrounding.

With the protection from the Bloodvine Lotus and the Obsidian Beetle, Zhang Mu felt that he could be at ease and let himself progress.

Making a prompt decision, he immediately swallowed two soul crystals on the ground in one go and closed his eye.

Boom!

It has started.