Chapter 813: Viruses of Different Strains
Very quickly, the demon king made a reappearance. He called out arrogantly, "I told you, there's nothing you can do about me. Don't bother to struggle needlessly—I'll be able to revive no matter what!"
Zhou Ying asked, "I'll grant that I can't seem to kill you. How are you doing it?"
"I might as well be a mutated virus, you see. It spreads via touch, and every lifeform I encounter will turn into a demon. Once my body dies, infected lifeforms will enter the second stage of infection, and one of them will be chosen at random to become my host. As long as demons still remain in this world, I will never die!" the demon king crowed.
A regular hunter might be shocked or feel powerless, but Zhou Ying seemed to take everything in stride. "Have you looked closely at your surroundings?"
The demon king turned around. It had felt its environment changing, but it didn't notice precisely how until Zhou Ying pointed it out. A lot of greenery had suddenly appeared in the world...
Zhou Ying smiled. "I've taken over much of the forest already, and my reach will only keep expanding with time. Very quickly, this world will be taken over by the force of nature, and I'll be in control of all the lifeforms within. No demon shall survive under my rule!"
Then, she killed the demon king's body.
If the demon king were a virus with animals as its vectors, then Zhou Ying was a virus with plants as her vectors. This would be a showdown of control and transmission. Zhou Ying's wood dragons emerged from the soil, overwhelming the demon king in a huge flood.
As more and more of the land around Zhou Ying were subsumed under her control, her power waxed and began spreading even more quickly. The revived demon king felt threatened for the first time in recent memory. It had never encountered such a pesky foe, one who tried to take over the environment rather than fight it outright.
None of its enemies had ever found a way to deal with it. All they could do was run away—or die to his self-destructing bodies.
However, Zhou Ying was different. Her skill might well be in direct opposition to the demon king's own, and more frighteningly, it could visualize how she might succeed.
The demon king used its ultimate technique. It caught one of the demons around it and began to consume it whole while the other demons watched, trembling. They had been genetically transformed to serve him and him only, and they weren't even able to escape from his grasp.
As the demon king consumed more and more demons, its body began to grow wildly. Pustules began to spread over the surface of its body, large and bulbous, as though they were the heads of the demons it had consumed.
Meanwhile, Zhou Ying's energy continued to invade the forest and the land around it. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, she had terraformed half the world's swamps into verdant forests.
No miasma filled the air in the forests; the trees hummed with life. In her arena, filled with trees, plants, grasses, and shrubs, Zhou Ying was nigh undefeatable.
She looked around her and began to frown. After killing the last demon king, no new one had appeared. Surely the demon king couldn't have gotten so scared that it chose to run away? That was hardly possible.
According to the information that Zhang Lie had shared with the members of Team Zenith, kings of the realm rarely left their world. Only in their native world could they exert their full strength.
Regardless of what the demon king was planning, Zhou Ying was certain that she would be able to overcome it. What she had to do now was take control over as much territory as she could to bolster her power.
Suddenly, she felt a disturbance by the edge of the forest. Dark miasma flooded into her forest, causing any greenery it came into contact with to wither and die.
A huge demon king appeared in her sight.
Zhou Ying was astounded. The leaves of the forest shook and began to fall.
Her eyes bulged. This monstrosity was the demon king? It was over twenty meters tall, and its skin was pitch-black and covered with pustules all over. Bulbous tumors grew out of its limbs, and it exuded a fearsome miasma that gave off a truly vile stench, as though it were the combination of a month-old corpse allowed to decompose, a basement full of rotten eggs, coated with a layer of rotten durian.
As it trod over the ground, everything around it began to dissolve and decompose.
Zhou Ying couldn't allow this 'evolved' form of the demon king to get closer to the heart of the forest—if she did, everything would die, and her hard work would be for naught.
"[Avatar of the Fae: Worldbound Enclosure]!" Vitality swept forth from her like the tide. The verdant forest gave off a jade-green glow as energy seeped out of the trees and grasses.
The ground quaked. Moments later, burgeoning roots emerged from the soil and transformed into dragons of wood, forming a huge tide that swamped the demon king.
The demon king was surrounded by miasma so thick that even the reinforced ebony dragons were having trouble. Their bark was dissolved entirely by the miasma, and their bodies had grown so soft upon reaching the demon king that it could tear through them with a single swipe.
Zhou Ying had to adjust the composition of her ebony dragons. They began to twine around each other, forming pillars of wood and shielding each other from the worst of the impact. Even though the demon king's miasma was able to destroy their outer layer, they formed structures multiple dragons thick, enough to weather the assault.
Suddenly, the demon king's stomach began to bloat as it spat out dark yellow vomitus, dissolving the pillar of dragons whole. The bile was so corrosive that the ebony dragons couldn't even regenerate; Zhou Ying's strength wasn't sufficient to counteract that corrosion.
She had no choice but to continue supplying new wood dragons from the earth, inducing more and more growth. If not for the entire forest supporting her, she would have grown tired near-immediately.
Zhou Ying and the evolved demon king entered a stalemate: she continuously summoned more ebony dragons, while it continued spewing bile. Both sides were waiting for the other to be drained of their energy.
Zhou Ying was the first to suffer the impacts of a drawn-out battle. The forest's vitality wasn't limitless, and the trees by the outer perimeter slowly began to wither and die.
Just as she was about to collapse, however, the evolved demon king reached its threshold first. It didn't have an unlimited supply of bile, after all; as it continued to vomit, the tumors and pustules on its body began to shrink...
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