No one knew how much time had passed before Chen Xiaojun's consciousness suddenly relaxed and he woke up. He felt his Soul Power filling the meridians of his Small Circulatory Cycle, leaving him refreshed and clear-headed.
He planned to head deeper into the forest tomorrow, near the Black Moon Wolf Pack's territory in the Mountain Hollow, to challenge the Black Moon Wolves.
In the middle of the night, Chen Xiaojun suddenly heard wave after wave of wolf howls, extremely chaotic. He walked out of the cave, and vast surges of air came crashing toward him like mountains toppling and seas overturning. Even though they came from several li away, they still felt deeply uncomfortable, giving him the sense that his soul might scatter at any moment.
"Something's wrong. Wolves are highly disciplined beasts. Why are their howls this chaotic? And there aren't that many Black Moon Wolves—at most a hundred. Any more and this little forest couldn't sustain them."
"With this many wolf howls, those air waves are clearly the spreading aftershocks of a large-scale battle. Could there be another wolf pack? An invading outside pack? Ah, could it be Gale Wolves?"
During the day, Chen Xiaojun had already found it strange. Why had a lone Gale Wolf appeared?
Seeing this, Chen Xiaojun narrowed his eyes. Two streaks of white luster settled over his pupils. Though his Sword Eye was only in its early practice, his vision had still been enhanced.
He vaguely saw the battlefield several li away. Soul Power shot wildly through the air, rows of trees flew about in disorder, and sand filled the sky. In the haze, it seemed to be one pack of wolf-type soul beasts surrounding and attacking another pack of wolves.
Only a few minutes later, a firecracker-like explosion rang out, and in the sky appeared a firework in the shape of a huge yellow Seven Kill Sword. It could be seen across a range of ten to twenty li.
Chen Xiaojun recalled what he had learned before in the Martial Arts Hall, when his second granduncle once took out red, yellow, and blue Warning Fireworks tubes and said:
"Xiao boy, these are our Chen Clan's Emergency Signals. They come in red, yellow, and blue. Red is the highest, yellow second, blue third. Blue means the attacker has, or is close to, Soul Sage strength and requires a clan Soul Sage to move out. Yellow requires a Soul Douluo. Red means a Titled Douluo. As for anything below Soul Sage, there's no need!"
"It's uncle Wu. In this forest, uncle Wu should be the only one who'd send a warning signal. That direction is the Black Moon Wolves' territory. My Soul Power is only rank ten right now. I can't go join the excitement. Even the aftershocks might make me unable to stand steady. I wouldn't even count as cannon fodder." Chen Xiaojun reacted quickly, and his mind remained fairly calm.
"This place is seven or eight li from the forest exit, and the forest exit is only five or six li from the village's North Gate stone wall. That's around fifteen li in total. With the strength of the Defense Force members on the stone wall, it would only take them a few minutes to get here. The clan's experts will be even faster. As long as I don't wander around, safety shouldn't be a problem." Thinking this, Chen Xiaojun gripped the Wind Phoenix Sword tightly and leaned against the stone at the cave entrance, closing his eyes to rest.
Over there, a dark cyan tornado rose, twenty or thirty meters in diameter, its violent, bloodthirsty aura surging outward.
Afterward, in the air above that place, a Seven Kill Sword twenty to thirty meters long manifested. Then an enormous number of Seven Kill Sword auras flashed with vast, majestic power, gathering into a spherical body of light. It shone as dazzlingly as the moon, like a bright moon rising over a boundless sea, releasing thousands of beams of blue light that illuminated the forest until everything was clear and bright.
The trees of Black Moon Forest seemed unable to withstand these two majestic powers. They shook violently, on the verge of collapse.
"With such a phenomenon, could it be uncle Wu activating the Seven Kill True Body and using one of the ultimate moves of the Sword Control Technique, Vast Sea Bright Moon? That greenish-gray tornado should be the dark cyan hurricane of the Gale Wolf king, the Hurricane Demon Wolf. As expected, battles between high-level soul masters and soul beasts are terrifying beyond measure for us low-level soul masters."
As the two forces collided, a strange halo spread outward at a visible speed. Even though Chen Xiaojun was several li away, he was still within its range. A groggy feeling immediately surged into his heart. He felt as if he had been buried alive, struggling to breathe, utterly suppressed, and unbearably stifled.
At the same time, on the hundred-meter-long stone wall at the village's North Gate, a dozen or so soul masters sat cross-legged, looking up at the fireworks in the sky.
The middle-aged man at their head wore a blue cloud-patterned brocade robe. His figure was lean, his features picturesque, and his gaze gentle, with an indescribable air of graceful elegance. He was none other than Chen Xiaojun's granduncle, Ling Yunxiao, Chen Hanxin's husband, a rank 79 Soul Sage.
"Chen Wu, Xiaojun is in the woods. Cheng Hao, go first and see what's happening. Ding Lao San, Chen Chen, come with me. Lao Zhao, I'll leave this place to you. Stay alert. When people from the village arrive in a bit, have them hurry over to provide support."
Cheng Hao, Ding Lao San, and Lao Zhao were all hereditary followers, and they belonged to the North Gate Defense Force.
Lao Zhao was Zhao Lin, the Vice Captain of the Defense Force in charge of the North Gate. Ding Lao San was also Little Fatty Zhu Wuneng's third maternal uncle, Ding Lang, the younger brother of his mother, Ding Dang. Chen Chen was Ling Yunxiao's son, thirty-five years old, and already a Soul Emperor.
Hearing this, Cheng Hao, who had the cultivation of a Soul King, possessed his martial soul, the Azure Shadow Divine Eagle, and flew toward the fireworks. Ling Yunxiao, Ding Lao San, and Chen Chen immediately followed.
At this moment, the Black Moon Wolves' territory, Black Moon Ridge, was a mess. Broken trees were everywhere, crisscrossed trenches covered the ground, and wolf corpses lay strewn all around.
Some three hundred Gale Wolves and Azure Gale Grey Wolves were surrounding and killing seventy or eighty Black Moon Wolves and Black Moon Grey Wolves, divided into several battlefields.
The wolf clan was a major clan of soul beasts, with over a dozen branches. The Gale Wolf ranked near the bottom in combat strength, but its numbers were the greatest.
On one side of the center of the battlefield, Old Black, the leader of the Black Moon Wolves, a Black Moon Shadow Kill Wolf, was entirely pitch-black. A silver moon mark sat on his forehead, his pupils shone with a blood-red light, and his body was seven or eight meters long and over three meters tall. His expression was extremely ferocious.
Old Black used his innate skill, Shadow Moon Illusion Kill, constantly transforming into clone phantoms as he fought two Hurricane Demon Wolves whose bodies were wrapped in greenish-gray energy. Both were over four meters long; one had more than thirty thousand years of cultivation, and the other more than ten thousand.
Several hundred meters away, a slightly smaller Black Moon Shadow Kill Wolf was locked in battle with a Hurricane Demon Wolf and a deep cyan Azure Gale Grey Wolf King. She was already covered in wounds. This was the queen of the Black Moon Wolves.
(PS: In a wolf pack, the dominant male wolf can, in theory, possess all the female wolves, but the dominant female wolf will also stop the dominant male from mating with other females. In this way, mating and reproduction generally take place between the two strongest individuals, the dominant male and dominant female, which is why a wolf pack has a Wolf Queen.)
The Azure Gale Grey Wolf King was another evolutionary path for the Azure Gale Grey Wolf besides the Hurricane Demon Wolf. More accurately, it was a strengthening path, but its potential was not as great as the qualitative evolution into a Hurricane Demon Wolf.
Black Moon Wolves somewhat countered Gale Wolves. This was perhaps one of the reasons the relationship between the two races was poor.
First, Black Moon Wolves had extremely high resistance to wind-type Soul Power.
Second, the difference in physique was quite large. Gale Wolves were very small: two meters at a hundred years, three meters at a thousand years, and four meters at ten thousand years. In size and strength, they were far inferior to Black Moon Wolves, which started at four or five meters, with larger ones reaching six or seven meters.
Third, Black Moon Wolves excelled at phantoms and covert killing, so Gale Wolves often lunged at nothing and were killed.
Fourth, it was currently midnight, with Moonlight Splendor shining down, giving the Black Moon Wolves a boost in combat strength. Because of that, Black Moon Wolves could fight two or three of the same rank at once.
Aside from being caught off guard at the very beginning, these were the reasons the Black Moon Wolves had managed to hold on.
Logically speaking, it would have been better for the Gale Wolves to choose daytime to ambush and kill the Black Moon Wolves. But there was no helping it—wolves were nocturnal animals, and they were never as strong during the day as they were at night. Besides, with this many wolves, they would be very easy to discover.
I look forward to your Recommendation Tickets and favorites, rubbing my hands together, hehehe.
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