Chapter 227: Fighting Fire with Fire |
Raging infernos flared to life. Across the fading remnants of the verdant land, walls of flame erupted, devouring forests, grasslands, and untamed plains... Silhouettes mounted on deer darted through the blazing glow.
Following Bai Mu's instructions, they set blazes everywhere they went, accelerating the destruction of all remaining life.
Bai Mu wasn't idle either. While the girls ventured into the central zone of the once-green lands, he rode Tuya out to the most perilous fringes, taking Xiao Wei along for the journey.
He had separated from the main survivor group, handing command over to the Shaman. For the time they had left, the group would have to survive on their own. Whether it was rationing food and water or dealing with the Mountain Evil Gods that might give chase, they had to face those trials themselves.
If luck was on their side, simply hiding in that cave would be enough to weather the storm.
Bai Mu shared the same task as the young women: setting fires everywhere and incinerating anything that still harbored vitality.
By the evening of the twenty-sixth day, monstrous flames raged out of control, choking the sky with thick black smoke. Once the prairie fires took hold, they spread with terrifying speed.
Bai Mu encountered several Mountain Evil Gods in the peripheral zones, but he completely avoided direct confrontation. Relying on the vision provided by his mobile wards, he steered clear of the monsters.
By the time the Mountain Evil Gods had drained the life force from the rest of the region and arrived at these final zones, everything within sight had been reduced to charred charcoal and smoldering ash.
There was absolutely nothing left to absorb. Charcoal and plant ash offered no life force. Even as they rooted desperately through the burned landscape, they couldn't find a single living thing.
Gnawing hunger forced them to keep moving. Some of the Mountain Evil Gods sprinted blindly toward unexplored territory ahead, while others doubled back, desperately scouring the ravaged lands for anything they might have missed.
This was "Fighting Fire with Fire". Burning down the forests and grasslands in advance was equivalent to preemptively draining these creatures' Health and lifespans. Every Mountain Evil God would now die much faster. Originally, a significant number of them would have retained their combat capabilities until the day the Script ended, but thanks to the fires set by Bai Mu and his riders, the monsters would never survive that long.
However, this starvation also drove the monsters into a frenzy. They rampaged wildly, smashing into everything that stood in their path as they frantically searched for any lingering trace of life.
Hunger and primal instinct made them terrifyingly aggressive. They even began slaughtering one another, but since they were all Mountain Evil Gods, they couldn't extract any actual life force from their kin.
Mountain Evil Gods didn't possess anything that could genuinely be called life. It was akin to how a person could gain energy from eating rice, but couldn't stave off starvation by swallowing batteries. A battery could power an appliance, but it was useless as human sustenance; consuming one would only result in being poisoned.
Starving, the Mountain Evil Gods attacked anything that so much as twitched, but nothing could halt the rapid depletion of their energy. By the twenty-ninth day, the creatures began dropping like flies.
They exhausted their remaining vitality through running, chasing, and fighting. Like clockwork dolls whose springs had unwound, they collapsed into lifeless heaps, crumbling into dry bones upon the blackened earth.
Continuous notifications rang in Bai Mu's ears, announcing [Resentful... has died]. Though he hadn't slain these Mountain Evil Gods in direct combat, his actions were the direct cause of their premature demise.
Paradise was highly intuitive when judging such matters. Players could dispatch monsters through a myriad of methods; dealing raw, direct damage to beat a monster to death wasn't the only way to register a kill.
Indirectly eliminating enemies by exploiting the environment, terrain, or traps perfectly counted toward a Player's total kills.
For instance, if someone severed a live wire and left it in a puddle along their target's path, the resulting electrocution would still be credited to them as a kill.
Even if Bai Mu hadn't set the fires, these Mountain Evil Gods would have eventually starved to death once they ran out of life force to absorb. However, since his deliberate strategy actively accelerated the process, he rightfully earned the kill credit.
This extended to the blazes set by the young women as well. Since Bai Mu had provided their food, equipment, and explicit orders, all their hard work fed directly into his total kill count.
His numbers skyrocketed at a terrifying pace. On the morning of the twenty-sixth day, his kill count had sat at under fifteen Mountain Evil Gods, consisting of a giant boar, a black bear, a water buffalo, a ram, and a pack of wolves crushed at the bottom of a valley.
By the night of the twenty-ninth day, that number had surged wildly, multiplying tenfold and then some. His ears had gone numb from the relentless barrage of notifications. It was an outcome he hadn't initially anticipated. His approach had always been inherently conservative, rarely favoring aggressive, preemptive strikes. But Xiao Wei's mind operated with far more chaotic brilliance than his rigid habits allowed. She had been the one to propose this "Fighting Fire with Fire" strategy in the first place.
Under normal circumstances, accumulating such an astronomical kill count in this Script would be utterly impossible. In traditional gaming terms, this was the equivalent of exploiting a bug.
But Paradise was a realm of profound freedom. It didn't artificially restrict how Players cleared a Script. The rules were set in stone the moment one entered the world; the rest simply depended on how deeply a Player could exploit them.
Without a doubt, from a Player's perspective, Bai Mu's run in this Script was a resounding success.
This would undoubtedly yield the most lucrative rewards he had ever harvested from a single Script.
The Script was incredibly dangerous and fiercely difficult, but those lethal monsters directly translated into massive payouts. It all boiled down to whether a Player had the sheer competence to slay them. Now, there was only one day left. In less than twenty-four hours, he would officially clear the Script.
Over the past few days, he had summoned Lucy to replenish his consumables. He shared his own rations with Tuya, surviving on the absolute minimum amount of food and water necessary. As for Xiao Wei, unless she was actively needed for combat or setting fires, she remained tucked safely against his chest in her doll form.
He had a loyal mount and ample stamina to deal with the Mountain Evil Gods, but the young women of the tribe weren't faring nearly as well. On the night of the twenty-ninth day, Bai Mu rode into a stretch of scorched earth. There, he found the charred remains of a deer and a human. The fallen rider's skeletal grip was still wrapped around a long blade synthesized by the Book of the Witch, her body draped in beast garments crafted from the Book of the Witch.
Beside the corpse lay the colossal, fallen bones of a beast. It was impossible to discern which of the riders this was. Bai Mu hadn't memorized every girl's name; the only ones etched deeply into his mind were Adai, Ashi, and Nuosu.
He dismounted from Tuya's back, gently removing a stone pendant from the corpse's neck to keep as a memento.
Without them, he never could have traversed so much territory to set fires over the span of three days.
She had sacrificed herself for a noble cause, harboring absolute faith in Bai Mu's commands. She had entrusted her very life to the one leading them. Deep blade marks scored the ghastly white bones of the beast—a testament to how fiercely she had fought until her dying breath.
Her efforts hadn't been meaningless. Her tribe, the very spark of their people, would continue to live on.
On the final night, Bai Mu tracked down the remaining warriors who had fulfilled their mission. Excluding himself, only seven riders had survived. The quiet and gentle Ashi did not return to him; only her older sister, Adai, was still alive.