Cheng Ming really wanted to try using his "newly acquired" abilities, but considering this was a hospital room and there were two nurses taking "close" care of him, he ultimately gave up on that idea.
Cheng Ming looked down at his hands, recalling the sensation of those red spikes piercing out of his body during the fight with G09 — he could faintly catch a few streams of heat flowing beneath his skin, and when he focused his attention on one of these heat streams, its speed would slow down, gradually forming into a needle-like entity.
Cheng Ming instantly dispersed his attention, and simultaneously, the not yet fully formed spike dissolved back into a thermal stream, swimming to other parts of his body like a small fish escaping a net.
If not for intentional focus, these minute heat streams were almost negligible, except for a slight burning sensation when they coalesced, they didn’t cause Cheng Ming any discomfort.
Could this be the ability he gained after his anomalous meme infection process entered the "late stage"? Cheng Ming couldn’t help but think.
Under normal circumstances, acquiring this ability already meant a countdown to the end of his life had begun, but with the help of that mysterious girl, he gained this ability in a "safe(?)" manner, ahead of time.
The red spikes finally gave Cheng Ming a meme ability that could serve as an attack method, but Cheng Ming was well aware that if this was the only ability he possessed, he was still far from being a qualified combat-type Hunter.
He had watched many combat videos of top Hunters, some could unleash flames covering an entire football field with a wave of their hand; some could turn into a pool of liquid, silently appearing behind the prey... or even inside the prey; others could instantly create a vacuum around the prey, suffocating them to death...
Compared to these abilities, the red spike ability from the anomalous cactus didn’t even rank.
Just the attack range alone was a significant weakness, to hit a target with the red spikes, Cheng Ming would have to engage in close combat — not to mention anomalous entities with various strange attack methods, even if the target were to be a human soldier armed with modern firearms, Cheng Ming’s chance of victory wouldn’t exceed ten percent.
There are many top Hunters who specialize in close combat, but these Hunters either have a physical strength so powerful they can withstand bullets, have such high speed that they are difficult to aim at, or they possess various defensive methods — energy shields, body liquification, vaporization, Defense Fields, or illusion-based Blinding Skills...
And Cheng Ming had none of these methods.
His physical strength, while higher than that of an ordinary person, was still limited; a shot to a vital area would kill him instantly, an injury to the spine would leave him paralyzed, and if a major artery ruptured, without timely treatment, he would pass out from excessive blood loss, leading to death... By the standards of a combat-type, especially a close-combat Hunter, Cheng Ming’s body was indeed too fragile.
He even felt that managing to take down G09 was somewhat of a fluke — assuming G09 hadn’t grabbed him with a tightening grip but opted for a high-speed attack like throwing or pounding, Cheng Ming probably wouldn’t even have had the chance to fight back before being beaten to death by G09.
Unless those abilities of accelerated awareness and physical enhancement could also manifest... but after waking up in the hospital bed, Cheng Ming tried several times without success.
Those abilities seemed to be "borrowed" temporarily by that mysterious girl.
"Mr. Cheng, would you like to eat something?" The young nurse asked as she cut an apple into small pieces and fed a piece to Cheng Ming with a toothpick.
"I can actually manage on my own..." Cheng Ming replied, "I’m not used to being fed by others."
"It’s part of my job." The young nurse blinked, "Mr. Cheng, you are an injured patient, it’s my duty to take care of patients."
"Alright, I’m actually not hungry." Cheng Ming shook his head, "Could you hand me my phone?"
"Sure." The young nurse nodded, unplugged the phone that was charging on the bedside table, and handed it to Cheng Ming.
Cheng Ming glanced at it, aside from the two daily text messages from his mother and the compensation notification from Bai’s Military Industry, there were no new unread messages.
Cheng Ming sent a message to his mother to let her know he was safe, then opened the browser and entered Dragon City’s Hunter forum— "The Moon in Qin’s Time, The Pass in Han’s Time".
This period could be described as the forum’s most bustling time in nearly a decade, with posts on the homepage refreshing almost every second. Hunters from all over the Federation were flooding into this forum, prompting the forum operators to urgently add several servers, barely managing to handle the burst of traffic that had surged a thousandfold.
If a thousand Hunters had come to Dragon City, then at least a hundred times that number had joined "The Moon in Qin’s Time, The Pass in Han’s Time" online — many couldn’t make it to Dragon City, but that didn’t mean they weren’t keeping an eye on this hunting operation with a sky-high bounty.
People from all walks of life, with varying purposes, connected through the internet to focus on this desolate area located at the northwestern border of the Federation... For some reason, for a moment, Cheng Ming felt like a clown performing on a circus stage.