Chapter 308: Hidden Danger

Secondhand goods really were trash. Just a few space turbulences had already wrecked it.

He rummaged through the storage inside his mechanical battle armor, then looked at the system’s exorbitant teleportation fee. He immediately put on his mechanical battle armor himself.

Suddenly, he felt that doing the work himself was actually not so bad.

After all, aside from being equipped with weapons, his mechanical battle armor had also been loaded with other functions. It had never been purely a weapon of war.

When Joo Joowon arrived at the energy pool, Gaemi still looked somewhat surprised. She had not expected to see him again so soon this time. After the surprise passed, she immediately became somewhat overjoyed.

"Boss! Food! Hungry! ..."

Joo Joowon had just arrived when he heard this extremely emotional shout from Gaemi. He could not help freezing for a moment before looking at her strangely.

"You can still eat now?"

Weren’t insects that had transformed into pupae supposed to wait until they emerged from their pupae before they could eat anything?

Gaemi froze, then suddenly realized something.

Oh, right! She did not have a mouth right now!

The honey juice she had drunk before had simply seeped directly into her pupa. Because of this, Gaemi had completely failed to realize this problem. She had only felt that she had drunk so much water that even her ant body was about to swell up from being soaked. Now that Joo Joowon had pointed it out, ishe immediately became completely dejected.

She really wanted to eat meat!

Seeing her reaction, the corner of Joo Joowon’s eye twitched slightly. So it was not that Gaemi had some kind of special method of eating. She really had simply failed to realize this point?!

He suddenly became deeply worried about the ant army’s commander whom he had thought highly of. What if this guy’s intelligence suddenly stopped working in the middle of a battlefield too? Wouldn’t everything be completely ruined?

Gaemi was still immersed in her sadness and did not notice at all that Joo Joowon had already begun questioning whether she could really be relied upon.

Joo Joowon also did not let her continue feeling sorry for herself. Whether she could do the job or not was something that could be considered later. For now, he should first explain everything clearly and let Gaemi make the necessary preparations.

Gaemi was immediately attracted by his words and became so moved that she nearly shed tears.

Finally, another ant was going to help her dig the anthill?!

Joo Joowon looked at the overjoyed Gaemi somewhat puzzledly. What was there to be so happy about?

He did not think much about it. After giving his instructions, he planned to leave. Just as he was about to go, his heart suddenly jumped, and he sensed a fluctuation in fortune.

At precisely this moment, the earth shook and the mountains trembled. His eyebrows moved slightly.

When he turned his head to look, he saw a huge tree at the top of the mountain waving its wildly chaotic branches. Its trunk was charred black, with deep cracks running across it, and an extremely powerful and violent aura spread outward.

[ System Notification: You have encountered a Lord-level Boss. You have entered combat. ]

[ System Notification: A Lord-level Boss cannot exit combat through conventional means. Combat can only end when the life force of one side disappears. ]

Joo Joowon: Oh, wow.

He had guessed that Gaemi was going to have bad luck, but he had never expected the danger to come from inside rather than from the nearby protected area.

After all, the earth fire had caused such a huge commotion before, yet he had never seen the other party appear. He had not even sensed the slightest trace of its aura. This showed just how powerful its ability to conceal itself was. Therefore, Joo Joowon truly had not expected there to be a Boss hiding on the mountain.

Thinking about the earth fire, however, it was not that strange.

Without experiencing lightning strikes at close range, it would have been impossible for it to comprehend the Thunderfire Erosion skill.

Creatures that had only recently gained intelligence actually did not have particularly high comprehension abilities. Most of them were like Gaemi. Because they did not understand the world well enough, they would appear somewhat foolish. Yet the earth fire had comprehended a new skill in such a short period of time.

At the time, Joo Joowon had not thought too much about it. The main reason was that he had not discovered the existence of anything else at all, so naturally, he could only attribute everything to the earth fire having an extraordinary talent.

Now that he thought about it, the other party should have been sleeping all along. It was only when Seong Seungmin began construction that it had no choice but to wake up.

Judging from the Boss’s lush green branches and charred black bark, it seemed that the other party might have been recovering from its injuries, or perhaps it was evolving?

In any case, no matter what the reason was, it no longer had anything to do with him.

Joo Joowon pulled a bag of sunflower seeds out of his spatial waist pouch, without the slightest intention of going over to help.

Judging from the darkened area between the other party’s eyebrows and the dark clouds hanging over his head, Joo Joowon estimated that he probably had some responsibility for this too.

The earth fire should have had some kind of connection with this tree in the past. Perhaps it had helped it recover from its injuries, or maybe they had a symbiotic relationship? More likely, it had simply been using the earth fire. Regardless, they had been on the same side all along.

After the earth fire was taken away by him, it might have happened to affect something about the Boss, which had already been in a state between waking up and sleeping.

Perhaps this lightning strike was originally supposed to be something that Joo Joowon would trigger and detonate, but instead, Seong Seungmin happened to crash right into it.