Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 169: You Are the Demon!

Calling Chen Ye and Chu Che “fat and greasy” was honestly a bit of a stretch.

Chen Ye was over six feet tall and barely weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. By pre-apocalypse standards, he was lean, almost scrawny. As for Captain Chu Che, calling him “well-proportioned” was accurate, but he was miles away from fat.

However, compared to the skeletal, hollow-eyed scavengers surrounding them, the two men looked like an absolute feast.

The red-haired punk leading the charge was slightly shorter than Chen Ye, but he looked like a walking cadaver. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on his bones. Xiao Hua, who was steadily backing away toward the perimeter, couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds soaking wet.

These people were suffering from severe, late-stage malnutrition, and the feral glint in their eyes suggested their sanity had eroded long ago.

Chen Ye felt a cold, murderous fury ignite in his chest. These scavengers had absolutely zero martial honor—they had actually managed to scrounge up firearms.

Behind his sunglasses, the Abyssal Blood Eye flared to life. It burned with a blinding crimson radiance, looking like the eye of a demon peering through the cracks of hell.

Chen Ye had a hundred different ways to erase every single person standing in front of him. Given the blatant ambush, he felt absolutely zero moral hesitation. Judging by the hungry looks in their eyes, this wasn’t the first time they had lured survivors into a slaughterhouse.

Part of Chen Ye wanted to extract information from them. The other part wanted to test drive his new ocular hardware.

The left eye he had harvested from the Abyssal Blood Eye retained a fraction of the apex Anomaly’s innate abilities. Back at Rong City No. 2 Primary School, the chaotic battlefield and his recent surgery had prevented him from properly testing its limits.

These cannibals were the perfect test subjects.

Leading the charge, the red-haired punk suddenly felt uncomfortably warm.

Dawu City didn’t suffer from extreme sub-zero temperatures; it hovered at a chilly, damp fifty degrees. Yet, the punk suddenly felt like he was sprinting through a scorching desert summer. Before he could even process the bizarre sensation, a bloom of searing, orange-red fire erupted directly in his field of vision.

Panic seized him. He didn’t understand why the air in front of him was suddenly burning, but every primal instinct screamed at him to dodge.

It was too late.

The cloying stench of roasting meat flooded his nostrils.

The air around him violently ignited. The flames latched onto his filthy clothes and rapidly spread to his skin.

“What the hell?! It burns! It burns!”

“Save me!”

The horrifying spectacle instantly shattered the ambush. The surrounding scavengers scrambled backward, stumbling over each other in sheer terror to get away from the human torch.

A perfectly healthy man had simply burst into roaring flames mid-sprint. It was a sight that sent a bucket of ice water down the spines of everyone watching.

The red-haired punk thrashed wildly, screaming like a slaughtered pig as the fire cooked the flesh off his bones. “What’s happening to me?! Help me! Put it out!”

The agonizing pain drove him completely mad. He became a flailing hazard, forcing the other scavengers to scatter like frightened rats.

“Ahhhh!—”

Still wailing, the burning man blindly charged out of the courtyard and vanished into the thick, toxic fog.

The remaining survivors stood paralyzed. They wanted to help, but the supernatural horror of spontaneous combustion kept them firmly rooted in place.

“It’s you! You did this!” Xiao Hua screamed, pointing a trembling finger at Chen Ye.

She stared fixedly at his glowing left eye. Deep within the crimson pupil, tiny, spectral flames seemed to be dancing.

Chen Ye ignored her hysterical accusations. Instead, he smoothly slid backward, putting the heavy steel frame of the Doomsday Pickup between himself and the mob.

Several of the scavengers had already leveled their shotguns and hunting rifles at his position. Sequence Beyonder or not, Chen Ye had no desire to test if his flesh could stop a 12-gauge slug.

Secretly, he was a little disappointed.

The raw output is still too low, he analyzed critically. The Abyssal Blood Eye’s power hadn’t fully integrated with his nervous system yet. It had only been a few days since the transplant, and he could still feel a dull, throbbing ache behind his optic nerve.

If Sun Qianqian had been here, a single sweep of her fire dragon would have instantly incinerated the red-haired punk into a neat pile of ash, preventing him from running around and screaming.

Still, the psychological impact was undeniable.

“He’s a Beyonder… an actual Beyonder!”

“How is he this strong?!”

“No, this isn’t right! When we took down Xia Bo, he was weak! Why is this one a monster?!”

The scavengers exchanged terrified glances. Chen Ye’s casual display of power had completely shattered their confidence.

“So, you degenerates have killed a Sequence Beyonder before?” Chu Che’s cold voice echoed from the rear of the vehicles.

The scavengers kept their guns raised, their hands shaking as they aimed at the edge of the truck. The second Chen Ye poked his head out, they were ready to fill him with lead.

“What… what do you want from us?” Xiao Hua demanded, her voice cracking.

Chen Ye mentally noted her tone. She was clearly a high-ranking member of this cannibalistic ring. She didn’t answer his question, but he already knew the truth.

Glancing back, Chen Ye saw Captain Chu Che huddled tightly behind the rear axle of his modified SUV. The stoic leader was practically trying to merge his body with the asphalt.

Chen Ye had to give the man credit—that was textbook apocalyptic survival. Even though Chu Che was dripping with life-saving Artifacts and defensive barriers, he still cowered behind hard cover at the first sign of a gun. He was a role model for cowards everywhere. It was no wonder he was still breathing while millions of heroes were dead.

Suddenly, a sharp, metallic sound cut through the tension.

Click. Click.

Chen Ye blinked.

Wait… are those guns empty?

The sound of the dry fires instantly provoked a furious reaction from the other scavengers.

“You idiot! Who told you to shoot?!”

“Xiao Long, are you out of your damn mind?! You almost shot me in the back!”

“I… I didn’t!” a panicked, cracking voice yelled. “It wasn’t me! My… my finger moved on its own! I swear!”

“Bullshit!”

Slowly, Chen Ye stood up from behind the Doomsday Pickup, his expression thunderous.

The faint, pulsating glow of his Abyssal Blood Eye was genuinely terrifying. Deep within the center of the crimson pupil, a complex, jagged rune was slowly rotating, giving off an aura of ancient, unspeakable malevolence.

Just a moment ago, Chen Ye had silently activated the Blood Eye’s second innate ability.

Back at Rong City No. 2 Primary School, he had watched the Abyssal Blood Eye use this exact power against the Death God. It had hijacked the nervous systems of thousands of Crawlers, forcing them to swarm the crimson bride in a suicidal wave.

While it hadn’t damaged the Death God, the sheer violation of bodily autonomy had left a deep, lingering psychological shadow on Chen Ye. He had noticed how stiff and unnatural the Crawlers’ movements had been—like marionettes pulled by invisible strings.

Now, having assimilated the eye, he had inherited a fraction of that terrifying dominion.

Abyssal Control. Anyone who made direct eye contact with the Blood Eye would have an invisible, psychic ‘seed’ planted in their subconscious. Through that seed, Chen Ye could temporarily hijack their motor functions.

Because his glowing red eye was so striking, it was a natural focal point. Everyone who looked at him inevitably stared at it. In the chaos of the spontaneous combustion, Chen Ye had successfully planted seeds in at least two of the scavengers.

One of them was the young punk with the blue hair, Xiao Long.

Chen Ye had mentally ordered Xiao Long to turn his gun on his companion and pull the trigger. He just hadn’t expected the scavengers to be so pathetic that their firearms were completely empty—likely used purely for intimidation.

“Your guns… don’t have bullets?” Chen Ye asked, his voice dripping with venom.

He was furious. He had just burned his ultimate defensive trump card, Shadow Drag, and cowered behind a truck to avoid getting shot by empty, glorified metal clubs.

What was worse, Chu Che had witnessed the entire embarrassing display. Knowing the captain’s big mouth, the entire convoy would hear the story by nightfall.

Chen Ye had zero intention of showing these scavengers any mercy.

He hadn’t forgotten their gleeful shout: “Two fat, greasy pigs! If we butcher them right, the meat will last us all winter!”

That single sentence painted a vivid, horrifying picture of exactly how these people had survived in Dawu City for so long. Chen Ye was a ruthless pragmatist who would do almost anything to survive, but he had never crossed the ultimate line of sacrificing his humanity.

These people, however, had long since abandoned theirs.

“Who… what are you?” Xiao Hua stammered, backing away.

They had ambushed and eaten a Beyonder before. But the power gap between their previous victim and the monster standing before them was the difference between a puddle and an ocean.

THWACK.

The sickening sound of metal biting into bone echoed loudly.

The scavenger standing next to Xiao Long—a man gripping a rusted meat cleaver—suddenly pivoted and buried the heavy blade deep into Xiao Long’s neck. A geyser of hot blood sprayed across the shooter’s face.

The scavenger holding the cleaver froze, his eyes wide and completely uncomprehending. He stared at his own blood-soaked hands as if they belonged to a stranger.

“It wasn’t me!” the man shrieked, dropping the cleaver as Xiao Long collapsed, gurgling in the dirt. “I didn’t want to! I… I couldn’t control my arm! It just moved!”

“I’m sorry! Oh god, I’m so sorry! I didn’t want to!” the man wailed, dropping to his knees in sheer, psychological terror as his own body betrayed him.

Xiao Hua watched the execution, her pupils dilating until her eyes were almost entirely black. She stared at Chen Ye, trembling violently.

“It’s you…” she whispered, her voice breaking. “You… you’re a devil! You’re a monster!”

Chen Ye’s glowing red eye burned through the fog. “No,” he replied coldly. “You are the demons.”