When system cheat becomes rampant!

"The area we are heading to is called the City of the Old Days, Jingsu. Last time, a classmate mentioned there were sightings of Wen Lin. From here on, we have to walk. I had set up an escape point in that direction, but it has disappeared, probably gnawed away by a soil-eating beast,"

Fan Kai led them about sixty kilometers away using the escape points he had set up. These points were usually unremarkable stones discarded on the ground but were also easily destroyed by desolate beasts.

Fortunately, Fan Kai knew where they were going. The exchange students in school would stay in touch, sharing the locations of desolate beasts. If someone completed their task of killing a desolate beast but there were extras, they could inform others to finish the job.

During this process, other students also used various means of teleportation to travel, sharing these points with those they were close to.

"These are teleportation arrays left by Zhuang Bo; we've been to that area before. Although he isn't here now, they should still work,"

Fan Kai found a tree, dug under it for a while, and then unearthed an iron rod. He gestured, and quickly Xiang Beifei and Sun Yushan grabbed onto Fan Kai as he channeled his spiritual power into the rod and teleported again.

"What does the City of the Old Days, Jingsu, mean?" Xiang Beifei asked.

"You'll see in a moment," Fan Kai replied.

They appeared next to a pond, but they hadn't taken two steps when suddenly a tentacle shot out from the pond, grabbing towards them!

Sun Yushan reacted quickly, her axe blade flashing, and the tentacle was chopped in half.

Whoosh!

A roar seemed to come from the pond, but a desolate beast did not appear.

"That was a twelve-clawed beast, late-stage Qi-Controlling; don't mind it, we need to hurry," Sun Yushan said sternly.

She was clearly used to such occurrences. One had to be fully alert while traveling in the wilderness, as desolate beasts could appear suddenly and from tricky positions.

Xiang Beifei had experienced this before, but the desolate beasts in that area had been weaker and he had resolved the situation with a single punch. This time, with fan Kai and Sun Yushan, both in the Meridian Opening phase, leading the way, he essentially didn't need to lift a finger.

They walked along a desolate path for about an hour, casually dealing with many desolate beasts, all killed by Sun Yushan.

Sun Yushan was skilled in eighteen types of weaponry, and her weapons were no ordinary ones—each was imbued with a special power and was extremely sharp.

Soon, they came upon a dilapidated town!

It was quite rare to see a human-inhabited town in the wilderness.

"This town?" Xiang Beifei examined the town with surprise.

"Now do you understand what the City of the Old Days, Jingsu, means?" Fan Kai said with a smile.

"I understand."

Xiang Beifei had learned from the Introduction to Defense of Jiuzhou that since ancient times, Jiuzhou had undergone various beast surges. Some surges had been terrifying enough to submerge a frontier town, killing all its inhabitants.

Once a town was overtaken, if humans could not reclaim it, they had to fall back and establish a new defensive line deeper within. Consequently, the towns captured by desolate beasts had been abandoned.

The textbook hadn't specified the names, but among explorers, these towns had come to be called "Cities of the Old Days."

"This town, let me see, based on timing analysis, was likely abandoned during the great beast surge a hundred years ago. It's called Jingsu City, about three kilometers from our current defensive front line in Jiuzhou,"

Fan Kai said as he held a tablet, scanning the ruined town with a sigh.

In a hundred years, a loss of three hundred kilometers in territory had significantly reduced Jiuzhou's domain.

In other words, their current location and the area they had just traveled through had all been within the safe bounds of Jiuzhou's protective range a century ago, but now it was desolate beast territory.

For several years, Jiuzhou had been endeavoring to expand its territory, but reclaiming land from the wilderness, where desolate beasts had tainted the soil. Cleaning up required clearing deeply buried beast eggs; failure to do so thoroughly could cause the eggs to hatch and lead to severe casualties.

The parasitic methods of many desolate beast eggs were bizarre; those lodged in vegetation were relatively manageable. However, eggs buried tens or hundreds of meters underground, capable of camouflage, posed significant challenges to eradication efforts.

Moreover, the air here had been contaminated by desolate beasts; some beast eggs were even dispersed in the air. Warriors could block them with spiritual power perception, but not all humans possessed such strong perception abilities.

Therefore, reclaiming the lost towns was an arduous task, requiring initial environmental cleanup; the process was exceedingly slow!

Jiuzhou's domain was not small, and indeed, quite expansive; the total length of all its borders was nearly twenty thousand kilometers. Even expanding the borders by just one meter would necessitate the construction of over twenty thousand kilometers of new defensive perimeters, a colossal undertaking!

Constructing such lengthy defenses was immensely challenging, and expanding the defensive perimeter required significant effort. It wasn't possible to expand everything at once; it had to be done bit by bit.