After the kiss, Minako wasted no time rallying her team and evacuating through the emergency exit, her movements as crisp and decisive as her personality.
On the feed from the USSS micro-UAV, Luo Jie watched as Minako's squad safely reached the fifth-floor rooftop and boarded the same helicopter that had brought them, gradually disappearing into the night sky over Bedtown. Only then did he cancel the drone's follow command and shift his gaze to a new system notification that had just popped up in his visual projection.
[You have obtained the item - Light of the Heart · Minako]
With a thought, a milky-white light orb, solid as a physical object, materialized above Luo Jie's palm.
[Light of the Heart · Minako] Type: Special Item (Non-tradable, Non-discardable) Description: Love is a light, so wonderful, guiding us to meet in the future.
"Looks like I actually maxed out Minako's favorability..." Luo Jie murmured to himself, a hint of disbelief in his expression.
This "Light of the Heart" in his hand was a special item that automatically appeared once a player maxed out a non-player character's (NPC) favorability.
In his previous life, many players had these things, but no one really knew what they were for. They felt a bit like commemorative badges given after clearing an illusionary realm, purely a trophy to prove the favorability achievement.
There were also rumors that these orbs contained all the memories the associated NPC had of the player, allowing one to meet the NPC again in dreams through a method similar to "dreamweaving."
However, "dreamweaving" itself was based on the player's existing memories, making it impossible to verify whether what one saw in the dream was truly the NPC's memory data or just the player's own recollections of the NPC. Thus, this claim remained purely anecdotal.
...
By the time Luo Jie retraced his steps back to their apartment hideout, it was nearly five in the morning.
A red sun rose from the distant sea horizon, its shimmering reflections and the shifting clouds combining to form a breathtaking scene straight out of an anime-style painting.
Luo Jie quietly opened the door. Looking up, he saw Rose emerging from the bathroom.
"Hey, Nightstalker, I thought you were still sleeping upstairs. What were you doing out so early?" Rose assumed Luo Jie had only just stepped out and her tone carried the raspy laziness of someone who'd just woken up.
"Getting breakfast," Luo Jie replied casually, wiping the dirt and blood from his shoe soles on the doormat.
At the mention of food, Rose perked up immediately: "Oh? Did you get fried dough sticks and steamed buns?"
"Want me to throw in a bowl of hand-ground, freshly squeezed Northeast organic soybean milk? Maybe with some Li Qianhu aged brown sugar that's been stored in a camphorwood box and white porcelain jar for eighty-one days?"
"Whoa, that sounds fancy! You actually got that?"
"Get outta here!" Luo Jie couldn't help but laugh, tossing the bulging hiking pack he'd been carrying onto Rose. "There are some ready-made bento boxes in there. Heat 'em up in the microwave. Don't touch the rest; that's our supplies for the road today."
Having dumped the gear on Rose, Luo Jie headed straight up the stairs.
In the master bedroom on the second floor, that busty bundle of cuteness, Shizuka Marikawa, was still sleeping obliviously. The blanket that had originally covered her had long since slid to the floor, her voluptuous and well-proportioned body exposed without a shred of concealment to the air.
(◎_◎;)...Whoa.
Caught off guard by the sudden display, Luo Jie froze in the doorway for a few seconds.
Then, remembering he hadn't exactly rolled a Paladin or Priest, he stepped forward, picked up the fallen blanket, and silently provided Shizuka with manual pixelation.
"Mmm, Xiao Ye... no... just... just this once, okay..." Shizuka mumbled in her sleep, clutching the blanket and rolling over, a strand of ahoge sticking up adorably.
Luo Jie rubbed his forehead in exasperation. Just what was this blonde airhead dreaming about?
He walked into the bathroom, turned on the bathtub faucet, deactivated his combat armor, and gave his face and head a quick rinse with the showerhead before stepping into the filling tub.
Heaving a sigh of contentment as the warm water slowly rose around him, Luo Jie began to tally up the night's gains.
His main interface showed a total of 66,885 points. Subtracting the 7,635 he'd had left (after spending 4,000 to upgrade the [Bloody Bride M92F Custom]), that meant he'd earned a solid 59,250 points that night – the equivalent of killing nearly four thousand zombies.
While the total wasn't as high as his last outing in Dead Rising, that had taken three full days. This was accomplished in less than seven hours, making the efficiency far superior.
Despite the points once again cresting fifty thousand, Luo Jie didn't rush to upgrade his skills or weapons. Instead, he retrieved the [Mutated Soichiro's Treasure Chest] he'd obtained from the fleshy abomination.
He was intensely curious about what kind of items a hidden boss of such clearly over-leveled difficulty might yield.
[You have opened - Soichiro's Treasure Chest. You have obtained the following items:] [50,000 Points] [Mutated God's Blood]
"Hmm? Only two things?" Luo Jie was surprised, but not displeased.
Treasure chests from bosses followed two general rules: first, the more points they contained, the higher their quality; second, the fewer items they held, the more valuable those items tended to be.
This chest satisfied both conditions.
The chest vanished, leaving a clear glass vial in Luo Jie's hand. Inside swirled a golden and black liquid, like a cocktail. The gold shimmered, the black was deep and profound, the two colors moving as if alive, sometimes blending harmoniously, sometimes remaining distinctly separate.
At the same time, a description appeared in Luo Jie's visual projection.
[Mutated God's Blood] Type: Special Item Quality: EX Description: The blood of Soichiro, containing trace remnants of Zeus's lineage, later contaminated by the blood of a Cthulhu Outer God, resulting in an unknown mutation. Injecting it has a 50% chance of bestowing a low-level Divine Spark and a 50% chance of being corrupted by Cthulhu's evil aura, transforming into a powerful, mindless abomination. (Note: Spirit attribute can increase resistance to evil corruption.)
It was an EX-grade item?!
Even with his experience with the [Demi-Human] bloodline, Luo Jie found himself holding his breath, his heart pounding wildly as he read the description of the [Mutated God's Blood].
He never could have imagined that this accidentally discovered hidden boss would drop something so incredibly powerful.
Luo Jie took a deep breath, cupped a handful of cold water, and splashed it on his face, forcing himself to calm down temporarily.
Thinking objectively, while obtaining an EX item seemed almost too good to be true, upon reflection, it made a certain kind of sense.
First, the hidden boss's location was extremely well-concealed. Without encountering Minako's squad and obtaining information from them, finding that mutated Soichiro abomination on his own would have been like finding a needle in a haystack.