Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 159: Three-Day Qi·Return to Smoke

“Hey. Go cook.”

Chen Ye, a cigarette dangling from his lips, kicked the shivering lump of fabric huddled in the truck bed.

It was a man. He didn’t look familiar, and he was still draped in the heavy black robes of a Death God cultist. Of the seven or eight desperate people who had scrambled into the back of the Doomsday Pickup at the school, he was the only one who hadn’t been dragged off by the horde. It had to be said, the man possessed lottery-winning luck.

The cultist weakly raised his head, only to be met by a vast, impenetrable wall of swirling white fog. Aside from Chen Ye’s cold command, his ears were filled with absolute, dead silence. He couldn’t smell the exhaust of the truck, the metallic tang of blood on his clothes, or even the burning tobacco from Chen Ye’s cigarette.

If it weren’t for the solid ridges of the truck bed digging into his knees, the man would have thought he had been banished to an alternate dimension.

This was the power of the Absolute Aura Shielding. It violently severed all sensory input—vision, hearing, smell, taste, and spiritual perception.

Anyone other than Chen Ye who stepped into the mist was instantly reduced to a deaf, blind invalid. Even apex Anomalies couldn’t bypass it. For a Sequence Beyonder, the sensory deprivation induced intense vertigo and panic; for an ordinary human, prolonged exposure would rapidly trigger a psychological breakdown.

It was an environment fundamentally hostile to human existence.

This was precisely why the Smoke Apostle’s mist could never fully replace Chu Che’s mobile Concealment Barrier for convoy travel. However, what it lacked in utility for mass transport, it made up for in sheer, terrifying combat application. It wasn’t just a stealth tool; at a critical moment, turning an enemy completely blind and deaf was a lethal offensive strike.

Before the cultist could completely panic, the fog directly in front of his face parted, revealing Chen Ye.

The man instantly recognized him. Back at the primary school, the Sequence Beyonders were practically royalty; every survivor knew their faces.

“If you want to keep breathing, you need to prove you aren’t useless cargo,” Chen Ye said flatly, pulling the cigarette from his lips. “So, what’s it going to be? Do I throw you out into the snow, or do you go cook?”

“Don’t throw me out! Please, I’ll cook! I can cook!” the man babbled frantically, scrambling to his knees.

Terrified of being left behind, the man practically threw himself over the tailgate and began frantically searching the immediate area.

Chen Ye watched him go, his stomach giving a low, painful rumble. He hadn’t eaten a proper meal in almost twenty-four hours. He could have just cracked open a tin of cold rations, but since he had a perfectly good servant available, why suffer?

Advancing to Sequence 2 had significantly increased his baseline resistance to the freezing temperatures, but he still couldn’t compare to Iron Lion’s absurd, weather-immune physique. In this brutal winter wasteland, a hot meal was the ultimate luxury. He had just saved this man’s life; forcing him to cook to pay off the debt seemed perfectly reasonable.

When Chen Ye had first climbed into the cab back at the school, he had noticed a massive pile of Supplies stacked in the backseat.

Before they had left for their fuel-scavenging run, they had completely emptied the truck to maximize cargo space. Yet, last night, after the tense meeting in Wu Jianshan’s office, Chu Che had casually mentioned that the truck was fully stocked. At the time, Chen Ye had been too focused on the impending sacrifice to care.

Looking at the crates of food and water now, Chen Ye couldn’t help but feel a deep, grudging respect for Chu Che.

No wonder he was sneaking out into the dark every night while we were at the school, Chen Ye realized. He and his inner circle were secretly packing the escape vehicles.

While Chen Ye had been out grinding Slaughter Points and practicing his abilities, his captain had been quietly ensuring they wouldn’t starve if they had to run. It was highly likely that Chu Che had rigged the other convoy vehicles with hidden stashes as well.

He actually is a damn good captain, Chen Ye admitted to himself. I guess I shouldn’t call him useless anymore.

As the cultist tumbled out of the truck, the gray mist instantly surged forward, swallowing the vehicle and Chen Ye entirely.

In the apocalyptic wasteland, especially without a Pathfinder present to mask their scent, radiating the aura of a living human was practically ringing a dinner bell.

The cultist, shivering violently, began to dig through the snow, hunting for dry branches or anything combustible to start a cooking fire. The apocalypse had long since burned away the arrogance of the old world. No one cared who you were before the sky fell. The rules of society had been rewritten in blood: the strong commanded, and the weak obeyed.

Consequently, the man didn’t dare hesitate for a fraction of a second when Chen Ye gave an order.

Glancing back at the impenetrable dome of mist, a flicker of deep envy passed through the cultist’s eyes, followed by a heavy, defeated sigh. Before the apocalypse, a ruthless thug like Chen Ye wouldn’t have been fit to shine his shoes. Now, the man didn’t even dare to breathe too loudly in Chen Ye’s presence.

Although the blizzard had finally broken, trudging through knee-deep snow was exhausting work. Fortunately, the frozen wasteland wasn’t like the desert. While the desert lacked fuel entirely, the snow-covered ruins still held plenty of dead vegetation; it just required freezing hands and backbreaking effort to dig it out.

As he worked, the man’s eyes darted frantically at the shadows. He wasn’t an idiot; he knew exactly what stalked the night. If it weren’t for the terrifying threat of Chen Ye’s blade, no force on earth could have convinced him to leave the truck.

From the safety of the cab, Chen Ye kept a lazy eye on his surroundings. The Absolute Aura Shielding guaranteed his own safety, but the man gathering firewood was completely exposed.

Well, a single, weak human aura shouldn’t be enough to draw any apex Anomalies, Chen Ye reasoned, relaxing slightly into the worn leather seat.

As he waited, his mind drifted back to the blood-soaked courtyard of Rong City No. 2 Primary School. The God-Worshipper, Wu Jianshan, had left a terrifying impression on him.

The moment Wu Jianshan’s severed head hit the snow, Chen Ye’s corrupted memories had violently snapped back into place. He did have a best friend, a brother forged in the fires of the apocalypse. But that brother wasn’t emaciated, he wasn’t a cult leader, and he certainly didn’t look anything like Wu Jianshan.

Wu Jianshan’s Abyssal Control was horrifying. It actively hijacked a target’s mind, forcefully ripping a loved one from their memories and seamlessly replacing them with Wu Jianshan’s face.

There had been several moments during their stay at the school where Chen Ye had noticed glaring logical inconsistencies. But every time his suspicion spiked, a strange, suffocating psychic pressure had forcefully smoothed the thought away.

Looking at what it had done to Sun Qianqian, Ding Dong, and Iron Lion was genuinely chilling. To have your mind rewritten so flawlessly that you would willingly die to protect a total stranger… the mere concept made Chen Ye’s skin crawl.

Thankfully, the ability had proven remarkably ineffective against Chen Ye’s unique psychological makeup. He had even managed to exploit his ‘best friend’ status to extort several cartons of premium cigarettes from the cult leader. It seemed Chu Che had also possessed enough sheer willpower to resist the total brainwashing. The stoic captain was far more cunning than his rugged exterior suggested.

Still, the raw, explosive power of a God-Worshipper was absurd. When Chen Ye had fought the Eight-Limbed Human Face, he had barely survived. Yet, Wu Jianshan, utilizing the Death God’s borrowed abilities, had been able to fight it to a standstill. The disparity in sheer destructive output was infuriating.

But in the end, raw power hadn’t saved Wu Jianshan from a blade to the neck.

The Smoke Apostle Pathway was notoriously weak at Sequence 1. It only truly unlocked its lethal potential at Sequence 2. And the core ability of a Mist Master had absolutely not disappointed him.

If it weren’t for his newly awakened, logic-defying clone ability, the entire convoy would have been wiped out today.

Three-Day Qi·Return to Smoke was the second, ultimate ability exclusive to the Sequence 2 Mist Master.

It wasn’t merely a ‘second life’ or a simple decoy.

When the Death God had plunged her scythe through the roof of the truck, the person she impaled was the real Chen Ye. It wasn’t an illusion. But the instant his physical body suffered fatal trauma, the ability automatically triggered. His dying flesh was violently converted into smoke, completely dissipating.

Simultaneously, Chen Ye’s consciousness and physical form were instantly ‘rewound’ to the exact position and state he had been in exactly one minute prior.

That was the true, terrifying nature of the ability.

One minute prior to his death, Chen Ye had been hiding in the dark corner of the courtyard—the exact same corner Wu Jianshan was currently using for cover. The Absolute Aura Shielding he had deployed there earlier hadn’t fully dissipated yet, meaning his sudden materialization was completely masked.

Even a sensory apex predator like the Death God hadn’t detected the temporal shift. Wu Jianshan hadn’t stood a chance. He had been executed by a ghost.

“Three Days” dictated the brutal cooldown: it took seventy-two hours for the system to condense a single charge of the ability.

“Qi” represented the temporal clone.

“Return to Smoke” described the violent conversion of the dying body into harmless mist, while “Return” symbolized the rewinding of the user’s physical state to a previous anchor point.

By perfectly chaining his Absolute Aura Shielding with the reality-bending reset of Return to Smoke, Chen Ye had outplayed a god.