This time I chose Paladin.

Chapter 280 Life Manor
Time flies by.

Traveling through the wilderness in a subtropical climate is a test of both mind and body.

The only dry area seems to be around the Bitterwater River near Bitterwater Town, but once you get away from the Bitterwater River, you'll understand why people don't leave it—

The transition zone between the extremely dry and extremely wet areas here is very narrow.

When Nie Weiyang entered the extremely humid region, the air was no longer a simple gas, but a hot, sticky, viscous substance that pressed heavily on his chest. Each breath felt like swallowing warm water, carrying the earthy smell of decaying plants and rising soil.

Sweat never truly dries; it just seeps out of the pores and is immediately enveloped by saturated moisture, sticking stickily to the skin and forming an uncomfortable film.

If the extreme heat is a natural disaster, a manifestation of the damage to the world's natural barriers, clearly reflected in the climate, then such changes in humidity must have an element of human error!
Life Manor is located further upstream on the upper reaches of the Bitter Water River. Nie Weiyang did not follow the river when he set off, but only took a shortcut.

This will certainly make the road more difficult, but nothing meaningful in this world is easy.

As Nie Weiyang continued to venture deeper into the heart of the epidemic area, the surrounding environment became increasingly unbearably hot. The midday sun, like molten platinum, relentlessly poured down, evaporating the moisture in the forest into a visible mist.

Even though Nie Weiyang is now immune to light-based skill damage, he still feels a subtle discomfort when faced with this level of sunlight.

He had to adjust his attire repeatedly. He had put away his heavy, functional turtleneck long-sleeved shirt and replaced it with a light linen short-sleeved shirt. Later, even the collar of the short-sleeved shirt seemed like a constraint, so he cut it off, revealing his neck soaked in sweat.

He even redesigned his usual armor setup. While the silver full-body armor was incredibly defensive, he rarely used its defensive properties and usually relied on his health bar and regeneration when he did need them.

In this environment, the armor was nothing short of a mobile steamer.

In the new plan, he will never wear full armor on ordinary days, but will only retain core components such as the breastplate, reinforced shoulder armor, and arm guards, striving to find a balance and truly achieve light and simple travel.

Fortunately, he had long since passed the stage where he needed to rely on equipment attribute bonuses. For someone like him, the outcome of a battle depended more on his own strength, skill, and belief.

Aside from rare items or familiar pieces like Zhenhui's, ordinary armor and weapons are just consumables to him. He can replace them whenever he wants, and there's no need to sacrifice more important mobility and comfort just to pursue a few points of attribute improvement.

This land is bathed in an excessively strong, even scorching, sun.

Although the terrain and landforms have a roughly similar outline to the Earth in my memory, as if they were a rough copy based on the Earth's blueprint, the details are full of the strange and unpredictable changes unique to the new world.

Nie Weiyang once traversed a dense, primeval forest, where towering trees stood tall, buttress roots rose like walls, and strange fluorescent fungi adorned the eternal darkness with mesmerizing bands of light.

Here exist proactive, aggressive mutant plants, a rarity on Titan. Their thick vines coil like giant pythons, and whenever certain mushrooms are touched, a soft 'pop' sound is heard, immediately filling the air with suffocating fungal spores.

Nie Weiyang also encountered all sorts of mutated animals in the jungle, which were incredibly diverse and colorful.

The modern Homo sapiens arrived here not long ago; before that, Titan was the world of nature.

In the overgrown jungle, life unfolds an evolutionary detour in an almost frenzied manner.

He had glimpsed hammer-armed gibbons among the vines—these gibbon-like monsters with arms so long they almost dragged on the ground, their swollen knuckles like heavy hammers, capable of easily smashing tree trunks as they swung through the forest.

Their faces were covered with bony armor, and they emitted a hissing sound like stone scraping, but they were actually chirping and communicating with each other.

A mossy python brushed past him, turning to bite him. The python's scales were covered with thick, moss-like mimic flagella; who knows how it got its structure, but it certainly blended perfectly into its environment.

What's most terrifying is that instead of a tongue, it protrudes from its mouth with a mouthpart covered in suckers, like six or seven octopus tentacles, the suckers gleaming with a slightly poisonous cold light.

The insects in the forest are even more dangerous. Swarms of drill mosquitoes fly about, their fist-sized bodies emitting an engine-like roar. Their rapidly spinning proboscis can easily pierce through leather, but they can be easily killed by the smoke from the campfire.

But knives can't be killed by ordinary smoke; it will only drive them far away and make them lurk in the jungle.

These mutated stick insects have sharp, knife-like edges on their limbs. When an unprotected human passes by, they can sever a tendon by spreading their wings.

In swampy areas, the serrated snail-eating turtle has ferocious bony spurs growing along the edge of its carapace, and its neck can spring out two meters. Its horny beak, resembling glass shards, is specifically designed to crush hard objects. They usually eat mud snails the size of a fist, so much so that their bodies are covered with parasites, making them difficult to protect themselves from even high-temperature grilling.

It's really... hard to imagine what the Hummingbird River basin on the other side of the ocean must be like now.

"To be able to survive in a place like this..." Nie Weiyang left the jungle, looked into the distance, and exhaled: "...humans are still a bit difficult to kill."

This shortcut is really hard to find.

After leaving the jungle, the world Nie Weiyang saw was like turning the pages of an apocalyptic scroll. He saw many traces of humanity struggling to survive—scattered settlements. They were like pebbles, carelessly tossed about in the dangerous wilderness, scattered, tiny, and fragile beyond repair.

Most of them consist of a few dilapidated tents patched with colorful patterns, or makeshift shacks pieced together from branches, mud, and broad leaves, barely enclosed by sharpened wooden stakes. No metal is used in this structure; even rusty iron sheets can be processed into knives, which represent the hope for survival.

The job system in "New World" gives people too many advantages. During one of his breaks, Nie Weiyang discovered a family settlement. He saw a boy wondering how to process a piece of iron he had acquired. The father used the basic processing program that came with the "Craftsman" job to turn the iron into a knife step by step.

"If I have it, can I get my sister back?" the boy asked.

“No,” the father said softly. “You need better, bigger weapons.”

"Then there are better and bigger weapons..."

“No, not either,” the father’s voice was hoarse. “You need many more people.”

Nie Weiyang watched them for a while, then walked away into the distance.

He passed by the ruins of some abandoned camps, where nothing usable remained. Scattered, simple graves dotted the surrounding dirt roads, creating a rare and beautiful scene.

Through his firsthand observations along the way, he became completely certain that it was normal for the cult's power to expand so rapidly last week, like a snowball rolling downhill.

They create suffocating survival pressures through disease and resource monopolies, forcing people to choose between 'dependence or death'. Even more insidious and effective is their apparent intentional or unintentional maintenance of a high-frequency, relentless external threat—whether it's mutated swarms that seem to be driven away, sudden, mysteriously originating small-scale armed conflicts, or periodically raging, precisely reaping lives like epidemics…

These successive crises, one after another, were like whips soaked in salt water, lashing the survivors' nerves to their limit, leaving them perpetually exhausted and unable to squeeze out a single spare bit of energy.

This is essentially equivalent to continuous torture. Moreover, it's one of the most heinous methods.

In the midst of such deprivation and cruelty, those who still maintain the ability to think and the will to resist—even to put it into action—are heroes, not ordinary people.

The vast majority of ordinary people, exhausted both physically and mentally by repeated blows of despair, find it almost inevitable that they will eventually kneel at the feet of religions that promise protection and eternal happiness in order to survive and gain a moment of peace and respite.

It's pretty much the same everywhere; in chaotic times, people are worse off than dogs.

It's sad, yet we can't be too harsh on it.

Nie Weiyang sighed silently in his heart, but this understanding would not shake his determination to break free of his shackles.

The environment was unfamiliar, and the dense forest seemed endless, with tall trees and tangled vines blocking almost all possible paths.

Unlike in China where roads are built first, motorcycles are practically useless in this environment, so I was lucky enough to get a long holiday.

Nie Weiyang traveled entirely on foot for three days. Every day, he maintained communication with Pingdu.

The support Pingdu offered was largely in line with his expectations, but to his surprise, Pingdu asked him, "Comrade Nie, do you have time to create map-sharing tools?"

By tracing parts of the map, you can create shared items, but you can't update the local situation in real time.

For example, in the map that Nie Weiyang can share now, this area is experiencing a heat wave event. Even if he resolves the event later, as long as the people behind him do not update the map through other means, this area will remain in a heat wave state in their map function.

Nie Weiyang had time to make the props, but what did Pingdu need them for? Nie Weiyang didn't ask that question, but simply promised Pingdu that whenever he had free time, he would leave the map sharing props in Kushui Town for their people to pick up.

—In this cycle, the decision-making body in Heito is far more radical and ruthless than he imagined.

After three days and nights of hard work, Nie Weiyang finally made it close to the target area, arriving at the outer perimeter of Life Manor about ten kilometers away.

This is a rare open area, a wide valley.

Under the cover of the dense bushes, Nie Weiyang's gaze fell upon the enormous manor.

It sits at the natural confluence of two mountain ranges, guarding the river valley waterways and land transportation routes...

However, the scene before him was completely different from, and even incompatible with, the functionalist modern settlement he had envisioned.

Nie Weiyang's gaze swept over the ten-mile stretch of dirty and messy shacks and looked towards the mountainside in the distance.

That was... an extremely magnificent white European-style classical manor?!
(End of this chapter)