Chapter 131 - Panther Human
When Meng Chao reached Xie Feng and Sun Ya, they were still in a daze. They did not even notice that their tutor had left in a hurry.
Meng Chao put his hand on Xie Feng’s shoulder. Xie Feng shuddered violently, and goosebumps even rose on his skin.
“Meng Chao, you’re here?” Xie Feng asked in a daze.
“The martial arts course lost?” Meng Chao saw that Xie Feng was covered in medical gel, bandages, and all sorts of dressings. “There’s no need for you to be that dejected even if you lost, right? You just have to win next time. What’s wrong? Did you lose that terribly?” he asked in shock.
Xie Feng had a hard time gulping. Some blood returned to his face, and he nodded.
“Didn’t you say that there aren’t any elites in the monster controller course— Wait, did you lose to the same person? She’s a girl who’s short, has a wrinkled uniform, yellowish hair, dark skin, and a sharp nose, canines, and chin?” Meng Chao remembered the mysterious girl he saw in the grove.
Xie Feng shuddered and covered the gauze on his neck. “How did you know?”
“I saw her just now.” Meng Chao sat down beside him. “If it’s her, then there’s no doubt that you’d lose. But I really want to know. Just what did she do for all of you to become like this?
“Winning and losing is one thing, but being scared witless is another. I can feel that you and Sun Ya’s mental strength indices are fluctuating badly. I can even see your fear brainwaves. It’s making my heart race too. What’s going on?”
“You don’t understand. You didn’t fight against her in the arena. You don’t know what she did!” Xie Feng said in a quivering voice.
“In a continuous tournament like this, the winner has to keep on defending the stage, so it’d be normal for her to win three rounds in a row or even more. But even if she won eight rounds, you wouldn’t have suffered such a huge blow, right?” Meng Chao became even more interested.
“You’re right. She won seven rounds in a row. She beat us up, but what is more important is the way she won against us.”
Xie Feng lowered his head and buried his face in his hands, even though his face was still covered in cold sweat. He mumbled, “Most of the strongest in the monster controller course this year are people we know from high school or our circle of friends. We’ve seen each other in competitions before, so we know each other’s limits. That’s why we were very confident.
“Just as we expected, for dozens of fights, the martial arts course had a slight lead, but in the end, when there was only one contestant left in the monster controller course, we still had seven left, including me, Sun Ya, Jiang Rui, and Duan Lian.
“We were confident that we had victory in our hands. But then, an accident… No, a nightmare happened.
“That girl did not just win against the seven top scorers in the martial arts course in a row… When she fought… she was savage, brutal, and ruthless!
“She’s not like a student at all. In fact, she doesn’t even feel like a normal person. She’s like a beast in human skin, who has deep hatred for us.
“In truth, no matter how fierce the fight between courses is, it’s just a spar between students. Even if we can’t stop short of hurting someone, we don’t try to kill with every move nor chase after someone’s life with each step we take. We’d much less try to die with the other, right?
“But she didn’t care. It was like she was mad. She started growling, and her eyes shone fiercely with killing intent. I’ve never seen someone our age acting like that!”
Xie Feng removed the gauze on his neck to reveal the bloody tear there.
“Look, this is the reason behind why I lost.”
Meng Chao observed it carefully before he gasped. “Her biochemical beast is a Ghost Leopard, right? It’s very powerful among Nightmarish Beasts and even slightly stronger than a Bloody Moon Wolf King. This bite is pretty deep.”
“Would I be that terrified if it was a biochemical beast that left this on me?” Xie Feng’s face turned a little red as he admitted his weakness. “That girl bit me!” he said in a wronged manner.
“Huh?” Even Meng Chao was shocked.
Would the current monster controllers personally attack? Were they this brutal?
“It’s the same with me.” Sun Ya smiled bitterly and raised her arm. She pointed at a terrifying wound and said, “Look, my wrist was nearly bitten in half. I’ve never seen someone as crazy as that girl.”
Meng Chao shut his eyes and imagined a young girl suddenly pouncing on them and opening her mouth.
‘Alright, it makes sense why everyone’s mental strength indices fell.’
“Her fighting style is very unique, so she shouldn’t be a nobody. Is she not from First High School, Second High School, and Construction High?” Meng Chao asked curiously.
“Her name is Wu Wu, but she’s not from our circle,” Xie Feng said. “After the tournament, we learned that she didn’t even take the national college examination. She’s the secret weapon the monster controller course had specially recruited.”
“A specially recruited student?” Meng Chao’s eyes lit up.
The requirements for specially recruited students were very strict.
Those who were recruited by the university without taking the national college examination were usually very talented or had some sort of special skill. They were real genii.
Based on Xie Feng’s explanation, Meng Chao was sure that the girl called Wu Wu had the right to be specially recruited.
She came from White Stone Town, which was one of the dozens of satellite towns surrounding Dragon City.
Half a century ago, when they all transmigrated, White Stone Town was lost in the depths of the fog and separated from the main city area. There was no contact between the two areas.
Then, five years ago, White Stone Town, or more accurately, the ruins of White Stone Town, were discovered by an expeditionary group.
The town was not big. Before it transmigrated, it had only around fifty thousand people. The townspeople had no defenses and lacked sufficient production ability and technology to survive on their own. The difficulties and brutality they faced during the decades they were lost in the Other World could not be described with paper and pen.
When the expeditionary group found the town, they did not see the ruins of a town, instead, they found a broken graveyard.
The buildings had all collapsed. The remaining walls were covered in vines and moss. The brilliance of civilization was replaced by the marks of barbarism. Brilliant and fatal carnivorous plants of the Other World had grown out of human corpses and gave off a fragrance that was unpleasant to the nose.
The army and superhumans put up a net around White Stone Town and searched for a full year, but they only managed to save around four hundred humans.
The brutal life in the Other World had shrunk their life spans. The eldest among them were middle-aged people who were not more than forty years old. The average age was twenty, but they also had a group of dirty infants among them.
Dragon City had transmigrated half a century ago, so it meant that these people were all a new generation born in the Other World.
As the people of the older generation who were born on Earth died one after another, their civilization was also destroyed along with the town.
The new generation turned into savages who ate raw flesh and drank blood.
Within a short few decades, they had degenerated at light speed and stimulated the ancient power hidden in their genes, which returned them to the time when humans lived in the stone age. They were strong, savage, had thick skin, and sharp teeth. They could quietly bear great pain and carry heavy prey as well as injured companions while running like the wind. After they became one with the Other World, they started a fight for supremacy against all other living beings.
Even though they still retained some semblance of language, words, books, and video recordings, since these things were passed down in incomplete forms, they turned into things that were similar to witchcraft and magic.
If the rescuers had discovered them any later, the people from Dragon City’s branch who had degenerated to tribal life would have either been completely destroyed by monsters or continued degenerating until they became the same as monsters.
Wu Wu was another story.
She was not discovered in White Stone Tribe.
Instead, she was discovered in a Ghost Leopard nest not far away from the tribe.
Just like the Demonic Bloody Moon Wolves, Ghost Leopards were pack animals. They had a certain degree of intelligence and were very fierce and cunning monsters.
But in certain extreme situations, such as when there were enough food around their nests or when the power females in the tribe had lost their children or the ability to reproduce, they captured the cubs from other species to take care of them.
Among them were humans.
There were legends of wolf children even on Earth, so this was not strange.
When human children grew up among wolves, their habits and self-perception were the same as those of wolves.
Wu Wu was a leopard girl brought up by Ghost Leopards.
The rescuers estimated that her parents had died under the jaws of monsters when White Stone Town was invaded by monsters, and she was captured by a Ghost Leopard.
For some reason, the Ghost Leopard did not kill her. Instead, it brought the ignorant child back to its nest. From then on, it became a member of the pride. It learned how to live and hunt like a Ghost Leopard, and slowly, she grew up.
But that was not all.
When the rescuers found her, Wu Wu had already become the leader of the Ghost Leopards. Or rather, she was their Leopard Queen.
“Hang on a second.” Meng Chao found it hard to believe. “I remember that the Ghost Leopards are more brutal than the Demonic Bloody Moon Wolves and even more untameable. If the leader doesn’t show absolute power, they won’t treat them as their king.
“In fact, every time a new king wants to take the throne, they have to challenge the former king, kill it, and eat it. It’s only then that they can obtain the legacy of the former king and have the right to rule over the entire pride!”
“That’s right,” Xie Feng said with complicated emotions. “She ate the former king.”
“That’s something that should have happened a few years ago. She should have been very young at that time, right?” Meng Chao frowned.
“Fourteen years old,” Xie Feng said. “When Wu Wu was fourteen years old, she won against the former king of the Ghost Leopard pride and ate him, which made her the queen.”
Meng Chao was stunned for a long time. In the end, he asked, “So, a monster like that can get into university?”
“When they just rescued her, she was in a bad situation. She couldn’t understand a single word and had completely forgotten how to be a human. She treated herself completely as a Ghost Leopard,” Xie Feng said.
“But her intelligence is extremely high. In just a year, she learned how to read, write, and gained all sorts of knowledge about society, to the point that she can compete with her peers. Then, in another year, the classes we took through the twelve years of compulsory education were no longer difficult for her.
“She was receiving a special education in the monster research center, so the outside world didn’t know about her existence.
“This year, she finally accepted her status as a human and understood all that happened to her over the past decade or so. I heard that she did a few sets of past year papers for the national college examination, and her scores were ridiculously high. She also showed great affinity to large, feline-type monsters. She also has a talent for intimidating and controlling them. Because of that, she was recruited ahead of time by Agricultural University’s monster controller course as a special recruit.”