The night wind of the Misty Marsh carried the stench of rotting stagnant water.
Su Ming pushed aside the knee-deep humus, his eight sturdy walking legs sinking into the slime with a sickening squelch. Black slime and sticky moss clung to his carapace, while the icy dampness seeped through the gaps in his armor.
Movement ahead.
Three players in leather armor emerged from the reeds, their high-intensity flashlights blinding in the darkness.
"Holy crap, it really is that lobster! The forum didn't lie!" The leader, a warrior named "Wandering Sword Under the Sky," swallowed hard, raising his mediocre steel longsword which glowed with a cheap luminescence. "Brothers, if we drop this bug, we split the 5,000 gold bounty from the whole server!"
Su Ming didn't move.
5,000 gold.
Just for 5,000 gold, a novice who hadn't even sharpened his sword properly was daring to throw his life away.
"Master, let me handle these guys for a warm-up, okay?" The Sprite floated in mid-air, its small face brimming with eagerness, clutching a tuft of foxtail grass it had somehow plucked from nowhere.
"Don't stain my eyes," Su Ming replied.
He blew a string of murky bubbles. His massive right claw shot up and came down with a deafening crack.
The sickle-shaped claw tore through the air. The warrior didn't even have time to see the motion before he was smashed into the mud pit. A red-and-white damage number "-1240" floated into the sky, and the health bar above his head instantly emptied.
One-shot.
"G-ghost!" The remaining two fell flat on their butts in the muddy water, scrambling away in a panic. One of the cloth shoes given for free in the starter village was lost in the chaos. They looked utterly pathetic.
"Why run?" Su Ming followed leisurely behind, dragging his claws through the mud and leaving two deep furrows. "Didn't you just want to sell me for cash?"
Tonight, the Misty Marsh was exceptionally lively. The server-wide bounty combined with the temporary leaderboards of various guilds had attracted all the greedy flies. Su Ming didn't even need to seek them out; he just followed the beams of their cheap flashlights, and he'd inevitably run into a few teams seeking their own deaths.
First wave: a five-man assassin squad.
Second wave: three rangers trying to trap him with physical traps.
This was the third wave.
None of them were interesting.
Su Ming waved his antennae. On his system panel, the [Dark Energy] progress bar was skyrocketing. The more people cursed him on the forum, the more absurd the values of his [Absolute Reflect] and [Iron Carapace] attributes grew. The sword strike from that warrior earlier had barely scratched him; he lost less HP than he would have from a single swamp leech bite.
He ignored the screams and continued forward, following the faint dark current deep into the marsh. His memories from his past life were like a yellowed old map, every landmark etched into his mind. As long as he crossed this toxic miasma zone, he would reach the abandoned altar at the center of the marsh.
11:55 PM.
Center of the Marsh.
Dead silence.
This area was originally supposed to be the entrance to a low-level dungeon, but now it was shrouded in an eerie, thick fog. Deep within the mist stood a massive, broken black stele.
Standing before the stele was a person.
They wore a wide, hooded black robe that blended almost perfectly with the night. They held no staff, but rather a vintage windproof lantern. The dim yellow candlelight swayed violently in the wind, illuminating the person's pale, bloodless jawline.
Su Ming stopped.
His eight legs instantly dug into the mud, adopting a highly aggressive defensive stance. His right claw was raised high; if the figure made any move, he would crush that head instantly.
"Still so suspicious, Su Ming."
The figure turned. The hood slipped back, revealing a face of cold, stunning beauty. It wasn't some grotesque abyss monster, nor a stereotypical villain. She was just a living human girl.
But her eyes were not human black or white; they were like flowing galaxies, so deep that looking into them made one feel lost.
Lu Yao.
The number one strategist of the [Sky] team in his past life, codename "Chessmaster."
Su Ming's right claw froze in mid-air.
Impossible.
In his past life, to cover the retreat of the main force, Lu Yao had been torn apart by monsters in the tenth layer of the Abyss. He had watched her tattered robe sink into the bloodstained water with his own eyes. How could she be here? And on the very first day the server opened?
"Surprised?" Lu Yao casually placed the lantern on the stele and pulled a deck of Tarot cards from her robe. Her long fingers shuffled the cards with nonchalance. "I didn't expect the so-called sword-wielding stubborn fool to turn into a crustacean that can only walk sideways."
Su Ming retracted his claw. His massive body lay prone on the mud, the tense muscles slowly relaxing.
"You are also a reborn one."
It wasn't a question.
"More accurately, you are an 'Appropriate One' chosen by the system," Lu Yao said, her fingers pausing slightly. She drew a card and glanced at it in the dim light. "Hidden Class: SSR-level Abyss Diviner."
She flipped the card face up toward Su Ming.
It was [The Fool]. The card depicted a comically dressed jester, but the face was unmistakably that of Su Ming from his past life.
Su Ming looked at her coldly. "Did you send that email just to confirm if I was the fish that slipped through the net?"
"Partly," Lu Yao sighed, sheathing the Tarot deck. "The invasion of the Abyss was never an accident, Su Ming. It is a grand screening process conducted by the Divine Realm system itself. Any soul capable of surviving the Abyss's laws and being reborn is a seed it needs."
Su Ming felt the absurdity of it.
System.
Appropriate One.
He had gone to great lengths to be reborn, thinking he held the advantage, only to find out he was still a pawn being played with by a higher-dimensional existence.
"So what?" Su Ming's voice remained calm, carrying a gritty texture. "Even if I'm a pawn, I can flip the board. The things I failed to protect in my past life, this time, even the King of Heaven himself can't take them from me."
Lu Yao smiled. It was the first time she had smiled tonight, yet it carried an indescribable bitterness.
"Flip the board? Look at your system panel first, big lobster."
Su Ming paused.
He instinctively summoned the OpenClaw Lobster System.
The usually quiet red interface was now flashing with blinding, blood-red warnings.
[System Notification: Warning! Extremely high concentration of hostility detected!]
[System Notification: Warning! Heavenly Fate Guild is initiating an SS-level Cleansing Formation!]
[System Notification: Coordinates Locked: Center of Misty Marsh!]
Su Ming snapped his head around.
The thick fog had somehow thinned. In the distance, countless headlamps flashing with blue-white light were approaching like ghost fires. Chaotic footsteps, the clinking of iron armor plates, and the roars from the guild channel merged into a suffocating wave of sound.
Three hundred.
Five hundred.
One thousand.
It was the elite squad of [Heavenly Fate], the largest guild in the server. The remnants of Pojun's failed assassination, combined with fresh reinforcements from the guild, had managed to encircle him at this precise moment. These people weren't here for the bounty; they were here to wash away their humiliation.
"Do you understand now?" Lu Yao looked at the sea of lights, her voice as cold as ice. "The system is forcing us to fight. Only by stepping on the corpses of the entire server's players can we truly activate the Abyss's permissions."
Su Ming slowly straightened his body.
His eight walking legs supported his massive, iron-armored body, towering like a small hill in the mud. His two giant claws collided in the air, emitting a metallic roar that made eardrums ache.
"If that's the case..."
He looked at Lu Yao. In his protruding compound eyes, there was no fear, only a madness suppressed to the extreme.
"Then let's slaughter our way through them."
"Just as I intended."
Lu Yao flicked her wrist. Five Tarot cards instantly fanned out between her fingers. Behind her, a massive, phantom image of a Star Dial slowly materialized, instantly purifying the mist within a ten-meter radius.
In the distance, the first wave of arrows descended, blocking out the sky.