Chapter: The Pride of a "Trash" Adventurer
In the Adventurers' Guild of the Aizeya Continent, there was a corner despised by everyone. The quest scrolls there had turned yellow and brittle from neglect, their edges curling like cheap, low-grade cigars. This was the infamous "Rank G Section"—a dumping ground reserved for beggars and those who had already failed at life.
"Even a dog would shake its head at this kind of quest," a passing hero in silver armor sneered. His eyes swept contemptuously over Xiao Yu's tattered pajamas, which were printed with the words "REFUSE TO WORK OVERTIME."
In the eyes of those noble heroes, catching chickens at a farm or clearing rats in a sewer was beneath their status. Rank G quests had two unspoken rules: First, the reward was so low it made you question your life; second, the intel was as messy as a pile of mud—you never knew if a common rooster would suddenly mutate into a man-eating Godzilla.
But for Xiao Yu and Mia, this piece of paper was their only lifeline. "Reward: Two steamed buns, a bowl of porridge, and two oily salted duck eggs."
Xiao Yu stared intently at those few words, his Adam's apple bobbing involuntarily. His mind was filled with the image of steaming buns and rich, oily egg yolks. This intense craving made the world before him blur.
He was all too familiar with this feeling. Before transmigrating, in that narrow and dark dormitory, he had endured the same struggle. To save money, he had survived on nothing but tap water for three days straight. That water, cold and tasting of rust, didn't fill his stomach; instead, it stirred up waves of burning gastric acid. In the deep of night, the emptiness in his stomach felt like a rusty saw being dragged back and forth. He could only curl up on his bed and force himself to sleep.
Because only in sleep could the brain temporarily forget the hunger; only in sleep could he avoid feeling that the world was being too cruel to him.
"Mia, let's go." Xiao Yu stood up, his slumping back now straightening. Although his Stamina stat was a pathetic 3, his stride carried a tragic sense of suicidal resolve. "This isn't just for the eggs. It's for my stomach, which refuses to suffer any longer."
[Nora's Backyard: The High-Voltage Lab]
On the way out of the guild, Mia's mind was filled with the hallucinations Xiao Yu had described—of "juice exploding in the mouth." Even the dried grass by the road looked like golden breadcrumbs to her. But when they actually stood at the gate of Aunt Nora's backyard, the tempting illusions were instantly replaced by a pungent, soul-piercing stench of scorched earth.
"Is this the... firm-textured, self-massaging fried chicken you talked about?" Mia froze at the gate, her face—once flushed with excitement—now turning paler than a corpse.
What lay before them was no mere farmhouse backyard; it was an open-air high-voltage laboratory! The air was filled with the dry, strange smell of ionized ozone, and the buzzing sound of electricity made one's scalp tingle. The once-level ground had been charred into black carbon, emitting wisps of white smoke.
In the center of this scorched earth, perched atop the chicken coop, stood an invincible "Lord." It was a mutated rooster named "Thunder." Its feathers stood up like steel needles, each tip dancing with arcs of brilliant blue electricity. With every breath it took, charges leapt uneasily in the air, forming a semi-transparent field of death.
"COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" The rooster let out a cry like an air-raid siren. A visible wave of electrical force rippled outward. Xiao Yu's messy black hair instantly snapped upright under the intense static, making him look exactly like a black human sea urchin that had just been struck by lightning.
"Xiao Yu... my legs are turning into jelly," Mia whispered, clutching the hem of Xiao Yu's "No Overtime" top, her voice trembling like a scrap of paper in the wind. "This thing looks like it could send us straight to the afterlife. Should we... should we just go back to the guild and drink tap water? Water might be tasteless, but at least it doesn't thunder!"
Xiao Yu didn't budge. He bit his tongue hard, the metallic tang of blood filling his mouth, forcibly suppressing his primal instinct to flee.
"Drink water? Can water taste like fried chicken?" Xiao Yu's voice was hoarse. He turned his head slightly, a glint in his eyes that Mia had never seen before—a spark of neurotic madness.
"Mia, you heard the mercenaries' mockery back there, didn't you? In their eyes, trash like us with 3 Stamina are meant to rot in the gutters. We have no background, no stats, and even taking a G-Rank quest is seen as a suicide mission."
He pointed at the rooster, which was looking back at them with a disturbingly human expression of mockery, and spoke in a terrifyingly calm voice: "But I know the taste of hunger. That feeling of a rusty saw tearing through my stomach tells me one thing—dying is not scary. Dying hungry and pathetic is the ultimate disgrace!"
Xiao Yu took a step forward, his boot crunching against the scorched carbon soil.
"As long as this chicken gets into the pot, it becomes the energy for our survival! Today, either it fries us into human lightning rods, or we turn it into that goddamn, soul-shattering Golden Fried Chicken!"
Mia froze. She looked at Xiao Yu's eyes—green with hunger and red with resolve. The explosive power of the downtrodden, cornered in a dead end, ignited her soul. She wiped her nose and bared her small fangs. "Fine! Let's do it! For those oily egg yolks, I'll pluck every single electrified feather off its body!"
"That's the spirit." A dangerous, crooked grin spread across Xiao Yu's face.
In his deep pupils, the chaotic and violent lightning suddenly froze. The trajectories of all things were deconstructed into a series of broken, stuttering frames. The Traveler's ultimate trump card—[Dynamic Vision: Ultra-Low Frame Rate Mode]—activated.
Every muscle twitch of the rooster, every micro-second of electrical accumulation, became a predictable, pathetic slideshow in his mind.
"System, stop playing dead," Xiao Yu roared internally. "Analyze its discharge intervals! Even if I end up in a coffin today, I'm taking a bite out of this meat!"