Angel walked several thousand meters farther. Aside from the six-tailed fox from before, he spotted another Kexi Fire Salamander poking its head out of the lava.
However, the Kexi Fire Salamander merely showed its head, looked around, then swiftly dived back into the orange-red lava without appearing again.
Angel had the feeling that the Kexi Fire Salamander had glanced in his direction before submerging.
Could it have discovered him?
"It probably hadn't, right?" Angel muttered inwardly. His entire body was concealed by Nightmare Illusion nodes, and he had deliberately erased every trace of residual pheromones. Even a Wizard of True Knowledge might not necessarily discover his trail. That Kexi Fire Salamander did not even seem to be wizard-class—how could it possibly discover him?
Perhaps he was overthinking it. Angel shook his head, did not dwell on it, and continued onward.
Along the way, every few thousand meters, Angel saw one or two unique elemental creatures. Yet he did not disturb any of them, merely detouring around them.
But this journey of less than half a day had already left Angel deeply moved.
According to the common records of the Wizarding World, it was clearly documented that elemental life was exceedingly difficult to birth naturally. Three conditions were indispensable: an extreme environment, a fortunate convergence of circumstances, and an elemental concentration in the region sufficient to sustain an elemental lifeform's consumption.
This differed from the fire creatures Angel had encountered in Duoling Garden. Those had been formed from Reeves's elemental energy, not the power of nature. Such artificially formed elemental creatures still carried some of Reeves's elemental properties. That was precisely why Angel had not chosen to capture those fire creatures at the time.
But the fire creatures Angel encountered in this region had undoubtedly all been born naturally.
In the