Chapter 457: God Hunter

Su Mu chuckled and shook his head. "I'll just have to go out and see for myself."

With a mere thought, he vanished from the dreamscape and stepped into the true Heaven.

The moment Su Mu laid eyes on Heaven's true form, he narrowed his eyes. An imperceptible glint of crystalline blue flashed in his pupils.

An eerie dark-purple fog choked the sky. It hung like a rotting, moth-eaten curtain bearing down heavily upon the earth, pierced now and then by flashes of blood-red lightning.

The ground beneath his feet was crisscrossed with jagged fissures. A black, foul-smelling slime oozed through the cracks like festering wounds upon the earth.

The parched soil bore a sickly, lifeless shade of ashen gray.

Down in a crevice right beside his foot, a deformed, pitch-black toad covered in fleshy tumors slept soundly in the dark slime.

Not far away lay the ruins of a city. Humanity's once-glorious architecture, their proud steel jungles, had long been reduced to shattered walls and rubble. Bare rebar jutted from the broken stone.

Countless grotesque plants sprouted from the wreckage. Their twisted, tangled branches grasped at the air like struggling arms.

"So this is Heaven?" A slight smile crept onto Su Mu's lips. "Interesting."

Judging from what he could see, the environment here was no better than Hell. This was truly... a Heaven like Hell!

If those Primal Cultists dreaming of ascending to Heaven ever saw this, their faith would shatter in an instant.

As atrocious as the environment was, it didn't exceed Su Mu's expectations. In fact, he figured that if Heaven really looked the way the Primal Cultists described, that would have been the true absurdity.

After all, Heaven had endured a war of the Gods. Just how devastating would a clash between divine beings be?

If two Gold Kings went all out in combat, they could obliterate a city in an instant—let alone Gods.

He didn't particularly care about the state of Heaven's environment. What concerned him was the current status of the Gods.

If the Gods had been severely wounded in the divine war and fallen into a deep slumber, that would undoubtedly be the most advantageous outcome for him.

He needed to explore first. Perhaps not every part of Heaven looked like this wasteland. The best course of action would be to find someone and quickly gather a basic understanding of the situation.

With this thought in mind, Su Mu set off toward the city ruins. As he walked, his aura steadily diminished, only stabilizing once it dropped to the Gold Realm.

Xiao Yuan had once mentioned that the stronger one was, the more conspicuously they stood out in the eyes of the Gods. Because of that, he concealed the vast majority of his aura, leaving only the power of the Gold Realm exposed.

After all, this was about as weak as he could reasonably portray himself.

If he truly disguised himself as an ordinary person walking alone across this desolate wasteland, he would only draw more suspicion.

Out of an abundance of caution, he refrained from extending his spiritual sense to scan his surroundings, relying purely on his naked eyes.

Until he could confirm his safety, he wouldn't lightly draw upon the power of the nightmare.

After walking for about half an hour, Su Mu finally spotted another person. Near a collapsed building, a woman stood atop a broken wall.

Dressed in a casual black trench coat, she stood there looking utterly bewildered, her face streaked with tears.

A gentle breeze fluttered through her long hair, revealing her features. She wasn't particularly beautiful; her looks were quite plain and ordinary, carrying the sort of quiet, honest face that completely lacked any sense of threat.

Su Mu approached at a measured pace. Startled by the sound of his footsteps, the woman quickly spun around.

The moment she realized he was human, the sheer joy of surviving a disaster lit up her face. "Thank goodness! I finally found someone else! Can you help me? I stumbled into this Divine Ruins by mistake and got lost."

Su Mu came to a halt in front of her, a gentle, gentlemanly smile gracing his face. "I would be glad to help."

Overflowing gratitude practically spilled from the woman's face. "Thank you. Thank you so much. If I hadn't run into you, I really wouldn't have known what to do."

Su Mu's smile grew even gentler. "There is no need to be so polite. Though, before we proceed, could you tell me just what a Divine Ruins is? Miss... Non-human."

The woman blanked for a second. "What do you mean by 'Miss Non-human'? I have a name. I'm Li Weiwei."

"Very well, Miss Li Weiwei."

Feeling the alien spiritual energy emanating from Li Weiwei and continuously attempting to invade his body, Su Mu calmly pushed up his Tinted Glasses.

Her spiritual energy sat roughly at the Gold Tier, but it wasn't human. It felt cold and sinister, mixed with a faint trace of a divine aura. What an interesting creature.

Like a gourmet connoisseur, he quietly savored Li Weiwei's spiritual energy, quickly analyzing precisely what "ingredients" she was made of.

"You don't know what a Divine Ruins is? It's..."

"Don't talk to her! Run!"

A filthy figure dressed in black suddenly charged toward him from a distance. The newcomer moved in a highly bizarre manner, stuttering forward like a skipping video frame. She would run two steps and vanish, instantly reappearing dozens of meters ahead.

Swish!

She teleported right beside Su Mu and grabbed his arm. Immediately afterward, a ripple of spatial energy washed over them, enveloping both their bodies.

A spatial-type Gold transcendent?

Su Mu saw through the newcomer's foundation in an instant. Instead of resisting the weak spatial fluctuation, he deliberately retracted his own power, afraid that a stray leak of his strength might disrupt the energy and cause the teleportation to fail.

Swish!

The two of them reappeared over a hundred meters away, putting a safe distance between them and Li Weiwei.

The smile on Li Weiwei's face slowly melted away. Her expression morphed into something exceptionally venomous and sinister. She stared fixedly at their retreating backs, looking exactly like a vengeful specter.

Spatial fluctuations rippled out once more as they continuously teleported away. Only after they had completely lost Li Weiwei did they finally come to a halt inside a half-collapsed building.

Su Mu appraised the filthy woman before him. Her black clothes were tattered, and her hair was so caked with grease that it hung in stiff clumps. Smudges of soot and dirt covered her face to the point where he could only vaguely identify her as a woman.

"Phew." The filthy woman gasped for breath before immediately complaining, "You're a Gold expert, for crying out loud! How can you run around playing God Hunter and rushing into a Divine Ruins when you don't even know what a Silent Spirit is?"

A God Hunter? And there's that term again, Divine Ruins?

Does she mean that Li Weiwei from a moment ago was a Silent Spirit?

Su Mu pondered the thought. Just what exactly was the situation here in Heaven? To think they actually had an occupation called a God Hunter. Did they hunt Gods? Were the people in Heaven truly that powerful?

However, after studying this filthy woman for a long moment, he failed to see anything particularly impressive about her. If he had to point something out, it would be just how exceptionally weak she was. To think a spatial-type Gold expert had such a pathetically short teleportation range. Having to split a mere hundred-meter distance into several separate jumps was simply far too weak.

"Do you have any idea how close you came to dying just now? If I hadn't shown up in time, you'd be dead!"

"Yes. Many thanks," Su Mu replied with a nod. His deep gaze drifted back toward the direction where Li Weiwei had been left behind. "Indeed. Someone almost died."

The woman's expression softened slightly. "Even though you look like an idiot, at least you have some manners."

In her eyes, Su Mu's composed demeanor came across as pure dull-wittedness. He hadn't even known to run when faced with danger, and now that he had narrowly survived, he wasn't showing any expression at all. To her, he looked as though he had simply been scared out of his wits.