Fleeing the Undead Mountain Range

A faint black mist shrouded the forest. It was cold and damp, and every tree had grown into a bizarre shape, resembling one monster after another—utterly terrifying.

Everywhere in the forest were bubbling marsh hollows. A moment's carelessness, one step inside, and a person would sleep there forever.

"Crack." "Crack."

A piercing sound came from behind a large tree, like two rusted iron rods grinding against each other.

Before long, a skeleton carrying a Bone Spear that gleamed with a dark luster emerged from behind the tree. It wore tattered armor, and within its two empty eye sockets, two eerie red glows flickered.

Just then, a faint silver radiance flashed through the air like lightning and soundlessly shot into the skeleton's ear hole.

At once, the red glows in the skeleton's eye sockets went out like flames doused with cold water. Immediately afterward, its entire body collapsed into a heap of bones.

On the large tree opposite, a figure lurking in the shadows revealed itself. It was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, carrying a dark longbow on his back. His face was smeared with grime, and his clothes were tattered beyond recognition. Yet his eyes, which occasionally flashed with the radiance of cold lightning, were enough to make anyone's heart tremble.

Anyone who saw the boy then would involuntarily feel a chill. His entire body radiated a deathly, murderous aura, without the slightest trace of human warmth.

The boy leaped down as nimbly as a civet cat, pulled the silver arrow from the skeleton's skull, then thrust two fingers into its hollow eye socket. Before long, he pinched out a green bead.

"Ha, not bad luck. I got ten Undead Beads today." A sliver of a smile appeared at the corner of Qi Bei's mouth. Strangely, when he smiled, the deathly, murderous aura covering him completely dispersed, and his eyes came alive, making him seem warm and approachable.

"Night is coming again. I should find somewhere to rest for the night. Sigh, who knows when I'll finally get out of this damned Undead Mountain Range?" Qi Bei muttered. He lightly tapped the ground with his foot and nimbly leaped onto the tree. After a few bounds between the trees, his figure vanished.

Moonlight spilled down like mercury, and the Undead Mountain Range began to grow lively.

Skeletons, zombies, ghost worms, soul-eating beasts...

The Undead Mountain Range at night belonged to the undead. It was a place where the dead held their revelry.

A living person who found themselves here would think they had been dropped straight into hell.

Inside a dark rocky cave, Qi Bei sat cross-legged. His tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth, his breath sank to his dantian, and his palms rested flat upward on his knees.

Faint white smoke rose from the Baihui acupoint atop his head. At the same time, pitch-black filth continuously seeped from the pores all over his body.

Suddenly, Qi Bei's entire body trembled, and several crisp popping sounds rang out from within him.

At the same time, on the palm of Qi Bei's left hand, the image of a golden divine dragon soaring through clouds and mist suddenly appeared, radiating tens of thousands of strands of golden light.

His dantian burned with scorching heat, and a thread of vigorous true qi surged upward toward his heart and lungs.

In an instant, Qi Bei felt that his body had become a boiler filled with boiling liquid, ready to explode out through the furnace.

"Ah..." Qi Bei abruptly opened his eyes and opened his mouth wide. A resounding roar burst from his throat.

The roar shot straight into the heavens, faintly carrying the sound of Dragon's Roar.

After that roar, Qi Bei felt incomparably refreshed, his body as light as a feather.

"The first layer of the Divine Dragon Art is finally complete." Qi Bei murmured. In his dantian, a hazy golden-yellow internal force slowly revolved. He could feel the surging power within his body, and he could even hear the instinctive hissing of a zombie hundreds of meters away.

However, Qi Bei soon sensed that something was wrong. His roar had already drawn some high-level undead capable of flying through the heavens and burrowing through the earth. The dense aura of death outside, the bone-chilling shrieks of hordes of undead, and the successive sounds of something tearing through the air as it approached him combined into a symphony of hell.

Qi Bei sprang to his feet and poured a number of Undead Beads of different colors from a cloth pouch, arranging them into a strange formation.

"Mogelas, Biana." Qi Bei held a black ancient tome in his hand and recited an obscure incantation.

The instant Qi Bei finished chanting, a mysterious magical rune rose from the black ancient tome. More than a hundred Undead Beads on the ground shattered at once, and dense deathly energy wrapped around his figure as it gradually faded from sight.

A perfectly living person had vanished into thin air on the spot.

Just after Qi Bei disappeared, the stones blocking the cave entrance were smashed apart by an enormous force. A skeleton covered in thick black bone armor appeared at the entrance. Golden light shimmered deep within its eye sockets as it swept its gaze back and forth through the cave.

"Golden light in its eyes... It's a high-level undead at the very top tier. If I faced it head-on, ten of me wouldn't be enough for it to kill. But it looks like it hasn't discovered me. The magic of this world really is miraculous." Qi Bei secretly rejoiced.

It was not long before the skeleton tore through the air and departed. Undead of a higher level already possessed a certain degree of intelligence.

Unfortunately, several hundred low-level undead had already blocked the way out beyond the cave.

The sky gradually brightened. The undead creatures outside the rocky cave clearly loathed sunlight, and they instinctively began moving into the cave.

At that very moment, the magic of the concealment formation was also about to run out.

Qi Bei slung the longbow onto his back, held a Bone Knife in his left hand, and gripped a black-and-red Bone Spear in his right. His body tensed like a hunting leopard.

Suddenly, with a "bang," more than a hundred Undead Beads turned to powder.

Qi Bei shot forward. His Bone Knife traced a white streak of lightning, instantly cleaving the heads from the three zombies before him. As momentum carried his body onward, he tackled a skeleton to the ground, and his right-hand Bone Spear followed through, stabbing into its eye socket.

The aura of life sent all the surrounding undead into a frenzy. They surged toward Qi Bei in a swarm.

"Die!" Qi Bei was wreathed in murderous fury as he bellowed. The Bone Knife and Bone Spear in his hands actually began to glow with strands of golden light. Wherever they passed, severed limbs and shattered bones flew like vegetables beneath a cleaver.

Even Qi Bei had not expected his combat strength to soar to such a level after reaching the first layer of the Divine Dragon Art.

His strength, speed, and reactions had all increased by more than threefold compared to before.

In particular, the golden radiance released when his internal force flowed into the Bone Knife and Bone Spear was as sharp as a divine weapon from heaven, utterly unstoppable.

However, Qi Bei did not dare celebrate too soon. These were only low-level undead, while his internal force, though surging and mighty, had one fatal weakness: it could not last long. After only a few attacks, more than half of it had already been expended.

Qi Bei had already charged out of the cave, but he did not dare linger in battle. There were five or six hundred undead creatures nearby. Once his internal force was exhausted, it would be difficult for him to break through the encirclement.

The low-level undead moved slowly. With Qi Bei's speed, he reached the outskirts without much effort.

Qi Bei chopped off the head of a zombie before him, then flipped over and tapped the top of a skeleton's head with his foot. His entire body glided more than ten meters like a great roc before landing, and he had already escaped the undead horde.

Qi Bei let out a breath of relief and was just about to flee when—

A sudden change erupted. A pair of large hands with long, sharp purple-black claws burst from the ground and clamped around Qi Bei's feet like iron hoops.

Qi Bei's heart jolted. Golden light faintly rose from his Bone Knife as he hacked downward.

With a clang, only a three-inch-long gash was left on the zombie's hands, while the undead horde nearby was less than eight meters away.

Qi Bei roared, drove his internal force into his legs, and kicked hard against the ground. His entire body shot upward like a cannonball.

A zombie was dragged out of the earth—not quite a whole one, but only half, because everything below its waist had vanished. Its claws still clung tightly to Qi Bei's foot.

Qi Bei landed and looked at the zombie with only half its body remaining. His heart felt as though snow had begun falling in the seventh month.

The zombie's eyes glowed with a green, ghostly light, and its entire body was incomparably hard. A bright silver mark gleamed at the center of its brow. In other words, it was a high-level undead. Because of the bright silver mark on its forehead, it was also known as a Silver Corpse. Even incomplete, it was still a high-level undead.

Using the strength of both hands, the Silver Corpse thrust its half-body forward like lightning. Its maw, packed with sharp fangs, lunged toward Qi Bei's thigh.

Qi Bei smacked the Silver Corpse's head sideways with his Bone Knife, knocking its open mouth off course so that it bit nothing but air.

Then Qi Bei steeled his heart, twisted his legs, and kicked. Several chunks of flesh were torn away by the Silver Corpse's claws, but he regained his freedom. At that moment, the undead horde was only half a meter away, and the foremost skeleton had already swung down the Bone Blade in its hand.

Qi Bei dove forward, rolled across the ground several times, then suddenly sprang up and leaped onto a large tree. He was already at the edge of a vast stretch of woodland.

As long as he used the dense forest and relied on his ability to conceal himself, his chances of escaping alive would naturally increase greatly.

Qi Bei glanced back during the instant of his leap, and his pupils abruptly contracted.

The half-bodied Silver Corpse was actually more than a third faster than him. It merely braced itself with both hands, leaped, and became nothing more than a phantom.

Qi Bei's nerves were taut to the extreme, and his mind was utterly focused. Every time he reached a life-or-death crisis, his tightly strung nerves and concentrated mind enabled him to calculate and analyze with astonishing speed.

"Crash!"

Qi Bei had just leaped from one large tree when the tree was torn to splinters by the Silver Corpse's sharp claws.

Qi Bei desperately bounded from tree to tree. Yet no matter how he changed direction, the Silver Corpse stayed glued behind him. Blood channels had been carved across his back, thighs, and even his buttocks.

It looks like I can't shake it off. If this drags on, even if it doesn't tear me into pieces, the corpse poison in these wounds will be enough to doom me beyond redemption. Qi Bei thought. The wounds on his body had already begun to rot, and the poison was spreading through his blood to every part of him. If not for a breath of inner energy protecting his internal organs, he would already have been unable to move. Even so, he could not hold out much longer.

Qi Bei did not panic. This was not the first life-and-death crisis he had experienced, and he knew all too well that if he failed to maintain a calm mind at such a moment, he would only die faster.

Just then, Qi Bei's gaze swept past a Corpse Eating Worm nest beneath a large tree to his right front, and his heart stirred.