Lin Ye didn't go back to the garbage disposal station.
The monsters there were already too low-level for him, and the maximum Life Value his Soul Furnace could absorb from them was minuscule.
Besides, the area was small. Even if he turned the entire garbage disposal station upside down, he probably wouldn't find many more mutated beasts.
He needed to find a larger, more stable "Leveling Area."
Lin Ye activated the light screen on his watch, opened the map, and after confirming his direction, headed straight for the southern suburbs.
As Lin Ye continued walking toward the outskirts of the city, he saw fewer and fewer people and modern buildings.
Eventually, it gave way to a stretch of wilderness.
He had arrived at his destination.
The Dongjiang Ruins.
This place was once Dongjiang City's old industrial district. Due to changes in urban planning, industrial upgrades, and a severe chemical plant explosion, the entire district was affected.
Factories relocated, and residents evacuated.
The entire district gradually became a forgotten jungle of steel.
It was officially designated a Level Three restricted area, with ordinary citizens strictly forbidden from approaching.
Lin Ye's figure, like a phantom, silently blended into the edge of the ruins.
A strange smell of rust and dust hung in the air.
He had ventured less than a hundred meters into the ruins when a dense burst of SQUEAKING erupted from an abandoned factory building nearby.
The next second, a black, overwhelming mass—a torrent of over a hundred mutated rats—poured out of the factory's broken windows and streamed across the cracked street.
They completely ignored Lin Ye, the uninvited guest.
In this vast expanse of ruins, the scent of a human was nothing new.
This was their true territory.
Lin Ye's gaze swept over the rat swarm. Above all of their heads, he saw the same green text: Level 1.
He didn't make a move.
Lin Ye merely observed with a cold detachment.
This place was fraught with danger. Even Level 1 mutated rats moved in packs here.
The deeper he went, the more deathly still his surroundings became.
Towering smokestacks stood like silent giants, casting massive shadows. The dilapidated factories and residential buildings resembled dormant behemoths, watching him with a cold gaze.
In the darkness, pairs of eyes of different colors would occasionally light up, only to vanish quickly after a brief moment of observation.
The creatures here seemed to possess a cunning and caution that those at the garbage disposal station lacked.
Lin Ye slowed his steps, his breathing becoming nearly inaudible.
Like an experienced Hunter, he used the broken walls and abandoned vehicles for cover, slowly infiltrating deeper into the ruined city.
His eyes shone with astonishing brightness in the dark.
It was a powerful dark-adaptation ability brought on by pushing his Spiritual Power to its absolute limit.
He saw a mutated cat, the size of a hound, squatting silently on the fifth-floor balcony of a residential building. Its pair of eerie green eyes were fixed on the street below.
[LV5]!
At the end of its line of sight, a creature covered in bone spikes, resembling a pangolin, was rummaging through a pile of construction debris.
[LV6]!
Farther away, a seemingly ordinary ivy plant's vines were squirming slightly. At the tip of one vine was, shockingly, a maw filled with fine, dense teeth.
[LV4]!
This place had clearly formed a complete food chain, where the strong preyed on the weak.
Lin Ye's heart pounded, not just from fear, but from the excitement of discovering a new world.
'This is the place I should have come to!'
This Leveling Area had formed its own ecosystem. It was vast enough for him to stay here for a very long time.
Lin Ye continued his stealthy advance.
As he ventured deeper, the levels of the mutated creatures he encountered grew higher and higher.
He stopped at the edge of a massive, circular plaza after passing through a completely destroyed commercial street.
According to the map, this spot was still over ten kilometers from the core of the ruins.
But the level numbers above the heads of the monsters entrenched here had already turned a glaring, vivid red!
A giant lizard, over three meters long and covered in dark green scales, was sprawled on the base of a statue in the center of the plaza, its scarlet tongue flicking in and out.
On the other side of the plaza, several strange birds that resembled vultures, but with wingspans exceeding four meters, were tearing at the corpse of some unknown creature with their sharp beaks.
In the shadow of a half-collapsed department store not far away, Lin Ye even glimpsed a colossal figure nearly three meters tall, its original animal form completely unrecognizable after its mutation.
These mutated beasts were at least LV8.
The three-meter-tall behemoth was even marked as LV10.
Lin Ye held his breath.
He couldn't easily handle any single one of them at his current level.
Lin Ye knew this was the limit of what he could explore for now.
Any farther, and it would be a true death zone.
However, just as he was preparing to retreat...
ROAR—!!!
A roar that seemed to originate from the depths of hell suddenly erupted from the dark core in the far distance!
The sound was filled with endless tyranny and majesty, like an invisible sledgehammer smashing violently against Lin Ye's heart.
In the plaza, whether it was the giant carrion-eating lizard or the three-meter-tall behemoth in the high-rise ruins, all of them fled in a panic at the sound of the roar, disappearing in the blink of an eye.
The next moment, Lin Ye felt all surrounding sounds vanish.
Utter silence!
Lin Ye's pupils contracted sharply.
He saw, in the deepest darkness of the city's core, a massive, fleshy wing covered in black keratin—as if pieced together from rotting flesh and bone—suddenly stretch toward the sky, obscuring the already dim moonlight!
Just one of its unfurled wings was, by visual estimation, over seven meters long!
Lin Ye's breath caught.
He had no idea what that thing was.
He only knew that it was abnormally massive—so huge it defied his imagination!
The instant the great wing unfurled, a string of numbers—the likes of which he had never seen before, so red they were almost black, as if dripping blood—slowly materialized from the darkness.
[LV.20]!
No one knew that less than fifty kilometers from Dongjiang City, in these ruins, lurked a mutated beast of such extreme terror!
'If that thing ever broke out of the ruins...'
Lin Ye didn't dare to think about it further. His body's instincts had already taken over, compelling him to retreat backward, step by silent step.
But the moment he retreated into the shadows, a cold system notification suddenly sounded in his mind.
[Ding! Host has discovered the ultimate lord of the current region!]
[Special Phased Mission issued!]
[Mission: Kings Do Not Meet!]
[Description: In these ruins, which you have deemed your territory, the existence of another "king" cannot be tolerated. Go forth, challenge and crush it, and let its bones become the first cornerstone of your throne!]
[Mission Objective: Kill the LV.20 Regional Lord!]
[Mission Rewards: 25,000 EXP, 10 Skill Points, New Phase Unlocked: P2!]