Zhang Chen looked at the stone tablet in front of him. He always felt that the tablet, with its sinister aura, strangely absorbed blood, making it seem like it had an ominous origin. The more he looked, the more sinister it appeared.
"If I want to study the supernatural, I must constantly use golden light to stimulate it and see what magical properties these strange things possess in this world." Zhang Chen decided to take advantage of the fact that the tablet couldn’t run away, and without hesitation, pressed his palm against it. As he did, he observed the golden light penetrating the tablet, and numerous blood-red veins on the tablet shattered one by one, causing large chunks of experience points to fall down.
[Experience points +80]
[Experience points +60]
[Experience points +90]
[Experience points +120]
...
Chunks of experience points kept falling, and Zhang Chen couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear. With the tablet providing experience points, why bother laboriously digging graves? It’s much better to directly exploit the tablet’s wool. The tablet seemed to be cornered by Zhang Chen, as countless words burst forth, emitting blood-red light, which flickered in the void. However, the next moment, the golden light around Zhang Chen burst out, and the red glow emitted by the tablet was forced back to its original form.
"Am I really that powerful?" Zhang Chen was initially startled by the tablet’s counterattack; after all, it suddenly emitted red light, which frightened him. But who would have thought that the red light was nothing more than a bluff? Faced with his Light of the True God, it didn’t even have room to resist and was directly turned into nothingness.
"It can’t withstand a single blow!" Zhang Chen muttered to himself, seeing the countless blood-red threads on the tablet continuously erased. His eyes showed a hint of surprise: "But as the tablet was damaged, the experience points dropped began to decrease."
"Hmm~"
A quarter of an hour later, Zhang Chen furrowed his brows, watching the experience points drop from the tablet, and couldn’t help but frown:
[Experience points +8]
[Experience points +6]
[Experience points +9]
[Experience points +1]
[Experience points +8]
[Experience points +7]
[Experience points +10]
[Experience points +2]
...
"The drop in experience points seems to have significantly decreased." Zhang Chen stopped his actions and then looked at his Golden Finger Interface:
[Name: Zhang Chen]
[Skill 1 (Second Tier): Light of the True God (0/5000)]
[Skill 2 (Unranked): Dragon Qi (0/2000)]
[Points: 4500]
At this moment, Zhang Chen’s experience points had already increased to four thousand five hundred, just five hundred points away from the five-thousand point threshold required to upgrade his Light of the True God. However, the tablet before him seemed to be weakened by his exploitation, and the experience points dropped started to significantly diminish, occasionally even coming down to single digits. There were times he needed multiple attacks for experience points to drop.
"I’ve now verified something: my Light of the True God can harm the supernatural, and once harmed, it drops a lot of experience points. But the key point is, the supernatural has a limit to the experience points it can drop." Zhang Chen stared at the tablet as his Dharma Eye opened, examining it closely, observing the changes in the Qi Mechanism inside the tablet. He saw that the red mist on the tablet had dimmed to nearly invisible, and the blood flowing from the blood-red text on the tablet seemed more abundant, gathering into a small puddle on the ground.
Zhang Chen looked at the pooled blood on the ground. It had no aura surrounding it, appearing as ordinary blood.
"Truly bizarre." Zhang Chen muttered to himself, gazing up and down at the tablet, his eyes showing a hint of contemplation.
"I previously watered it with blood, and that’s when it started to revive and become supernatural..." Zhang Chen looked at the stone tablet with extremely sparse red airflow, hurriedly pulling over a nearby rabbit and wild chicken. Then, with a swift motion, he sliced them open, and their hot blood splattered onto the tablet.
The blood dripped onto the tablet and was instantly absorbed.
With his Dharma Eye, Zhang Chen watched the tablet, and sure enough, as it absorbed the blood, the red airflow started gradually recovering.
After watering the tablet with the blood from both the chicken and rabbit, Zhang Chen tossed them aside, and then, with focused eyes, he stared at the tablet: "This tablet becomes more powerful by absorbing blood. It’s truly precarious; I spotted the signs early on, otherwise, continuing to feed it could lead to unimaginable consequences. If I keep nurturing it, who knows if the tablet might eventually fly off to eat people."
Seeing the red airflow on the tablet recover slightly, Zhang Chen pressed his hand with golden light against it again, watching as the newly emerged red threads inside the tablet broke apart again. However, the experience points that dropped remained scarce:
[Experience points +5]
[Experience points +3]
[Experience points +1]
[Experience points +2]
[Experience points +3]
[Experience points +4]
[Experience points +5]
...
The number of experience points that dropped was pitifully small, and Zhang Chen stared at the experience points on the tablet, unable to discern any pattern.
"Logically, after watering the tablet with the rabbit and wild chicken, the red airflow on the tablet should have recovered somewhat, and the experience points dropped ought to be more. Why is there still no improvement?" Zhang Chen looked at the tablet in front of him, a trace of contemplation visible in his eyes.
Moreover, he discovered something else: he could only harm the blood-red threads on the surface of the tablet, but his golden light couldn’t reach the deeper red threads within the tablet, leaving him powerless against them.
"What to do?" Zhang Chen circled the tablet, examining it back and forth, but came to no conclusion even after a long time. He looked at the tablet, and as he stopped damaging it, the deep-seated blood-red threads inside started slowly extending, reclaiming the areas Zhang Chen had purified.
Once the tablet was filled with those blood-red threads again, the experience points dropped under Zhang Chen’s golden light remained meager, almost nonexistent.
"Did I drain it dry?" Zhang Chen looked at the insufficiently dropped experience points, those pitiful ’+1+1+1+1’.
"Seems like I drained it dry!" Zhang Chen ceased his actions, revealing a thoughtful expression as he looked at the tablet, then stopped his actions: "I’ll come back tomorrow to check!"
After this round of excitement, a day had passed. As the sun shifted, the cave grew icy cold. Zhang Chen glanced at the tablet, wrapped himself in animal skins, and quickly ran out.
Arriving at the stream for a wash, Zhang Chen frowned as he noticed the water level had again dropped: "Seems a bit ominous!"
The water level had lowered once more!
Though Zhang Chen was concerned, he was powerless in the face of such a natural disaster.
Carrying a wild chicken, Zhang Chen went to the beehive, chopped up a chicken leg, and fed the wasps for a while. After cleaning all traces, he returned to the cave, searching for a suitable nest to cultivate the wasps.