Chief Grade Gene — Seed of Nature
Inside the Small World, the Feral Beasts near the entrance were the weakest — mostly Common Grade.
Lu Yuan killed them quickly and collected their markers. Six beasts, six points total. *Every little bit counts, even if it's scraps.*
As he pressed deeper, however, the beasts grew stronger.
Before long, he sensed four powerful auras spread across three different directions. His eyes lit up. He adjusted course toward the nearest two.
He found a pride of Prairie Lions — every one of them Elite Grade. Two in particular stood out: shoulder heights well above a meter and a half, looming over the half-height grass around them. One bore a dense black mane — a male. The other was a female at its side.
The strong auras were coming from those two.
As Lu Yuan closed in, the pair spotted him. The Elite Prairie Lions erupted in furious roars at the audacity of prey charging straight toward them. The rest of the pride fanned out and began to circle, closing in from all sides.
*Think I'm the prey here?*
Lu Yuan became a blur.
He reached the male lion before it could react — a single kick snapped across its neck. The massive four-to-five-meter body flew backward and hit the ground with a crash, motionless.
In the same instant, the female lunged. At the last moment, Lu Yuan sidestepped and drove his fist straight down onto the top of her skull. The head slammed into the earth, carving out a deep crater.
She didn't get up.
The pride froze. Both their chieftains, dead in moments.
Even wild animals knew when to run. The remaining lions turned and bolted — but Lu Yuan had no intention of letting them go. As he swept past one, his blade drew a clean line across its throat before the massive beast could even register what was happening. Within moments, the remaining six were finished.
He tallied the kills. Male lion — High-level Elite Grade, thirty points. Female — Mid-level Elite, twenty. Combined with the six commons from earlier: fifty-six points. Add everything he'd accumulated since entering the Small World, and his running total crept past one hundred.
He pressed on.
Not long after, a distant roar split the air — deep and resonant, carrying real weight. Lu Yuan pulled up short. His head snapped toward the sound. Something stirred behind his eyes.
*That presence... Boss Grade.*
He changed direction and ran.
Outside the Small World, Li Qinghe and the others stood before the display screens.
From one of the feeds, the sound of the roar carried through, and every head turned. On Lu Yuan's screen, they saw what he was running toward: a lion unlike anything the candidates had faced so far. Pure white from mane to tail, not a mark of another color anywhere. Shoulder height close to two meters. Its aura pressed outward with a palpable weight.
Several eyebrows rose around the room.
"Well now," Elder Yu said pleasantly. "First Boss Grade any of these young ones have come across. Li Qinghe, junior, your brother's luck is holding."
"Mid-level Boss Grade — that's real strength," the tall thin man said. "The question is whether Li Qinghe's brother can actually handle it."
"I have full confidence in my brother," Li Qinghe said simply.
The muscular man said nothing, eyes fixed on the screen.
Back inside the Small World.
Just as the observers were still speaking, crimson light rippled across Lu Yuan's entire body. He stamped the ground once — and appeared before the white lion.
The white lion unleashed a thunderous **roar**. Pulses of white light blazed across its enormous frame. A massive paw swung down, the force of it flattening the tall grass for meters in every direction.
Lu Yuan didn't dodge.
He raised his arm and caught the blow.
A dull, heavy thud. He didn't shift a single centimeter.
He raised his right leg.
**BOOM!!**
His foot drove hard into the underside of the white lion's jaw. The massive body launched skyward, blood spraying from its jaws.
While it was still in the air, Lu Yuan stamped the ground and leaped, sweeping his leg sideways in a brutal arc across the lion's neck.
The neck bent at an angle that was never supposed to exist. The force flung the enormous body more than ten meters. It crashed to the earth and lay still. By the time it landed, it was dead.
Lu Yuan logged the marker. Two thousand more points.
*Two hits. Didn't even need Black Steel Force for a mid-level Boss Grade.*
Outside, the observers stared at the screen.
"Blocking a mid-level Boss Grade's full-force strike with a bare arm," the tall thin man said, his voice measured. "Two-hit kill. That level of strength and defense... First-rank peak. Maybe even perfect-level."
Both the tall thin man and the muscular man wore subtle frowns.
The tall thin man glanced at the crimson light fading around Lu Yuan. "That Transcendent Gene's strength is exceptional — must be quite rare. I've never seen this Combat Technique before." A brief pause. "Then again, he is Li Qinghe's junior's brother."
Li Qinghe crossed her arms, chin tilted up, the faintest trace of smugness in her expression. She didn't say a word.
The muscular man's expression settled into quiet satisfaction.
Lu Yuan, naturally, had no idea any of this commentary was happening. He was already moving. *First place. That's the goal.*
Seven hours had passed.
"Show me where they all stand," Elder Yu said with an easy smile.
The black-haired operator at the console nodded and made a few adjustments. Above the four display screens, a ranking board appeared:
**1. Lu Yuan — 18,322** **2. Min'er Ailan — 16,930** **3. Yang Ping — 16,811** **4. Lin Wei — 16,045**
A quiet ripple of raised eyebrows around the room.
"Seven hours in, and all four have cleared ten thousand by a comfortable margin," Elder Yu noted. "Solid quality in this group."
"Though the gap between them isn't very large," the tall thin man observed.
"Precisely." The mature woman's gaze sharpened, a pleased light in her eyes. "Even first-ranked Lu Yuan is only about fourteen hundred points ahead of my Miner in second. One more mid-level Boss Grade kill and she overtakes him."
The tall thin man raised an eyebrow but offered no argument.
Li Qinghe listened to the two of them and only smiled: "I trust my brother completely."
The muscular man glanced over. "Your brother's ability is real, no question. But first place still isn't guaranteed."
Li Qinghe didn't reply.
*Who do you think I am? My little Yuan brother couldn't possibly come up short.* But she kept that to herself. Provoking the others was pointless — in background, talent, or raw strength, neither of them matched her. No reason to antagonize people unnecessarily.
The four screens told four different stories.
In Yang Ping's feed, the brown-haired youth moved with fluid, wind-wrapped footwork, wisps of air trailing around him like a current. He was genuinely fast.
"Not bad, right?" the muscular man said with a grin. "Yang Ping — only eighteen, one Elite gene and one Boss Grade gene inscribed, already at First-rank peak. One-shots High-level Elite beasts without breaking a sweat."
The four candidates were all carrying themselves well. In the outer sections of the Small World, where Boss Grade beasts were only Low-level or Mid-level, every one of them cut through without serious trouble — close to Lu Yuan's pace, if marginally slower.
But then Yang Ping hit a wall.
"Oh — a defense-type Iron-armored Dragon Turtle." The muscular man locked onto the screen, and his grin widened. "That's going to be a headache. He's fast, sure, but his raw attack power isn't all that remarkable. He might not even crack that shell."
On screen, Yang Ping circled the creature and hacked at its armored shell with his sword. A few faint white scratches appeared. Nothing more. Then, caught off guard, the turtle's counterattack connected — rattling him, a minor injury. The Iron-armored Dragon Turtle, apparently deciding this opponent wasn't worth the trouble, withdrew entirely into its shell. Its armor plates sealed so seamlessly that the whole creature became a perfectly smooth black sphere, not a single gap remaining.
Yang Ping stared at it.
He eventually moved on.
The tall thin man raised a mild eyebrow and said nothing.
In Lin Wei's feed, a round-cheeked girl in a blue robe swept her Staff forward. A water lance a full meter long condensed in midair, punched straight through a massive prairie wolf, and dropped it on the spot.
"Wind Dance Combat Technique — the speed really is something," the tall thin man remarked.
"My little Xiao Wei isn't bad herself," another voice added. "Her water technique has far more raw power than Wind Dance."
"That Transcendent Gene is rare, and well-balanced," Li Qinghe said from the side, one eyebrow lifting with mild appreciation. "As a foundation gene for this stage, it's an excellent choice."
The mature woman's smile carried a trace of pride. "Her luck really was good."
"Depends on the matchup," the muscular man said. "If her opponent is fast enough, she might never get a shot off."
The tall thin man smiled at nothing in particular, the implication plain enough.
In Min'er's feed, a sharp-eyed girl with close-cropped hair moved through Feral Beasts in supple leather armor, twin slender blades in both hands. Faint crimson light flowed across her body in restless, shifting currents. Every movement was explosive. Every strike carried blade qi that parted hides like paper.
"...Bloody Rampage?"
The mature woman's eyes sharpened with quiet pleasure.
"That Transcendent Gene's strength is genuinely remarkable — quite rare, I'd imagine. This is my first time seeing this Combat Technique." The tall thin man tilted his head. "With an ability like that... she truly is of the same caliber as Li Qinghe's junior's peers."
Min'er had been making short work of Boss Grade beasts throughout. She'd met a mid-level Boss Grade prairie wolf and put it down in a handful of slashes. Everywhere she moved, packs became corpses.
"Exactly," the mature woman said. "Mid-level Boss Grades? My Miner handles those effortlessly."
"With their strength, passing the assessment is never in doubt," the tall thin man said evenly. "Though compared to Miner... they're still a step behind."
The mature woman smiled.
The muscular man's expression settled into satisfaction.
As the four candidates pressed deeper, crossing from the open grassland into dense forest, the Feral Beasts they encountered grew sharply stronger. Combat stretched longer, pushed harder, and their rate of advance slowed.
"The outer section can't really differentiate geniuses at this caliber," the tall thin man said calmly. "Real separation only happens in the deep interior — where High-level Boss Grades and Peak Boss Grades start appearing in numbers."
Even as the words left his mouth, the muscular man's gaze suddenly sharpened on one of the screens, and a grin spread across his face.
"Speaking of Peak Boss Grades — one just showed up."
Inside the Small World.
Moving through the forest, Lu Yuan caught a shape in the distance — a beast over three meters tall, its entire body armored in dark crimson scales, a single twisted horn jutting from its skull. It moved with slow, heavy purpose, radiating a presence that pressed against the air around it.
He looked at it for a moment.
*Not right now.*
He let it pass and moved on, deeper into the forest.
A thought drifted through his mind as he ran.
*With everything I've got — could I actually take down a Second-rank Low-level Boss Grade beast?*
This Small World supposedly had Second-rank Boss Grades somewhere inside. *Worth finding out, if the opportunity comes up.* Even if he couldn't win outright, he was confident he could hold his own — survive, buy time. High-level and Peak-level Second-rank Bosses were a different matter; those were simply beyond what any First-rank Gene Warrior could handle.
His current targets — mid-level Boss Grade beasts at the First-rank — didn't even require Black Steel Force anymore. That was how far he'd come.
He smiled and kept walking.
The problem was money.
Just before leaving the Land of Origin, Lu Yuan had spent nearly half a month of real-world time — close to three months in Land of Origin reckoning — in relentless effort: hunting Feral Beasts, selling materials and Gene Armaments, scraping together everything he could reach. He'd come out of it with just over five hundred thousand First-rank Spirit Crystals.
He'd fed every single one of them into the Evolution Cube to evolve the Rejuvenation gene.
The result:
**Chief Grade Transcendent Gene — Seed of Nature**
Lu Yuan's first Chief Grade gene.
Like Rejuvenation, it was a healing-type Combat Technique. By expending Spirit Power, it condensed natural energy into a Seed of Nature — a vessel dense with restorative vitality that healed injuries at several times the rate of Rejuvenation.
Primary enhancement: Spirit Power and perception. Secondary enhancement: defense and strength. Minor enhancement: agility and flexibility.
As a Chief Grade gene, the amplification it applied to his body far surpassed what any Boss Grade gene could achieve — by several times over. Even the secondary enhancements had pushed his defense and strength up by a significant margin, with his agility following.
With a Chief Grade gene's support, his physique now clearly and measurably surpassed that of an ordinary peak Boss Grade warrior. By a wide margin.
That much was deeply satisfying.
The gene's evolution naturally left Lu Yuan in high spirits. Almost.
The downside: five hundred thousand Spirit Crystals — the result of more than half a month of grinding — spent in a single sitting. He had barely five thousand First-rank Spirit Crystals left.
At his current absorption rate, that was barely enough for a single day's training in the Gravity Room. He certainly couldn't temper his newly evolved Gene Chain with reserves that thin.
He pressed deeper into the forest and sighed.
*How am I ever supposed to get rich like this?*