Chapter 111: One Year’s Harvest
Alliance Calendar Year Six Hundred and Seventy-Five. It had already been four years since Zhou Ming arrived on Blue Star, and one year since he last entered the Northern Wasteland.
In this one year, aside from eating, sleeping, and using the restroom, Zhou Ming had devoted almost all his time to studying various kinds of knowledge.
This state consumed even more energy than when he had gone to the Qinshan Library at the Qinshan Base.
If not for practicing martial arts and the powerful physical qualities brought by the Beast Taming feedback, he did not know whether he could have endured it.
In the inner city, inside an apartment near the Hunter Guild, this was Zhou Ming’s newly changed residence.
Two bedrooms and one living room, with one of the bedrooms already remodeled by him into a laboratory.
After a year of bitter study, although he still could not compare to top-tier scientific researchers, serving as an assistant posed no problem.
Inside the laboratory, Zhou Ming was extracting Inkband’s snake blood, then injecting it into test tubes prepared in advance.
After modulating it through purchased reagents, he directly injected it into his own arterial blood vessels.
The crimson blood slowly flowed in, making people feel an inexplicable fear, similar to the instinctive dread some people had toward entering hospitals.
When the modulated snake blood entered his body, Zhou Ming gradually felt a manic emotion slowly breeding within his heart.
This was a side effect brought by the New Martial Arts Beast King Body. However, before Zhou Ming could suppress this manic emotion with his Spiritual Power, a cold current suddenly rose in his eyes, blowing into his mind like a freezing wind.
One year had passed, and Zhou Ming’s eyes had already completely undergone mutation.
Vertical pupils, dominated by a dark gold color, revealed a cold, sinister charm, no different in the slightest from true serpent pupils.
The reason they had completely mutated into serpent pupils was not only due to the feedback from the Ironthread Snake, but also because Zhou Ming, when practicing the Beast King Body, exclusively used the snake blood of his own Ironthread Snake.
Under his intentional or unintentional cultivation, the dark gold serpent pupils were ultimately formed.
Now, not only did they exert spiritual deterrence against snake-type Ferocious Beasts, even other creatures experienced similar effects.
Besides that, they could also eliminate the side effects brought by practicing the Beast King Body.
It could be said that the dark gold serpent pupils already counted as a special spiritual secret technique, and the benefits contained within were self-evident.
It was precisely because of this that Zhou Ming practiced the Beast King Body without any misgivings, and his physical qualities were already comparable to mutated animals.
Beneath his clothes, his long and lean body showed no trace of bloated muscles, instead resembling countless steel wires twisted tightly together.
He not only possessed terrifying explosive power, but also pure, raw strength.
Especially since he also practiced the Mad Python Martial Way. The Beast King Body enhanced physical qualities, while the Mad Python Martial Way improved control over body and strength.
If Zhou Ming now possessed a Thunder Type-3 Revolver equipped with specialized bullets, even an official professional Beast Tamer would not dare to ignore him.
After all, the speed of bullets was far too fast. If a professional Beast Tamer failed to guard in time, it would be very easy for Zhou Ming to succeed with a sneak attack.
After all, among professional Beast Tamers, only Beast Knights possessed abnormally powerful physical bodies, while Phantasmal Tamers and Shepherds still needed to rely on their own Phantasmal Beasts.
As for Beast Spirit Sorcerers, Zhou Ming had yet to understand them. He only knew that this class advancement system could reach the Legendary Saint level.
Unfortunately, the Thunder Type-3 Revolver was not sold in any shops within the Qinshan Base.
Even if there were, Zhou Ming could not afford it now.
Because he was out of money.
The Northern Wasteland trip had yielded a total income of around 1.6 million Alliance Coins. Adding what he had left before, it barely approached two million Alliance Coins.
In the span of one year, those two million Alliance Coins had almost been completely consumed by Zhou Ming.
This was still under the premise that his Spiritual Power had already reached its limit, and that he temporarily did not need resources to increase Spiritual Power.
Nurturing Inkband and Vermilion Jade, practicing martial arts, re-renting housing, remodeling the laboratory, and adding experimental equipment all required considerable expenses.
Among these, studying knowledge related to Bloodline Genes required constant experimentation and personal experience, and the consumption of various reagents alone was a massive expenditure.
“Looks like I need to find a way to make money.”
With his funds bottoming out, Zhou Ming was naturally well aware of the situation.
Beast Tamers earned money quickly, but if one wanted to climb higher, the speed at which money was burned was even faster.
Phantasmal Beasts needed resources, Beast Tamers needed resources to increase Spiritual Power, venturing into the wilderness required equipment, and when Phantasmal Beasts died or Beast Tamers were injured, all of that demanded large amounts of funds.
If luck was bad, one might even lose their life in the wilderness.
Because of this, some Beast Tamers had no intention of advancing further, just like the boss of Canine Home.
However, letting Zhou Ming give up the path of being a Beast Tamer was impossible.
Especially after witnessing the terrifying power of transcendent Beast Tamers in the Northern Wasteland, his desire for power beyond the mundane had only grown stronger.
As for research into Half-Beastman Class Advancement, Zhou Ming had also achieved some results.
Among them, Bloodline Will, he had seen a brief introduction in the book “The Relationship Between Bloodlines and Genes”.
Its meaning was that Bloodline Will was an extension of a Ferocious Beast’s soul.
And this theory came from Beast Tamers who advanced into War Knights. When they executed combined techniques, they needed to resonate with their own Phantasmal Beasts. This resonance was a special aura formed by soul, life, and aura.
Thus, they realized that Bloodline Will was the extension of a Ferocious Beast’s soul.
As for why New Martial Arts brought about mental influence, according to Zhou Ming’s speculation, genes were a part of bloodlines and concealed a portion of a Ferocious Beast’s soul thoughts.
Put another way, they were residual intent.
Because it was not a complete Bloodline Will, it could be forcibly suppressed through an iron will or the Beast Tamer’s Spiritual Power.
If Zhou Ming wanted to use Half-Beastman Class Advancement, aside from perfecting the class advancement ritual, he also needed to resolve the influence of Bloodline Will on his own consciousness.
Based on the situation of New Martial Arts, unless he found a stronger force to suppress or replace the Bloodline Will.
For a single Ferocious Beast, Zhou Ming could not think of a solution, but for a group of Ferocious Beasts, it might be possible.
Collective consciousness surpassed individual consciousness, and collective will surpassed personal will.
If Zhou Ming could take himself as the core, gather the consciousness of several hundred or even a thousand Ironthread Snakes, and become the supreme will of the Ironthread Snake swarm, then the Ironthread Snake Bloodline Will could only submit to that supreme will.
To describe it more vividly, each Ironthread Snake had its own self-will, but when hundreds of snakes fused into a single snake, only one will would appear, enabling control over a body composed of hundreds of snakes.
This was all of Zhou Ming’s harvest over this year.
However, to put it into actual action still required large amounts of experimentation and preparation. Development of the dark gold serpent pupils’ abilities, practice of the New Martial Arts Beast King Body, research into Spiritual Power and consciousness…
A huge pile of things awaited Zhou Ming to complete.
All of these required money.
Without money, none of his follow-up plans could be carried out.
Facing such a predicament, after injecting the modulated snake blood, Zhou Ming began clearing out the clutter inside the laboratory.
Afterward, he brought Inkband and Vermilion Jade along, preparing to head to the Hunter Guild to take a look, see if there were any valuable missions recently that were also within his capabilities.
After changing clothes and putting in cosmetic contact lenses, Zhou Ming left his residence.
However, before leaving, he did not forget to place an inconspicuous little object at the laboratory entrance.
That was a biochemical weapon made by refining Ironthread Snake Venom. It could also be considered proof that Zhou Ming had not built the laboratory in vain, and it conveniently trained his hands-on abilities as well.