Gazing at the strange wound on her leg, Yun You sighed softly.
Ever since she left her hometown a year ago, the girl had developed a peculiar illness.
This illness caused her to feel extreme hunger, and even though she ate two bottles of compressed nutritional liquid and flavorless synthetic biscuits every day, she still couldn't stop the hunger.
When the hunger feeling crossed a certain threshold, the skin and bones of her limbs would rapidly lose vitality, turning into wounds on her calves that seemed to "disintegrate".
Yun You hadn't found any information about the strange disease, nor could she find a way to completely cure it.
The only method to prevent it from spreading further was to eat.
By continuously consuming high-nutrition, high-calorie food, the strange illness would naturally recede, and the wounds would gradually heal.
But this process was quite slow; once, she took half a month to heal a gap the size of a fingertip on her hand.
There was a way to speed up the recovery process, and that was by eating real meat and protein foods.
A chicken egg or wild potato the size of a ping-pong ball was often more useful than ten pounds of artificial nutritional liquid.
Unfortunately, in this Nest City where money and power reign supreme, such pure natural foods are often reserved for the city's upper echelons and Apprentice Death Gods to enjoy.
The girl couldn't afford them, nor was she willing to eat those things.
For someone as dirt-poor as her, the disinfectant-flavored nutrition liquid and compressed biscuits were enough to maintain her physiological characteristics.
Originally, the food she ate every day was barely able to suppress the strange disease.
But ever since she decided to set traps and start buying weapons and poison in large quantities, the little spare money she had was naturally not enough.
So, Yun You could only further reduce her food budget, from two meals a day to one meal every two days...
The result of neglecting her stomach was always serious. When it wasn't happy, Yun You would be in big trouble.
The unprecedentedly large wound on her leg was the best proof.
The subsequent battle with the Apprentice Death God further aggravated the wound, spreading to its current extent.
This truly was the unluckiest day of Yun You's life.
Having spent all her money, she failed to kill the enemy, got herself injured instead, and most importantly, she was starving, with nothing to eat at hand.
"Gurgle..."
The girl swallowed, and her stomach growled in protest; the hunger sensation was so overpowering that it even momentarily overshadowed the pain on her body.
She instinctively looked around the garbage mountain, with a thought popping up in her mind.
"Could there be food here...?"
To be honest, it was indeed possible...
After all, those decaying biological corpses, although extremely smelly, were still considered meat...
"No... no!"
But in the end, Yun You gave up on this idea.
Her current physical condition was already bad enough. With blood loss, leg injury, several vaguely aching fractures, and hunger, she had enough to deal with; if she got poisoned, she might truly have to prepare for a restart in life...
But if she kept starving like this, there really would be no other path for her...
A sense of helpless defeat inevitably spread.
The girl gradually hung her head, and the smile she had been trying to maintain slowly faded away.
Yun You considered herself a relatively strong person, always maintaining an optimistic outlook, no matter how bad the circumstances, she wouldn't give up.
But optimism, after all, has its limits.
She had reached a dead end.
"Is it truly impossible for ordinary people to kill a 'God' and make them pay the price?"
The girl helplessly closed her eyes, gently licking her scratched palm.
"Maybe this truly is the reality..."
"But no matter what, at least I gave it my all."
Yun You thought quietly.
The warm blood in her palm transformed into trickling streams, sliding into the girl's mouth.
In this incredibly shabby moment, Yun You surprisingly found that... this rust-flavored liquid actually tasted pretty good.
Not only did it lack a strange taste, but it also exuded a grassy fragrance, warming her whole body, even easing the hunger slightly.
But the girl knew, this was merely drinking poison to quench her thirst.
Excessive blood loss would eventually make her even hungrier.
"Blood... blood..."
"If I can hold on until I get home, and sell some blood to the prosthetic doctor, maybe I can exchange it for some food."
Yun You continuously pondered.
"But if I sell too little, he certainly won't want it, and if too much... my body definitely won't handle it..."
"Blood...blood..."
"..."
"Wait..."
Suddenly, Yun You's little face froze as if she had thought of something.
She no longer stood there dazed, but instead, roughly wiped the bloodstains off her hands and then frantically searched through her pockets.
A moment later, she found what she wanted in the pocket at her waist.
It was a rusty iron box wrapped in layers of bandages, looking like it held some hidden treasure.
Yun You carefully unwrapped all the bandages and lifted the lid off the box.
However, the contents inside were not coins, nor food or weapons, but a drop... of blood.
A drop of blood that could float in mid-air without any external force.
This was the blood of the Apprentice Death God.
It was the only trophy Yun You obtained after more than a year of effort.
Previously, in some urban legends, Yun You had heard about... those people who committed murder and plundering would take a drop of blood from the deceased after completing their task to prove they had successfully killed their target.
Yun You thought this method made a lot of sense.
Therefore, after detonating the explosives... and crushing the Apprentice Death God with the collapsing building, the girl, feeling she had avenged herself successfully, took away a drop of the Apprentice Death God's blood left on the wall.
At the time, she only regarded this drop of Apprentice Death God's blood as a collectible, a memento.
But now it seemed that this thing probably had other uses...
Blood, the carrier of life, a liquid rich in nutrients and energy.
Naturally occurring blood is no different from eggs or potatoes; it should be able to provide Yun You quite a lot of nourishment.
Especially since this was the blood of an Apprentice Death God, a special blood containing the power of the Extraordinary.
"If I can digest it, will the strange illness in my body get better?"
"Quite possibly!"
Once this idea appeared, Yun You could no longer suppress it.
"I have to give it a try, I must try!"
Thinking this, the girl no longer hesitated and gently picked up the blood bead from the box, ready to send it to her mouth.
"Buzz...!"
But just at the moment Yun You's hand touched the blood, this originally calm drop of blood suddenly started to tremble violently...
It rapidly turned red and hot, like boiling water, emitting wisps of light smoke.
In an instant, this drop of blood transformed into a white vapor, as if it possessed its own consciousness, and drilled into Yun You's palm, disappearing without a trace...
It left not a single trace behind, as if it had never appeared in this world.
"..."
Yun You was stunned.
The girl widened her eyes, instinctively wanting to say something.
But just as the words reached her throat, a strange warmth suddenly appeared in her palm, quickly spreading through her bloodstream and meridians...
At that moment, Yun You finally understood that the blood had not vanished into thin air but had instead entered her body in a way different from eating.
The warmth, like sweet dew or spring water, gradually washed away the fatigue and hunger in her body and even began to heal the wounds on her palm and leg.
In the blink of an eye, the dreadful wounds healed as if they had never existed, bones reconnected, and her skin returned to its former fair and flawless state, without leaving any scars.
Such a powerful recovery method far surpassed any medicine Yun You had seen before.
And the effects brought by this drop of blood seemed to go beyond just this.
While healing injuries, it also seemed to be strengthening Yun You's body... making her constitution gradually improve with each passing second.
The feeling was truly marvelous.
Even though her figure and size hadn't changed at all, the girl could clearly feel that her arms were stronger than before... and her legs had regained their ability to run.
The people of Nest City often said that luck was conserved.
When a person had been down on their luck for a long time, they would always have a time when their luck turned around.
Yun You felt that she must have hit rock bottom, and only then did she have the chance to rebound.
It made sense...
She had been unlucky for so long that even if misfortune loved her, it should slink away by now.
Now...
It was Yun You's turn to have some good days and experience the luck she had never enjoyed in her life.