Final Ending

(PS: Just two updates today, I'm sick. Ever since I went back to the hospital to follow up on my depression and started running a fever that same day, I suspect I've been infected by the flu or something else. Today it got really serious, my whole body ached, and I've felt drowsy all day. After eating lunch, I slept through until the evening, so there will only be two updates today. I'll take some medicine and go to sleep, and if I feel better tomorrow, I'll continue with three updates.)

Lu Yuanming had not tried to move anymore since the day his fingers twitched.

His soul was still too weak now; just moving his fingers had exhausted him. It was pointless to even think about causing a greater disturbance, so it was better to rest and recover peacefully. He needed to quickly absorb the White Light Particles into his soul to enhance its strength so that he could return to the afterlife world.

The key question now was whether he could gain Colorless Light Particles by controlling his finger movements to excite his parents and the doctors.

As of now, Lu Yuanming still wasn't clear about the source of these Colorless Light Particles. Did he need to burn sacrificial paper money, or could they be generated simply by sincere prayers and recitations?

This was also an experiment for Lu Yuanming.

The function of the Colorless Light Particles was too significant, allowing the creation of food and freshwater, as well as weapons and ammunition. In the last moment before his previous return, he had used the last Colorless Light Particle to produce a potato.

At that time, Lu Yuanming had one thought: hunting and searching for food was indeed unreliable. In a situation akin to the apocalypse, it was essential to cultivate the land (for real).

In the days since returning to his original body, Lu Yuanming had been contemplating what he should do next in the afterlife world.

First, continuing to send people out to explore the surroundings was indispensable, and not only could they not stop, but they also needed to increase the number of people involved.

Secondly, they had to start farming. This was a task that was never too late to begin, and potatoes were, to his limited agricultural knowledge, the highest-yielding crop per acre that required the least pickiness about the soil and the least demand for water sources.

This was just a trial. If the potato plantation failed, he would have to think of other solutions. However, if it succeeded, it would be a continuous source of food, far more than what hunting or panning for gold could provide.

No matter whether the afterlife's New York City had a vast store of food and freshwater, even if there were no monsters looming, finding food each day would eventually exhaust the supply, while farming could provide an unending stream of food.

Lu Yuanming himself hadn't realized that he had unconsciously awakened a hidden talent from his Huaxia heritage.

Thus, Lu Yuanming stayed in his original body for a total of seventeen days until the warmth and growth of his soul finally subsided. To be cautious, he stayed one more day. On the eighteenth day of his return to his original body, he activated the crossing again and went back to the afterlife world.

The process was unremarkable. When Lu Yuanming came to his senses, he was standing in an open space, and in the distance was the large supermarket where they had encountered the spider monsters. Instantly, he saw more than a dozen spider carcasses lying on the ground, their long legs all chopped off, leaving only their plump bodies. Eighteen days had passed, and their bodies had begun to rot and stink.

Lu Yuanming didn't find any human corpses here, which greatly relieved him. He had feared that the human companions he had finally found had all died here, making many of his upcoming plans unworkable. Without the power of an organization and a community, an individual alone was truly too vulnerable.

Without hesitation, Lu Yuanming started running towards the bank, but after just a few dozen meters, he stopped in confusion.

It wasn't anything else, but he felt both too fast and too slow.

It was a very contradictory feeling. The speed of his run should have been very fast; he had run about thirty meters from where he started to his current position, and by his estimate, it took him only about three seconds, which was incredibly fast. Considering this included the slower speed of the start-up phase, if he ran a hundred-meter sprint, he might have been able to break the world record.

But at the same time, during his run, Lu Yuanming felt a sense of slowing down, as if the reverse movement speed of the surrounding environment was decreasing.

"What's going on?"

Lu Yuanming was puzzled. He then repeatedly ran more than ten times to test, and gradually, he discovered the reason.

The foremost change he experienced was that his physical conditions had strengthened dramatically, far exceeding the improvement from the first enhancement. His running speed had reached around eight seconds per hundred meters. He hadn't tested his bodily strength, but it was obviously at least twice as much as before.

And it wasn't just that; his reaction time and dynamic vision had undergone transformative improvements.

Whenever he moved too fast, everything around him seemed to occur in slow motion. He could clearly see every scene around him, which was somewhat like the bullet time he had seen in animations before, only not as exaggerated.

This caused him to feel both fast and at the same time as though the scenes around him were slowing down, a strange contradiction.

Besides these, Lu Yuanming also discovered that he had gotten taller and bigger.

Lu Yuanming's original height was only 173 centimeters, and when he transmigrated to the body of an American drug addict, that addict stood at about 175 to 180 centimeters. After death, when he arrived in the post-mortem world, the image he displayed at first was that of the drug addict, but after his first return to the original body, the Soul Body gradually shifted towards his original form, and his height began to decrease as well.

However, this time, after absorbing a large amount of White Light Particles, which significantly strengthened his soul, upon returning, Lu Yuanming found his Soul Body had noticeably grown taller and bigger. Although he didn't have a ruler or anything like that to measure with, by judging with his eyes and comparing himself to the surrounding houses and telephone poles, he estimated his height to be around two meters, and this wasn't just a spindly growth, but a proportional increase of his limbs and torso as well.

The extent to which his soul had strengthened this time was so tremendous that Lu Yuanming found it hard to believe for a moment.

As Lu Yuanming raced towards the vault, particles of Colorless Light started to appear out of the void, then floated around his body. In total, thirty-one Colorless Light Particles appeared, which both startled and delighted him.

Thirty-one particles!

They could be used to create weapons, manufacture food, and perhaps had even other uses. These Colorless Light Particles were like a miniature, universal wish-granting device and could be considered Lu Yuanming's greatest hope for survival in this post-death world.

And while Lu Yuanming was overjoyed, running with long strides, a cry of surprise came from the roof of a small building on the roadside. Then, several men and women started running out of that building, calling out loudly; the leader was none other than Father Edward.

Father Edward looked terrible, with extremely dark and heavy bags under his eyes and a pale complexion. However, as he ran toward Lu Yuanming, he seemed so excited that he was almost flying. Lu Yuanming quickly went to meet him, and as soon as Father Edward reached him, he immediately knelt down with his hands clasped, starting to pray, continuously chanting words of thanks for the Lord's mercy and for not abandoning them, the sinners.

Following Father Edward were five other people, three men and two women, whom Lu Yuanming did not recognize. These five were not from the bank vault, so they were either people saved from the supermarket before, or ones found during the last eighteen days. They stood behind Father Edward, anxious and fearful. As Father Edward knelt down, they all did the same.

Lu Yuanming immediately went to help Father Edward up, speaking, "I've told you, I'm neither a Deity nor the Messiah. Stop calling me 'Lord.' I didn't abandon you all; I just returned to the world of the living, see? I've come back now, haven't I?"

Father Edward just sobbed and cried, continuing to recite the Lord's mercy and the words about Jesus Christ's resurrection on the third day.

Lu Yuanming was quite at a loss and could only keep comforting them. After a while, Father Edward and the five behind him finally calmed down. Lu Yuanming then quickly inquired, "Did anything go wrong at the base during my absence? Were those potatoes planted?"

Father Edward immediately replied, "We now have one hundred and seventeen people. When the Lord returned to the world of the living, we organized two more external explorations and finally found a large supply of food and fresh water in a logistics warehouse—enough to last all of us at least two months. Additionally, we fortified the outer walls of the bank and established several lookout points to guard against sudden attacks by those creatures. The potatoes have all been planted in a park not far from the bank. The seeds gifted by the Lord have mostly sprouted, and people familiar with agriculture in our group have told us that we can expect the earliest harvest in three months."

Lu Yuanming nodded, but before he could show his pleasure, Father Edward suddenly said, "John... he's dead."

"What?" Lu Yuanming was stunned, asking quickly, "What happened? Didn't John have firearms? And powerful rifles too, with more than twenty bullets. How could he die? Those creatures clearly understand fear. If you kill a few of them, the rest will run away. Did he encounter one of those ginormous creatures?"

Lu Yuanming thought that only the ginormous creatures would leave one without a chance to escape, and that firearms would be nearly useless against them.

But to his surprise, Father Edward shook his head and said, "No, someone slit John's throat from behind. It was the refugees he had saved. They killed John, stole his weapons and bullets, and they found the potatoes planted in the park two days ago, as well as our base in the bank. These people sent us a message demanding our submission, or they'd attack and kill every one of us."

"Oh Lord, please call down the heavenly flames and burn all these heretics to death, cast them into the fiery pit!"