The Essence of Healing

The clothes she had just changed into were almost dirtied again, but thankfully, Ren Anhua was fast enough.

Sensing trouble, she instantly ducked into the car and wasn’t splattered too much.

But the others weren’t so lucky, especially Tang Yunxuan, who was far from the car and ran slowly.

He got a face full of shredded meat and was now washing his face with a basin of water.

This, too, was a stroke of luck, because this household had preserved an antique-like hand-pump well, making water access relatively convenient.

Having something to wash with was already good.

Otherwise, he would have had to endure the strange smell until the next water source.

Ren Anhua pulled out the three hollow nails embedded in her wrist.

The enhancement of an Awakened’s body by energy flow brought not only an increase in strength but also toughened the muscle tissue.

After all, only the physical strength of a non-natural human could withstand such terrifying non-natural power.

For an Awakened, this was something with only benefits.

However, for the current Ren Anhua, it might be a little more troublesome.

The physical strength brought by the fourth-tier energy flow enhancement made it difficult to drive these three hollow nails in, and it was also difficult to pull them out during combat.

Only after deactivating her ability, like now, could she deal with these three small gadgets.

Similarly, before a battle, they had to be driven into her hand without ability enhancement.

This meant that this skill wouldn’t be very useful in a sudden situation, as fighting with the aid of tools couldn’t be instantly turned on and off like her past self.

Of course, there were countermeasures.

During a battle, she could also spare a moment to locally undo her ability enhancement and put the nails in while fighting.

Ren Anhua was also considering the feasibility of such a technique.

Besides these issues, she discovered another problem that needed to be solved.

The blood-stained hilt was really slippery; it almost flew out of her hand just now.

However, this was an easy fix.

Ren Anhua got a roll of gauze from Liu Weimin and wrapped it tightly, circle by circle, around the plastic hilt.

She swung it a couple of times and felt much better.

Speaking of which, this watermelon knife was truly durable.

After being used by Ren Anhua in such a way, it still hadn’t broken.

Although it wasn’t some divine weapon, its quality was genuinely solid.

Perhaps that fruit shop owner really did have a dream of martial arts and had somehow obtained such a fine blade.

A small section of the gauze wrapped around the hilt fluttered freely at the end.

Soaked with Ren Anhua’s blood, it had taken on a reddish-black color, giving it a somewhat free-spirited, wandering martial artist feel.

She lightly twirled the hilt, casually shaking off the accumulated blood on the blade, and re-hung the watermelon knife on her waist.

Although the knife’s structure was still relatively intact, it was no longer as sharp as it was initially.

Ren Anhua wasn’t worried about it cutting her now.

For Ren Anhua, the sharpness of the blade was not important.

For someone like her, even a piece of scrap iron could slice a person in two.

As long as the knife still had the concept of a blade, it could be used.

If it was sharp, that was naturally good, but if it wasn’t, it wasn’t a major problem.

Perhaps it was even more convenient in daily life.

The rotten beast dog died a spectacularly gruesome death.

When it went up, it was a complete rotten beast; when it came down, only a skeleton remained.

Ren Anhua’s specially made blood carried a high concentration of energy flow and was absolutely self-contained.

During the high-intensity movements of battle, this blood deeply permeated its muscles.

The dead flesh didn’t know how to resist this foreign blood, and like a sponge, it was defenselessly soaked by these liquid bombs as it contracted and expanded.

During the explosion, these terrifying material bombs expanded frantically in its body’s most vulnerable places.

The solid muscle tissue was no match for the pure physical pressure, and the damaged skin was torn apart by the sudden high pressure.

The muscle and skin near the wounds were directly blown away, and the internal organs, with nothing to hold them in, slid out.

This derivative skill could be said to have reached the extreme of biological explosive damage.

With long-term use, Ren Anhua began to realize that the properties of this healing ability were quite extraordinary.

“Healing” and “repairing” were not enough to accurately describe the truly important nature of this ability.

This ability completely disobeyed the law of conservation of mass.

Whether it was repairing severed limbs or creating mutated tumors, the suddenly appearing organic matter did not cause any consumption of organic matter from the human body itself, appearing out of thin air in a way that was impossible to understand.

Of course, abilities themselves were irrational.

Perhaps there was a special, unobservable process of material transfer involved.

Just like Shen Dinghui, according to her, whether enlarging or shrinking, she needed to find the same material within a limited time to balance the mass.

This meant that after the steel nail hit the zombie and completed its expansion kill, it needed to be quickly shrunk back to its original state to keep the final mass of the same material unchanged.

If this wasn’t done, her ability would automatically extract the same material within the affected area to balance the mass after the time limit was reached.

In fact, this was another of her attack modes—human mass extraction.

Don’t forget, the human body also contains iron.

If the ability automatically eliminated this iron as a mass balance, then the person who had their iron element extracted would surely die.

But this ability was rather random and not applicable to Awakened because it would automatically avoid Awakened with energy flow, and even ordinary people with biological fields, prioritizing non-living inorganic matter first.

Only in a severe material shortage would it downgrade to target humans.

And her scaling ability was even more so.

She could not scale any living being.

This kind of material extraction was an unconventional operation caused by desperation.

So, although this ability sounded terrifying, what she really used was expansion killing rather than mass extraction.

Ren Anhua’s thoughts on this branch of ability development also began after seeing this kind of expansion killing.

The reason this material explosion was so terrifying was because it was fundamentally different from ordinary explosions.

No matter what type of explosion—high-pressure explosions caused by high temperatures, expansion explosions caused by the conversion of solid or liquid states to gas, or composite explosions caused by material decomposition.

Excluding nuclear explosions involving mass-energy conversion, the essence of these conventional explosions was the same: increasing the gaps between molecules or atoms, achieving rapid gas expansion, and creating the conditions to release shockwaves and energy to cause damage.

But this material explosion was different from them because it simply increased the number of molecules and atoms in a limited space, thereby achieving high-speed liquid or solid expansion to cause damage.

Humans can now even use brute force to compress air with tools, but in the conventional sense (excluding microscopic molecular compression in scientific research), humans cannot use existing machinery to compress liquids on a macroscopic level, let alone solids.

This kind of compression, unreachable by humans, only occurs outside the Earth’s scope, in the extreme spaces of the vast universe.

The terror of a material explosion lies in the fact that this expansion process is unstoppable, at least within the scope of Earth.

After realizing this, Ren Anhua devoted herself wholeheartedly to the development of derivative skills in this direction.

With her rich experience with abilities, she quickly developed two special skills with practical combat significance—the biomass bomb and dripping blood.

At the same time, she also began to wonder where these suddenly appearing materials came from and started to pay attention to whether any non-living organic matter had disappeared around her, but she had not found a single related clue to this day.

This healing ability, was its essence really just healing?

Ren Anhua found that she was increasingly unable to see through this ability she once despised.

The more she thought about it, the more she felt this thing was extraordinary.

Ren Anhua, who advocated for natural science and materialism, could only understand it as a material transfer occurring on a level she could not observe, a process she could not yet comprehend.

Only in this way could she stabilize her worldview and not let her imagination run wild, wondering if this was some “god” sneakily playing a boring game behind the scenes.

Two barks sounded in her ear.

A rotten beast was truly a rotten beast; with its brainstem intact, it could still eat, drink, and bark with just a mouth left.

Ren Anhua looked at Tang Yunxuan, who was sitting on the ground in fear, and amusingly went over to pull him up.

This guy really knew how to court death.

Seeing that the rotten beast dog’s head was relatively intact, he actually dared to run over for a close-up look.

It was lucky that the dog’s torso had almost no muscle left; otherwise, Tang Yunxuan would have inevitably gotten a bite.

“You can also try reaching out to touch it. As long as your head is still there, I can save you,” Ren Anhua egged on Tang Yunxuan with a sarcastic tone.

This brat really had a fearless feeling about him.

An ordinary person, messing with a second-tier rotten beast, truly brave.

In the end, it was Chen Shu who went up and ended the pitiful rotten beast’s life with a single strike.

Ren Anhua’s main test target was the explosive effect of her blood; she hadn’t intentionally touched the zombie’s vital parts.

On the contrary, to see the perfect effect, she had avoided the zombie’s head, deliberately picking places with solid muscles to strike.

Dripping blood was a skill she specifically used against zombies.

Against humans, although it would have an effect, it wouldn’t be as obvious as against zombies.

Because living biological tissue would not let foreign blood permeate as freely as a zombie’s.

Although some penetration effect would eventually occur, it wouldn’t be as deep as when dealing with zombies.

Unless the wound given was deep enough to directly enter the opponent’s blood circulation, in which case it would be a direct death sentence.

Of course, this beautiful vision only existed in theory.

A blood explosion also required an ability channel.

Ren Anhua guessed that this ability channel would also be somewhat weakened by the opponent.

Generally speaking, it should only detonate the blood residue at the wound site.

Unless the opponent was an ordinary person.

An ordinary person, perhaps this was what Ren Anhua should fear the most.

Completely losing one’s ability was the most terrifying thing for an Awakened.

It now seemed that losing her high-temperature ability was far from a desperate situation.

As long as she had something in her hands, she could always rise up.

Only ordinary people, in the post-apocalyptic society, where should ordinary people go?

Looking at the carefree Tang Yunxuan and the gentle and tolerant Liu Shi, Ren Anhua felt they truly had no sense of crisis.

They really needed her protection.

After all, the place they were going to next might be the cruelest place for ordinary people in the apocalypse.

Su City, a society of disparity where abilities reigned supreme.