The agonized, piercing scream instantly put both people in the clearing on alert.
The specially made longsword refracted a dazzling gleam beneath the sunlight overhead. Xia Nan stared in the direction the sound had come from, his dark, deep eyes seeming able to pierce through the dense shrubs and branches to see what lay beyond.
"More than one Petrification Lizard?"
Judging that the sound had come from somewhere near the lizard's lair, and suspecting another Petrification Lizard might have caused it, he asked Adeline beside him.
"Impossible!" The woman, covered in bits of grass and flecks of mud and looking rather disheveled, answered with absolute certainty.
"This creature is solitary by nature. Aside from a few breeding periods, it rarely stays in prolonged contact or activity with its own kind."
"And we staked out its lair for many days. There was no sign whatsoever of any other adult Petrification Lizard."
"The only possibility..." Adeline's tone suddenly grew hesitant. "There are several of its young being raised in the cave."
At that point, the confident look on her face could not help but change.
After all, from what they had observed over so many days, they had indeed noticed that this Petrification Lizard's appetite was unusually large. It often needed to go out hunting, and its periods of dormancy were relatively short.
They had originally thought it was just an ordinary difference between individuals. But thinking about it now, it really was possible that this was a Petrification Lizard in the middle of rearing its young.
Xia Nan neither agreed nor disagreed with Adeline's guess.
He carefully weighed the pros and cons in his mind. Only after a moment did he give a slight nod and say, "Stay alert. We'll go take a look."
Their current position was not very far