Chapter 144: The Cats’ Hunt
At the amount of noise currently filling the stairwell, the number of players brave enough to come outside and investigate was probably very small.
After only a brief moment of hesitation, Joo Joowon hurried upstairs and retrieved a fire axe.
Using spider silk to hold it, he swung the axe one zombie at a time, killing them with a single blow each while not allowing a single drop of blood to splash onto himself.
What was somewhat unfortunate was that although Byeol had successfully led the zombies back, the amount of experience they provided was quite limited.
Looking at the severed limbs tangled in the nylon rope, Joo Joowon could already tell that many zombies must have been lost along the way.
Among the zombies that had actually made it back, quite a few had also been accidentally killed by their own companions during the journey.
After all, low level zombies were not particularly durable.
They died very easily and were nowhere near as resilient as elite monsters with their thick health pools.
Being dragged over such a long distance and dying in the process was hardly surprising.
A total of ten low level zombies died at Joo Joowon’s hands, granting him thirteen points of experience.
Only three of them had been Level 2 Zombies, so the amount of experience gained was quite disappointing.
The real surprise was the thirty four copper coins that dropped, leaving Joo Joowon somewhat confused.
How could these zombies possibly have carried so much money on them?
One of the zombies had even dropped three coins all by itself.
If only Byeol could speak, Joo Joowon would have really wanted to ask it exactly what had happened.
He thought about it for a while but failed to come up with an explanation.
It felt as though he was only one thin layer of paper away from the answer, yet he simply could not break through it.
In the end, he stopped worrying about it and happily examined the three cards that had dropped from the zombies.
One of them was the beginner waist accessory that Joo Joowon had searched for endlessly but had never once seen drop before.
Another was a Spring Recovery Powder (Normal) that could restore one point of Mental Power.
The final card turned out to be a zombie core, though it was only a half of the core.
The image displayed on the card showed a mass of liquid that had only partially condensed into crystalline form.
If taken out, it would need to be stored in a container or it would definitely spill everywhere.
Its grade was not somewhere between normal and common grade item either.
It was simply a normal grade item.
There had actually been an elite monster among these zombies that had not fully matured yet?
Joo Joowon carefully looked over the zombies, but he could not identify a single one that possessed the standard physical characteristics of the elite monsters he had encountered so far.
He quickly gave up thinking about it, stored the cards away in satisfaction, and said to Byeol and Hwi,
"Alright, let’s head back upstairs."
"Meow! Meow! Meow!"
Byeol jumped over to the crab that had been pinned beneath the fallen zombies and patted the crab with its filthy little paw.
"Hmm?"
Only then did Joo Joowon realize that something was not quite right.
Earlier, he had assumed that the mutated crab had originally died trapped inside the fishing net, and that Byeol and Hwi had merely noticed the net on its body and taken advantage of it to achieve their goal.
Now, however, it looked more as though the zombies had only been incidental, while the mutated crab inside the net had been the real thing Byeol wanted to bring home all along.
Using his spider silk, Joo Joowon pulled the zombies aside and stared blankly at the mutated crab’s dark green shell.
So Byeol had not brought the zombies back for him to farm experience from at all.
Instead, Byeol and Hwi had actually gone out hunting together?
This... That explanation actually seemed far more reasonable.
After all, it was not uncommon for cats to bring prey back home to present to their owners.
Joo Joowon had simply never imagined that the prey they brought back would be this.
This... He found it difficult to describe.
Weren’t cats supposed to hunt mammals and birds?
Why had they targeted a crab?
The shell was so hard.
How had they even managed to kill it?
Joo Joowon crouched down and gently rubbed Byeol’s head.
Not wanting to waste Byeol’s good intentions, he carefully peeled the mutated crab free using his spider silk.
Only then did he finally get a clear look at the whole thing.
It was a dead crab nearly one meter across.
Judging from its appearance, it looked like a mitten crab.
Even accounting for the fact that mutated beasts grew larger in size, something this large had probably reached at least Level 3 or Level 4.
It was probably even a creature that specialized in Physique.
Joo Joowon quickly opened the system interface and checked for kill notifications but found none.
After thinking about it for a moment, he quickly relaxed.
When Byeol had killed the mutated rats before, he had only received experience and nothing else.
Since he had been so far away at the time, it was not strange that he had failed to receive notifications.
Besides, mutated beasts seemed not to drop equipment.
The mutated rats earlier had not dropped any equipment either.
Joo Joowon picked up the mutated crab and prepared to head back upstairs.
Then, after thinking for a moment, he simply threw the zombies lying on the ground out of the window one by one.
Now that elevators could no longer be used, leaving a pile of zombies blocking the staircase would inevitably affect other people’s ability to move around.
If someone who was injured accidentally came into contact with zombie blood and became infected because of it, that would be even worse.