Chapter 80: Beast world

Lin Fang groaned, covering his face with one hand. “The teacher recognized my handwriting. I got dragged into the principal’s office and scolded. Out of embarrassment, I hid at home for two days.”

“And then?” Li Xue pressed.

Lin Fang exhaled through his nose, recalling. “On the third day, Jasmine herself came to my house and dragged me back to school.”

The girls leaned closer. “And?”

Lin Fang blinked innocently. “And… nothing happened afterward. The end.”

They all groaned in unison, Li Xue slapping the couch. “That’s such a boring ending!”

“It’s not a novel to have interesting twists in life.” Lin Fang smirked, grabbing another beer. Glancing at Zhi Yan and then Li Xue, he said, “Alright then, my turn again. Never have I ever had a crush on a friend, but never said it.”

The room stilled. Both Li Liu and Zhi Yan exchanged fleeting glances, then—almost in sync—lifted their glasses and drank.

“Eh?” Lin Fang raised a brow, half amused, half intrigued. “Both of you?”

Zhi Yan quickly waved her hands. “I—it’s nothing special. Just the usual school days. You admire someone popular, but you know it’ll never happen, so you keep it to yourself.”

Li Liu shrugged, echoing, “Same here. Everyone’s had those kinds of feelings once or twice.”

But their guarded tones and averted eyes said more than their words. Li Xue, quietly observing, felt an odd tightness in her chest she couldn’t quite name.

The game carried on with laughter, teasing, and confessions until midnight, when one by one the drunken youngsters retired to their rooms.

Left alone, Lin Fang lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He summoned his System Interface, scrolling past the familiar functions.

His fingers hovered over the system functions he had yet to use: Beast World.

It was the function he unlocked after becoming a B-rank Summoner. Usually, he would want to take his time to explore this function, which he suspects is the system’s own version of a Stellar Rift. However, with so much negative balance hanging over his head, he would want to reduce it as much as possible with the hunt.

And with a thumping heart, filled with excitement and a bit of nervousness, he tapped it.

As soon as it did, unlike with the training grounds, this one didn’t give him a choice. Instead, the system chime directly echoed in his head, followed by a notification.

Ding! The World of Pterosaurs has been selected.

Teleporting you in… 3… 2… 1…

A wash of light engulfed him…

The next moment, Lin Fang found himself standing in the middle of a barren wasteland.

The soil was black and cracked, littered with enormous skeletons of dead monsters with their ribcages and skulls stretching dozens of feet high like titans.

A System notification blinked at the corner of his vision:

[You have 60 minutes to explore.]

“Great… a timer, just like with the Training Grounds. Because that makes this any less creepy,” he muttered, brushing dust off his pants as he glanced around.

Just as he was about to inspect, the ground beneath him rumbled all of a sudden, taking him by surprise. A tremor rolled through the wasteland, shaking the skeletal remains as if they were about to rise again.

His pulse spiked at the sudden change.

Then—

ROOOAAAR!

A deafening roar split the air. From beyond the skeletal hills, a colossal Pterosaur emerged with its scales glowing like molten lava and wings blotting out the crimson sky. Its sheer size was absurd—hundreds of feet from snout to tail, like a living mountain wrapped in fire.

Lin Fang’s jaw dropped at the sight of the colossal beast. His face was completely frozen. “Oh… you’ve got to be kidding me.”

The inspection skill kicked in automatically this time.

[Quetzalcoatlus Ignideus-The Pterosaur Fire God]

Grade: Mythical

Element: Primordial Fire

Level: 99 (Quasi-God)

Lin Fang blinked once, then let out a helpless laugh. “Yeah… nope. This is not my stop.”

At the same time, the Pterosaur Fire God’s eyes locked onto him.

Lin Fang was frozen in his spot; his entire body felt like it was paralyzed by its gaze.

As he stared at its large pair of eyes, the latter motioned its head.

A sea of flames erupted in the next moment, devouring everything in sight. Lin Fang had no time to scream before he blacked out.

*Ding! You have died.

[You have resurrected successfully.]

[You cannot re-enter Beast World for the next 24 hours.]

*Hah*

Lin Fang jolted awake in his bed with his heart hammering while sweat dripping down his forehead. He rubbed his face with both hands, staring at the ceiling as if it had personally betrayed him.

“Okay,” he muttered in a flat voice. “What the hell was that? A level-99, are you fuc*ing serious, system?”

He buried his head in his pillow, but no amount of muffling could hide the fact that he’d just learned a painful truth: he was too weak.

*

The next day, while Li Liu and Zhi Yan left for the store to conduct interviews, Lin Fang left with Li Xue for the guild.

The guild was quiet as always, save for the faint thudding sound coming from above, indicating movement.

Leaving Li Xue at the reception desk, as he climbed to the tavern on the second floor, there, a sober Li Chengfeng is seen with Fan Yujing, the guild elite who didn’t abandon him in the rift. A 12×12 chessboard was seen between them, and both of them were quite concentrated to the point none of them sensed Lin Fang’s arrival at all… until he stopped behind Yujing, who seemed to be in a tough spot, facing a fork for both his Queen and the Knight.

Lin Fang didn’t do anything to disturb their game. He calmly waited on the side for atleast another twenty minutes until Li Chengfeng resigned the name and finally spotted him. His eyes widened. “When did you come?”

Before Lin Fang got to answer, Yujing replied, “He was there for a while.”

“So, he knows that I’m here…” Lin Fang narrowed his eyes to stare at Fan Yujing for a moment before turning back to Li Chengfeng and asking, “I heard you want to see me.”

Li Chengfeng nodded. “Yes, I would like to talk about your experience in Rift.”

Lin Fang’s face hardened at that request. He immediately denied it with a straight face, “I apologize, but I would like to keep it to myself.”

That earned a complicated look from Yujing, who looked down while Li Chengfeng looked surprised by his voice. The former SS-ranked Hunter’s eyes narrowed as he asked. “Did you kill someone?”

“What?” The question took Lin Fang aback, but he quickly shook his head. “No. Neither did I kill someone nor do I want to kill someone.”

To that, Li Chengfeng sighed in relief. “Then, it is good.”

He then glanced at Yujing and ordered him to leave them alone. Fan Yujing neither questioned nor showed any hesitancy at all. He simply got up and left without turning back.

But once he is out of sight, Li Chengfeng then raised his hand, the storage ring on his index finger glowed for a moment before a scarlet egg with threads of gold wrapped around it like silk materialized in thin air, taking Lin Fang by surprise again. “A dimensional ring?”

A dimensional ring is something similar to that of Lin Fang’s storage space, but almost never to be seen, cuz not only is it incredibly expensive, in the lines of hundreds of millions of credits, but also because it needs Space element monster’s parts, and Space element is one of the rarest elements a monster can have.

Lin Fang then remembered Li Ying’s words about Li Chengfeng. When he remembered that this fellow was a former SS-rank Hunter, he paid more attention to the egg displayed.

As he inspected it, a new holographic window opened, displaying its details.

Blood Flame Tailed Fox Egg

Grade: Legendary

Element: Primordial Fire

Potential: Level-76 (Overlord Tier)

“Primordial Fire?”

Lin Fang couldn’t help but remember his encounter with the Pterosaur Fire God last night in the system’s beast world. While its details brought a shudder in his very soul, he remembered that both have the same element.

“Here, you can have this one…” Li Chengfeng then put forth the Arm-sized egg toward him. The latter pointed at himself in disbelief. “Me? Why?”

Li Chengfeng replied with a shrug. “You are an innate soul. It will be more useful to you than to me.”

“But that egg is…” As Lin Fang seemed hesitant, Li Chengfeng cut in, “Actually, there is another reason why I am giving it to you.” Raising to his feet, he stepped toward the young man and said, while looking straight into his eyes. “After the last battle with Blood Flame Tailed Fox, I realized that I no longer belong on the battlefield. Before my strength wanes away completely, I want to leave behind my legacy. Lin Fang, do you want to become a disciple?”

“Eh?”

*Ding!

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