Free Web NovelChapter 167: Chapter 167: You Gotta Be Kidding Me, This Is Actually a Dungeon?!
Jiang Che watched as the headless woman in the black leather jacket kept charging forward. The wounds on her body grew more numerous, and the tears in the leather widened.
Long gashes split across her, but her body was incorporeal—only the clothing gave her a physical shape, and not a drop of blood spilled from the wounds.
This challenger’s strength was unquestionable—even Xiong Jie had been instantly knocked out, yet she’d managed to cover two-thirds of the route already. That said enough about her power.
At first, Jiang Che himself didn’t even know what the final form of the dungeon would be.
The rule formation wasn’t in his control. From its inception, the dungeon’s rules evolved according to his subconscious intent.
But after the dungeon finished forming, Jiang Che understood the rules here better than anyone.
He could tell the woman’s path was being optimized as she progressed.
You could say that every stretch of passage she crossed was, for now, the best possible route through that zone.
Just as Ding Ning had guessed, the map was visible to all challengers.
The more ground a challenger covered, the larger the area of the map they could sense.
Jiang Che was naturally clear about this setting in his dungeon—he’d never intended to trap anyone inside.
Ding Ning had only been injured eight times, but already, eight times was enough for her to feel that soul-rending agony.
If she got hurt again, the pain would double—after eight, what comes next?
Someone had once said: start with one yuan on day one. Double it daily, and by the sixth day, most give up.
By the tenth day, the number would reach 1,024; by day eleven, it would be 2,048.
The further it goes, the more unbearable it becomes.
If you turned that into pain, it’s even worse.
After eight times, the pain Ding Ning was enduring ramped up to 512 times the original intensity.
The first time she was injured, it just felt like mental numbness—like an ant biting her finger. Painful, but not enough to hinder her.
The second injury felt like a shallow cut from a small knife; after that, the pain only escalated.
"Isn’t this dungeon too easy? She’s actually going to make it out!" Zhou Ang stared at the flat projection map. They could still see only one little red dot—the challenger.
The red dot had flashed eight times in total, meaning she’d only been hurt eight times.
Just eight injuries, and she’d made it through two-thirds of the whole dungeon without her speed faltering at all—not even her route planning was much affected.
Drawing on their past dungeon survival experiences, humans knew a simple truth—in a dungeon, the most important thing is to stay alive.
If you can survive being injured, the severity of the injury is secondary.
Xiong Jie opened his mouth and hesitated, wanting to speak but holding back.
He knew who that was. He knew how strong she was—the boss of Dungeon Nine, not someone to be trifled with.
Xiong Jie shot a glance toward Jiang Che, where the rest faced an illusionary desktop with the dungeon’s two-dimensional map displayed upon it.
They could clearly see that none of the blood-colored crystals on the map had been missed.
Zhou Ang and Flying Tiger both looked worried—it was clear that everyone was anxious about the challenge level in Jiang Che’s dungeon.
But Xiong Jie knew Jiang Che’s dungeon was anything but easy.
The boss had come in under a hidden identity—she wasn’t here for mercy. If even she was getting hurt, you could imagine just how difficult the dungeon really was.
Xiong Jie sighed. His boss’s current condition didn’t look good—at first, there had been brief exchanges, asking whether Jiang Che recognized her, but now, she hadn’t spoken in ages.
"This dungeon is tough!" Xiong Jie answered Zhou Ang with certainty. He’d been through it himself and knew the difficulty wasn’t as simple as it looked.
The instant those white Spirit Bodies swarmed in on him, it was the most painful moment of his life.
In that second, he had no idea if he’d taken dozens or hundreds of hits—he only knew he blacked out in a flash.
Jiang Che stayed silent, his eyes locked onto the challenger.
But in the next moment, his gaze shifted to the edge of the map.
Following his line of sight, Zhou Ang suddenly noticed three more little red dots appear on the map’s edge.
"Someone’s coming!" Zhou Ang jerked his head toward the new red dots that had abruptly appeared on the map.
This group had shown up at the map’s edge—a sign that someone out there had noticed something strange about this area and made their way over.
Whenever anyone entered the dungeon, they all shared the same map. But each had their own individual set of blood-colored crystals and the Spirit Bodies that hunted them through the dungeon.
"Beep beep!" Flying Tiger’s phone made a sound—an alert from their livestream device that a broadcast was starting.
Flying Tiger stared at her phone in mild surprise.
The signal icon at the top corner showed an X—no signal at all. She’d never expected she could still watch a livestream here.
People had brought phones into dungeons before, and once inside, all contact with the outside world was lost.
But the Flying Tiger Group’s livestream device worked like a signal receiver and transmitter.
The device could receive signals from the entire population of Survivors, but sending them to phones was much more restricted.
"We have a stream!" Flying Tiger raised her phone. Zhou Ang and the others instantly crowded around.
"It must be because we’re in the Human Realm—our livestream device can receive dungeon signals from the Survivors."
Now that the phone could receive livestreams normally, she immediately understood the principle behind it.
Before, all dungeons were in the Evil Spirit Realm, while the livestream device’s signal receiver was in the Human Realm.
[SS-rank dungeon has been entered by Survivors. Livestream started.]
Three windows popped up on the phone screen—three humans had entered the dungeon, and now stood warily right on its edge.
Apparently, they too had noticed the supernatural changes around the world and discovered Jiang Che’s dungeon, right next to the Black Forest.
The drab, dilapidated walls met the eerie Black Forest as if this asylum had always grown just at the forest’s edge.
They’d come from behind, intending to investigate the Black Forest, but on the way discovered something odd here.
[Dungeon has started. Please clear the dungeon to receive rewards.]
The instant all three Survivors stepped in, a familiar notification popped in their heads.
They glanced at the map in their hands, then back at their current location.
"Dungeon?"
They’d felt something was off as soon as they walked this way. The map showed this should have been the city outskirts—a national road with high stone walls on both sides, built to keep the slopes from collapsing.
Since the supernatural descended, humans hardly lived on the outskirts anymore.
Those who stayed out there were usually either highly skilled and fearless, or a very tiny minority of the ordinary.
In the era of Evil Spirits and the supernatural, humans preferred to huddle together in safety.
Once the Black Forest started to expand, even the high-ranked humans living in the suburbs headed to the city for protection.
In the stream, a man’s heart turned cold the moment the dungeon info appeared in his head.
"Goddamn it, it’s actually a dungeon?!"
