Chapter Eighty-One: Reckless Foolishness

The jagged hyena is a bronze-tier battlefield creature, and bronze tier is the rank held by the majority of evolvers on a one-star battlefield.

For that reason, the Thousand Nether Wasteland is one of the more popular regions in the nearby battlefield zone.

Of course, when people speak of its popularity, they mean only the outer stretches where newcomers first enter...

Once one truly reaches the depths of the Thousand Nether Wasteland, there are scarcely any people left.

Everyone on the battlefield knows that deep within the wasteland lies a pack of more than ten thousand hyenas!

That is the jagged hyenas’ lair.

No one dares venture there lightly.

As a bronze-tier battlefield creature, the jagged hyena is terrifyingly formidable.

Fast as the wind, powerful as a bull, and most of all, with a mouth full of steel teeth that can snap F-grade alloys in a single bite!

Among bronze-tier battlefield creatures, its individual combat strength ranks within the top ten!

Generally speaking, a lone jagged hyena can be easily brought down by a melee bronze squad.

But once there are two, it becomes a matter of life and death... and even then, someone in the squad may still be injured, or even killed.

As for three or more...

If it is merely a standard four-person all-melee team, then... run for your life.

Whether you can escape or not is a matter of luck.

If three are already this terrifying, then those more than ten thousand jagged hyenas...

To be honest, even a single glance is enough to make one’s scalp prickle.

So even golden-tier evolvers would not go there lightly...

Of course, because the jagged hyena is only bronze tier, not to mention golden tier evolvers, even silver tier evolvers would not come here.

What for?

So numerous, so dangerous, and with neither silver- nor golden-tier beings among the hyena pack... for silver and gold tier evolvers, this place held no appeal at all.

But bronze-tier evolver teams were plentiful.

After all, jagged hyenas were relatively excellent prey. They knew well that as long as they did not approach the depths and draw the attention of the pack, hunting these lone hyenas was still fairly easy.

In the battlefield city, a jagged hyena corpse could easily fetch around two hundred thousand star coins. And the journey from here to the battlefield city was only three days.

Moreover, there were quite a few of them; some lone jagged hyenas wandered to the edges in search of prey...

Yet during this recent period, bronze evolvers who frequently came to the Thousand Nether Wasteland discovered something strange: the number of jagged hyenas had inexplicably dwindled.

Ordinarily, they could see at least twenty to thirty of them a day at the edge of the wasteland. But recently... the numbers had plummeted.

Especially these last two days, there had been even fewer!

Over the course of an entire day, they had seen only six or seven lone jagged hyenas...

What was going on?

The evolver teams that often hunted here and had become familiar with one another gathered together to discuss the matter.

But no matter how they talked it over, they reached no conclusion. In the end, most chose to keep watching from the sidelines...

As for the depths of the Thousand Nether Wasteland, they would not dare venture there lightly. That would be gambling with their lives.

On a one-star battlefield, danger lurks everywhere; no caution can be excessive...

...

...

"Right now, I’m at the Thousand Nether Wasteland on a one-star battlefield... Friends who know Xiaozhou all know that I, as a fresh bronze-tier newcomer, have been hanging around here these past days... But these last few days, some small changes have occurred in the Thousand Nether Wasteland, and for unknown reasons, the number of jagged hyenas along the edge has sharply declined. Normally, you can see twenty or thirty lone jagged hyenas in a day, but recently there have only been six or seven each day... and sometimes only four or five..."

"Some of you may not know this, but jagged hyenas are pack-dwelling battlefield creatures, and in the Thousand Nether Wasteland there is said to be a tribe numbering over ten thousand... Of course, that is something I heard from silver- and gold-tier experts. I myself have never gone to see it. But today, I plan to take everyone to have a look... Could the drastic reduction in numbers at the edge be related to that hyena pack? Let’s wait and see!"

At that moment, deep in the Thousand Nether Wasteland, there were two people. A boy was holding a communicator, aiming it at a girl, and the girl was speaking this passage into the communicator’s lens.

After a brief pause, she asked, "Did you get it?"

"Okay," the boy said, making an okay sign and pressing the stop-recording button.

The girl ran over, took the communicator, and after looking through it for a while, let out a soft breath and nodded in satisfaction. "Not bad."

"Sis, you film this stuff every day. Does anyone really watch it?"

"Of course they do!" The girl, Zhou Xiaozhou, immediately glared at him and said unhappily, "My last video, 'Journey Through the Gale Gorge,' already passed ten thousand views! And there were several hundred comments too!"

Upon hearing this, Zhou Yuanlin rolled his eyes...

More than ten thousand views?

If he remembered correctly, on his sister’s video platform... even videos with tens of millions of views might not make the top ten of the rankings.

Ten thousand...

The wording was certainly sharp enough.

He could not help but roll his eyes again.

"You know nothing. Someday your sister will become one of the major streamers on Q-Station! Hmph, by then you’ll know how amazing I am!"

Seeing the boy’s expression, Zhou Xiaozhou was quite irritated.

Yes, Zhou Xiaozhou was an online streamer... In this age of information overload, online streaming was no longer anything unusual. Anyone could be a streamer.

However, Zhou Xiaozhou was not famous.

Although she looked decent enough, in today’s world, without someone behind you pulling strings, wanting an ordinary person to become famous?

Harder than ascending to heaven.

Even though Zhou Xiaozhou worked very hard on her videos and spent all her energy coming up with ideas... ideas were not so easy to create.

In this day and age, most of the skits and concepts that could be filmed had already been filmed by others. If she wanted to become famous, she had to take a different path and produce distinctive content.

But as an ordinary bronze evolver... what unique content could she possibly have that others did not?

So despite filming for more than half a year, she had gathered only a pitiful number of followers. Even last time, when she disregarded the danger and ran to Gale Gorge to film the gale tigers, she only got a few thousand clicks, not even ten thousand...

So many evolvers existed.

Not to mention bronze tier alone...

Even the sights accessible to golden-tier evolvers had long since been filmed by countless people on Q-Station.

Still, those few thousand clicks were a shot in the arm for Zhou Xiaozhou... Before that, the highest views any of her videos had ever gotten was only 123, and then nothing moved for more than half a year.

If the site did not recommend you, there was no traffic. Without traffic, there was no attention...

Being a newcomer was just that difficult.

Want to stand out?

Then you had to gamble.

So this time, when she discovered that the number of jagged hyenas in the Thousand Nether Wasteland had mysteriously dwindled, while everyone else was still choosing to watch and wait, Zhou Xiaozhou keenly sensed that this was her opportunity...

There must be many people following the Thousand Nether Wasteland!

If she were the first to find the reason and turn it into a video to release... there was a very good chance she could make a splash...

Even if, most likely, it would only be a small splash. Still, she felt... it was worth the gamble.

Thus, without a second thought, she dragged her younger brother along and came straight into the depths...

If others knew what she was thinking, they would probably be utterly speechless.

One could only say...

A newborn calf fears no tiger.

There was still such a thing as recklessness without fear...

Right now, Zhou Xiaozhou was eagerly hoping that the reason for the hyenas’ decline would be distinctive enough!

The more distinctive it was, the greater her chances of going viral.

At that thought, she drew a deep breath and said to her brother, "All right, let’s hurry on. Soon we’ll be able to see that legendary hyena pack..."

Her eyes shone as she spoke.

Her brother gave an "oh," then followed her onward.

And so the two reckless fools continued deeper and deeper into the Thousand Nether Wasteland, and indeed, they were quickly nearing the hyena pack...