Chapter 112 - 99: [Great Eater Technique] Mastery, Preparing to Return

Chapter 112: Chapter 99: [Great Eater Technique] Mastery, Preparing to Return

In the end, Valua didn’t escape.

Perhaps he wanted to see how things would turn out, or perhaps he simply hadn’t had time to run.

It didn’t matter, though. After a brief discussion, Zhang Ji had one of the island’s elders take temporary command.

Then, he took Valua, Bai Xiaoxiao, and Theo and set sail, preparing to return to Lanz.

The return journey was smooth.

This time, they didn’t run into anyone like Hypnos blocking their path.

Zhang Ji was in a bit of a hurry.

He was worried the fish carcass inside "Hope’s Ark" might start to rot.

Before he even got back, he contacted Zhou Hao ahead of time and asked him to arrange for a cold storage warehouse and a butchering facility.

This was a B-rank Exotic Beast, and a massive one at that. Zhang Ji definitely intended to make full use of it.

As soon as the plane landed, a car was there to pick up Zhang Ji and take him to a butchering warehouse and cold storage facility in the suburbs.

"They used to process and store all kinds of meat here. It’s more than big enough; you could fit seven or eight whales in here, no problem. I had to pay double to rent it for a month on such short notice," Zhou Hao said.

"That’s plenty," Zhang Ji said.

"By the way, what exactly are you planning to put in this warehouse?" Zhou Hao asked.

"A whale. Didn’t I tell you?" Zhang Ji said to Zhou Hao. "Do you have the people with butchering experience?"

"They’re all lined up and ready. They’re professionals. As soon as the whale is here, all the necessary equipment and engineering vehicles can be on-site within an hour. They estimate they can butcher a thirty-ton whale for you in about two hours," Zhou Hao said.

"Two hours might not be enough. They’ll have to work overtime," Zhang Ji said after pushing open the main doors to the warehouse and surveying the space.

"What? Overtime?"

Zhou Hao still looked confused.

However, after roughly estimating the size of the facility, Zhang Ji had already walked over to a slightly elevated spot.

He immediately stretched out his left hand. The space before his palm warped, and a massive volume of seawater and mud poured out, followed by the enormous whale sliding out along with it.

Zhou Hao’s expression changed drastically, and he swiftly moved to a safe distance.

"SPLASH! CRASH! THUD!"

Everything ended with the slap of the whale’s massive tail against the floor.

Zhou Hao stared at the behemoth before him, his mouth agape, at a loss for words.

He desperately wanted to ask Zhang Ji how he had produced the whale, but in the end, he said nothing.

As a high-ranking member of the Five Elements Sect, he had always understood one principle.

Do more, ask less.

Some things were better left unknown.

Suppressing his shock, Zhou Hao said loudly to Zhang Ji, "I’ll contact the butchers to come over right now."

"Okay," Zhang Ji nodded.

Before long, a convoy of vehicles arrived at the warehouse.

The largest animals they had ever butchered here before were cattle.

This was their first time butchering a whale.

Normally, whales are processed in coastal areas. After all, the cost of transporting one whole to the interior is astronomical.

In fact, it’s practically impossible; the carcass would spoil halfway through the journey.

This just goes to show how important Space Technology is to a civilization.

In the game *Ultimate Fighting*, mastering Space Technology was the fundamental hallmark of an Interstellar Civilization.

Whether for transporting massive amounts of supplies or making long-distance hyperspace jumps, Space Technology was essential.

The butchering took an entire day.

Naturally, Zhang Ji didn’t stick around to watch. He was already enjoying a whale meat hot pot with Zhou Hao, Valua, and the others.

The meat truly contained a tremendous amount of energy. It was very firm, far denser than that of an ordinary large whale. With the right seasoning, it wasn’t half bad.

As Zhang Ji ate, he also practiced the Great Appetizer Skill. He could feel the whale meat being rapidly digested by his gastric juices. With the peristalsis of his intestines, massive amounts of nutrients were absorbed.

He could clearly feel his body growing stronger in the process.

In the game, the description for the Great Appetizer Skill mentioned that, besides increasing digestive ability and conserving consumables...

...it could also raise certain physical attributes.

Things like strength, constitution, and poison resistance.

And the boost to these attributes wasn’t small, either.

To see just how significant it was, one only had to look at Valua.

Relying on the Great Appetizer Skill alone, he possessed B+ rank strength and considerable physical defense.

If Zhang Ji mastered it, it would be like adding Valua’s attributes on top of his own.

"Master Zhou, this is Valua, chief of the Terjia tribe and a Sublimation-rank fighter," Zhang Ji said to Zhou Hao. "I’ll need you to arrange for someone to teach him our language and writing. From now on, he will be an elder of the Five Elements Sect."

"A Sublimation-rank fighter?" Zhou Hao’s eyes widened. He quickly recovered and extended a hand to Valua. "A pleasure to meet you!"

Valua didn’t quite understand. He just grabbed a piece of scalding whale meat from his personal pot, stuffed it in his mouth, and looked at Zhang Ji quizzically.

"He’s expressing goodwill," Zhang Ji explained to Valua in the Terjia tongue.

"Good!" Valua grabbed a piece of whale meat and offered it to Zhou Hao.

"Thanks!" Zhou Hao, looking slightly bewildered, caught it in his bowl. He then turned to Zhang Ji and asked, "Like Hudson and the others?"

"More or less," Zhang Ji nodded. "Valua comes from a primitive tribe."

"I see," Zhou Hao nodded.

He was also curious as to how Zhang Ji always managed to find such peculiar people out in the world and bring them back.

And all those special, rare treasures, too.

...

The whale was enormous, far more than Zhang Ji could eat alone, so he distributed some of it to the disciples of the Five Elements Sect as a bonus.

The rendered whale oil, the organs, and everything else would be processed and eaten.

This was a B-rank Exotic Beast, a veritable super-tonic.

After that hot pot meal, Zhou Hao was so energized he couldn’t sleep a wink. He got up and trained all night long.

When he tested his strength on a dynamometer afterward, the number had clearly jumped by several dozen points.

That was as much progress as he’d normally make in one or two months of training.

Zhou Hao thought, ’If I keep eating like this, I’ll become a Grandmaster in less than half a month.’

If even Zhou Hao experienced such a significant boost, the effect on Zhang Ji was even more pronounced.

He felt his Great Appetizer Skill was on the verge of producing its first Essence.

It was a skill that required a massive amount of consumption to practice; the better the food, the faster the progress.

And right now, there was clearly no better food than this whale.

But Zhang Ji still thought it was too slow.

Zhang Ji gave some "Great Appetizer Coconuts" to Zhou Hao to have a batch of purified Great Appetizer Pills made on short notice.

Each pill was only the size of a pinky finger, but because they hadn’t been neutralized with oxalic acid or the like, their effect was more than a dozen times stronger than the secret medicine Valua had made before.

An ordinary person wouldn’t be able to handle it at all.

Taking one was like swallowing poison.

Zhang Ji swallowed a Great Appetizer Pill. His stomach immediately felt like it was on fire, and his body’s normal functions were thrown into disarray. His gastric juices combined with the pill, transforming into an even more corrosive stomach acid.

If it had been anyone else, their stomach lining would have been corroded by the acid, followed by their intestines and flesh, ultimately leading to a gruesome death from perforated bowels.

But Zhang Ji, after all, was accomplished in Horizontal Training. Boosted by his Profound Iron Body Refining Skill and the Five Elements True Technique, his physique had long reached an incredibly tough level. Thus, he only felt a burning heat in his stomach.

In this state, anything Zhang Ji ate was digested with incredible speed.

Zhang Ji then began to devour the cooked whale organs.

These organs were even more nutritious than the meat.

They were also easier to digest and absorb.

With his Great Appetizer Skill active, Zhang Ji took an eleven-pound chunk of organs, casually added some sauce, and swallowed the entire thing in no time.

The feeling of fullness lasted less than five minutes before he was hungry again.

Throughout the process, he could distinctly feel his body being fortified from within.

The density and quality of his muscles and bones were increasing.

His strength and defense were both rising noticeably.

And these were just the side effects.

The real significant improvement was to his digestive ability.

His body was adapting to and retaining that furnace-like sensation in his stomach. Gradually, he would be able to permanently maintain the state induced by the Great Appetizer Pill, keeping his digestive power at that constant, heightened level—or even surpass it.

After five hours of devouring the giant whale’s organs, Zhang Ji obtained the first Essence of his Great Appetizer Skill.

The vast amount of matter was converted into energy and absorbed, with only a small fraction becoming waste to be expelled via his metabolism.

His energy efficiency had increased by more than a single tier.

He stepped on a scale and saw that he now weighed four hundred kilograms.

This single Essence had increased his weight by a full twenty kilograms!

That’s right—before this, Zhang Ji already weighed three hundred and eighty kilograms.

As his power had grown, his weight had been steadily increasing as well.

It had shot up dramatically after he reached B-rank.

Otherwise, with his original mass, he wouldn’t have been able to generate such terrifying punching power.

But neither the Five Elements True Technique, the Profound Iron Body Refining Skill, nor the Qi Condensation and God Storage Method increased his weight as dramatically as the Great Appetizer Skill.

This skill seemed to be adding mass by directly stimulating a new growth spurt.

Zhang Ji even felt as if his body was swelling.

But that was just an illusion. His muscles hadn’t bulged much at all; they remained their original size, locked firmly in place by the Profound Iron Body Refining Skill. Only their internal density had increased.

In five days, Zhang Ji’s Great Appetizer Skill was mastered!

An (Excellent 8-Star) fighting skill, mastered just like that.

By constantly eating, he was able to form a new Essence every thirteen hours on average.

He now barely excreted at all. Most of the energy was utilized, with his main forms of waste disposal being the radiation of heat particles from his body and the shedding of skin cells.

Even when he did excrete, the digestive residue was like lumps of iron—truly indigestible material that was simply ejected from his body.

Zhang Ji’s current digestive ability was now easily more than five times what it was before.

From the same amount of food, he now extracted at least six to seven times more energy.

And his digestion speed was even faster.

All told, his daily intake capacity had increased more than tenfold.

Correspondingly, however, his weight had also increased to an absurd degree.

Upon mastery, his weight shot up to seven hundred and nine kilograms.

Just by mastering the Great Appetizer Skill, his weight had nearly doubled.

Now, Zhang Ji had to consciously use a bit of airflow to lighten his steps, otherwise he was afraid he might crack the ground just by walking.

Of course, this miniscule side effect was nothing compared to the benefits he had gained.

Now when Zhang Ji used a Spirit Strike, its power was at least forty percent greater. He could also withstand more of the recoil, so he wouldn’t send himself flying a hundred meters with a single punch.

The current Zhang Ji was confident he could take a missile to the face.

As long as he protected his eyes, the most it would do is singe off his hair and leave a few scrapes on his skin. Truly injuring him was now an absolute impossibility! ℯℯ𝑙.

’If I got hit by a tactical nuke, I probably wouldn’t die. My Spirit would give me an early warning, allowing me to escape the blast’s epicenter. The resulting shockwave probably couldn’t kill me.’

’But what I’d really like to do is take it head-on. To stand within the scorching mushroom cloud and show them just how insignificant they are!’

’That being the case, it’s time to go back!’