Chapter 148 If I Can't Beat You, I'll Gross You Out to Death

The gaming club of Eastern University was spearheaded by the student union. Lu Kuan could bluntly state that it was a cesspool of corruption. Back then, in just a single semester, more than thirty girls had quit the guild.

The shady dealings behind this were clear to everyone on the inside.

Furthermore, in Lu Kuan's view, Xiao Qin was the type of girl with deep scheming ways. Drawing from the life experience of his previous existence, Lu Kuan would always subconsciously avoid such people.

Therefore, Lu Kuan had zero interest in wading into this muddy water.

Seeing that Lu Kuan's attitude was resolute, Xiao Qin felt somewhat puzzled, but she could not press further. After exchanging a few polite words, she left.

The day passed quickly. That evening, Lu Kuan entered the game at the scheduled time. It was 4:30 in the morning in the game world, and the eastern sky was just beginning to brighten, barely allowing visibility up to twenty meters away.

Lu Kuan made all preparations inside his tent, then carefully lifted a slit of the tent curtain. Ensuring the surrounding area was safe, he quickly slipped out, packed up his belongings, and headed straight for the riverbank.

The river in the early morning was silent and still, but the water was terrifyingly cold. Lu Kuan took off his shoes, drank a water-breathing potion, and the moment he entered the water, he shuddered violently from the chill.

The widest part of the Salanmir River spanned nearly two li, but the deepest section was less than three meters. Consequently, the probability of giant water monsters appearing here was very low. Lu Kuan's only concern was the water python-type monsters that liked to inhabit shallow waters and marshes.

Thus, before getting into the water, Lu Kuan smeared himself thoroughly with snake-repellent ointment. Relying on the memory of his past life, he tried his best to avoid areas with heavy water-snake activity and swam toward the river islet.

However, these potions should only be effective against snakes of a level comparable to Lu Kuan's. If he were to run into a boss or something... he would just have to pray for his own luck.

Shortly after Lu Kuan submerged into the water, a bright array of torches appeared on the riverbank.

"It should be right over there."

Red Beard stepped onto a large boulder, looking off into the distance at the massive shadow in the middle of the river, and nodded, "Within a twenty-li radius, these are the only river islets left unexplored."

Grasshopper, the gnome rogue standing by the large boulder, also stood on tiptoes and peered forward. Seeing the dark, slowly flowing river within his field of vision, he involuntarily swallowed a mouthful of saliva.

"Captain, are we swimming across?"

Grasshopper nervously rubbed his hands together, looked around at his fellow teammates, and asked uneasily, "Are there going to be monsters in the water...?"

"Nonsense, of course there are—"

"I say, Grasshopper, your aquaphobia isn't acting up again, is it? Haha—the water here isn't deep at all, no excuses for you this time—"

His teammates seemed well aware of Grasshopper's weakness and began to tease him one after another. Grasshopper gave them an exasperated look, sighed, and said, "Not deep? Well, I can't see the bottom, can I? Pitch black, just thinking about it is terrifying..."

"Stop chattering, everyone drink your potions and get ready to enter the water." Master Red's deep voice rang out, and the group immediately began their respective preparations.

This time, the group had come fully prepared. Both water-breathing potions and swift-swimming potions were brought along. However, inventory space was truly limited; having brought enough other supplies, some niche items with very low probabilities of use were left behind, such as the snake repellent.

White Water Village could hardly be considered a formal supply point because it was a newbie village. All the potions and food sold there were targeted at beginners. Players at level 15 or 16 might have to sit down and chew on a piece of bread for an hour just to restore their stamina to full.

The members of the Fiery Demon Sword had all completed the first step of the inventory quest, but that was still far from enough.

"Just kill whatever monsters you encounter, what are you afraid of?" Master Red patted Grasshopper's shoulder with a smile, and then the team members walked into the water together.

Grasshopper took a deep breath, hesitated for a moment, and also stepped into the pitch-black river water.

...

Lu Kuan chose to swim stealthily along the riverbed, which allowed him to avoid the line of sight of most monsters, as the habit of the overwhelming majority of aquatic predators was to launch surprise attacks from below their prey.

When he was about halfway across, Lu Kuan swallowed a vial of swift-swimming potion, which could temporarily boost swimming speed by 50%. The potion took effect instantly, and Lu Kuan immediately transformed into a large fish at the bottom of the water, speeding toward the opposite bank.

Seeing that the journey was going smoothly, Lu Kuan's mood eased slightly. However, when he glanced out of the corner of his eye toward behind him, Lu Kuan instantly clenched up.

At some unknown point, about three or four meters behind Lu Kuan, a gigantic snake head had appeared! The snake head was a size thicker than Lu Kuan's torso, its massive mouth tightly shut. As it swam, it stirred up countless mud and weeds from the riverbed, heading straight for him.

"Damn it!"

Lu Kuan cursed inwardly. Ignoring whether his stamina would hold out, his arms and legs thrashed wildly as if he were having a spasm, splashing back and forth like fast-forwarded footage in a movie, swimming for his dear life.

Five meters, three meters...

As the river grew increasingly shallow, Lu Kuan's head was almost breaking the surface of the water, and he was about to make it ashore. But at that exact moment, Lu Kuan suddenly felt a massive suction force coming from behind him, accompanied by the diffusion of a nauseating stench.

Crap!

Knowing the situation was critical and paying no heed to what was happening behind him, Lu Kuan pulled the corks from several bottles of snake repellent he had been holding in his hand all along, threw them all backward, and then planted his feet on the stones by the bank, scrambling up onto the shore in a flurry of rolling and crawling.

"Hoo... hoo..."

Even after climbing ashore, Lu Kuan still felt uneasy and sprinted a great distance forward before finally stopping to pant heavily while looking back.

A massive figure was thrashing incessantly on the river surface. A snake body at least twice as thick as Lu Kuan's writhed and coiled, wildly slapping the water's surface. The splashing sounds echoed far into the night.

Snake repellent did not inflict damage on snake-type monsters. If one had to categorize its effect, Lu Kuan felt it could be summarized as the "nausea effect"—a sensation probably similar to a human accidentally eating a cockroach...

After a dozen seconds, the giant snake's figure finally vanished. Gazing at the calm surface of the lake once more, Lu Kuan wiped his face and said bitterly, "Damn it... I hope it nauseates you to death..."

Resting for a brief moment, Lu Kuan got up once more and advanced toward the center of the islet.

Lu Kuan knew very well that the people from Fiery Demon Sword would find this place soon enough. The long hours of the previous night were more than enough for them to gather enough silver-winged fish to proceed to the next step of the quest.

"Come then. Besides, since my rebirth, it seems I haven't slaughtered anyone to my heart's content yet—"

With these thoughts, Lu Kuan penetrated deep into the interior of the river islet.

The islet was not large, and the excessively lush vegetation presented a minor obstacle to Lu Kuan's advance. Twenty minutes later, Lu Kuan finally pushed through the barrier of the jungle and laid eyes on the destination of his trip.

A colossal, dilapidated temple.

Using "dilapidated" to describe it was already being polite. Bathed in the faint morning light and viewed from afar, it was covered entirely in spreading vines and moss, with only the spire-like shapes at the top of the structures and the white stones washed clean by rain and river water barely discernible.

Perhaps due to the soil composition, numerous small gullies and streams crossed the river islet, winding between the ruins and transforming this place into a wetland realm.