Gold-Striped Leopards were peak Level 7 magical beasts. Warriors of the same level were basically no match for them.
Once they set their sights on you, you were as good as dead.
The same went for mages.
The most troublesome magical beasts for them were the ones with exceptional speed and agility.
After collecting the Magic Crystal Core, Jonathan continued onward.
Several days later.
He had no idea where he was in the Magical Beast Mountain Range. Suddenly, his eyes lit up. He passed through the trees and saw a yellow-brown clearing ahead, bare of grass and sunken inward.
"The Earth Elements here are so dense, I can sense them even without focusing."
The Earth Elements ahead were so dense that they had pushed all the other Heaven and Earth Elements to the edges.
"Something's off here!"
"Could there be some kind of Earth-style Supreme Treasure?"
Jonathan guessed that it had either formed naturally in the Magical Beast Mountain Range or been left behind after a god-level powerhouse from another plane died on the Yulan Continent.
Just then, the ground trembled faintly. The vibration came from a cave at the foot of a nearby mountain.
Soon, Jonathan got a clear look at it.
It was a brownish-yellow bear, two or three zhang tall, with thick fur. It walked with a swaying gait, its semicircular ears twitching now and then. Its eyes were as large as eggs, wildly out of proportion to its body.
It was as if a person had a pair of eyes the size of beans.
With its round belly, it looked rather endearing.
"An Earth Bear!"
"And a Level 9 one!"
The Earth Bear walked to the center of the sunken, yellow-brown clearing and promptly flopped onto its back, all four limbs sprawled out.
After a quarter of an hour, it rolled onto its side and scratched its rump with a short limb. It didn't seem to be able to reach, though, and only managed a few futile swipes.
A steady snore soon followed.
Under Jonathan's spiritual perception, countless yellow Light Spots flowed into the Earth Bear's body with each breath.
"There has to be a treasure underground!"
"The Earth Bear probably doesn't stay here all the time."
Jonathan thought it over, then decided to lie low and wait for it to leave before going in to see what was there.
The Earth Bear slept for three whole days!
Fortunately, Jonathan had plenty of patience. He waited the entire time. At last, after absorbing enough Earth Elements, the bear slowly sat up, looked around, then got to its feet and headed back to the cave.
It didn't look as though it had slept enough. It was probably going back to the cave to sleep some more.
Even a magical beast like the Earth Bear, with its exceptionally high affinity for Earth Elements, couldn't absorb them endlessly. Just like people needed time to digest after eating their fill, it had to take a break.
After the Earth Bear entered the cave, Jonathan waited another two hours before making his move.
As he stepped onto the edge of the sunken clearing, a familiar force suddenly pressed down on him.
"Gravity!"
"The object at the center naturally emits enough force to create a Gravity Field a hundred meters in diameter?!"
His eyes burned with excitement.
After taking a few steps, he realized that the deeper he went, the stronger the gravity became.
After several dozen meters, the gravity around him exceeded the effect of a Level 7 Gravity Spell. It was uncomfortable, but his body, which had undergone rigorous training and was comparable to a Level 6 physique, could still endure it.
At the eightfold-gravity zone, he had no choice but to channel battle qi to protect himself and cast the Anti-Gravity Spell at full strength to withstand the force.
At the center, the gravity reached ten times normal.
Jonathan's battle qi and spiritual power were steadily draining away.
"I have to hurry!"
He had planned to dig with his hands, but years of gravity pressing down on the ground had made the soil far Sturdier than elsewhere, even harder than ordinary rock.
So he had no choice but to use the dagger Xue Yan had given him, which had been engraved with the Sturdiness and Sharpness Micro Magic Arrays.
Even so, it was no easy task. After an hour, he had only dug several dozen meters, and the soil below had grown harder and harder, already far tougher than ordinary steel.
"Could it be hundreds of meters deep?!"
"Wait, I'm an Earth mage. Why am I stupidly doing a warrior's job?!"
Jonathan pressed his hand against the ground. Earth Elements gathered in great quantities, and a Level 7 spell took shape in an instant.
"Level 7 Earth Magic, Earth Splitting Spell!"
The ground split vertically, instantly reaching deeper than he had managed in the previous hour.
The noise was considerable. Seeing no movement from the cave, he let out a long breath and cast the spell again.
After four or five more casts, he had to leave and recover his spiritual power and magic power.
Then he continued. After casting Earth Split Spell ten times in total, he reached a depth of a thousand meters underground and finally found a stone orb. It didn't look as though it had formed naturally.
The stone orb was only about the size of an egg, yet it was so heavy that even Jonathan, a Level 7 warrior, couldn't budge it.
"If it's an artifact, I should be able to make it recognize me as its master with a drop of blood."
Jonathan bit his finger and tried. The moment his blood touched the orb, it absorbed the drop, and a bright, yellow-brown light began to shine from its surface.
Jonathan suddenly felt a faint connection with the stone orb. In an instant, he saw a scene.
At the core of the earth beneath an endless yellow-brown plateau, a black boulder transformed into a human and roared at the sky. With a casual wave of his hand, he refined another black boulder, one that had been born alongside him, into a stone orb.
"So that's where it came from. Its previous master was a stone-like life-form who became a god?"
When Jonathan tried to pick it up again, the orb no longer felt as heavy as before. The Gravity Field, which had persisted for who knew how long, vanished in an instant. He tucked the orb into his clothes, turned into a streak of black light, and shot out of the underground cavern before speeding away.
A day or two later, the Earth Bear woke and came to the cavern. It blinked, staring blankly.
Then it let out a terrifying roar, sending the nearby magical beasts fleeing. None dared to provoke it.
As for Jonathan, after obtaining the stone orb, he ran toward the outskirts of the Magical Beast Mountain Range without stopping for two days. Now, hiding in a cave near the outskirts, he began studying the orb.
The stone orb had two functions. First, when activated, it protected him from the effects of gravity. Second, when activated, it generated a Gravity Field at least ten times as strong as normal. Its range depended on his spiritual power.
With his Level 7 spiritual power, he could activate it at full strength to cover a radius of one kilometer. But after sustaining it for the time it took to burn a stick of incense, his spiritual power would be depleted.
Aside from the tenfold Gravity Field, the stronger Jonathan became, the more terrifying a Gravity Field he could unleash.
It also contained an enormous amount of pure Earth Elements. A little refinement was enough to replenish his magic power, and it could draw in vast quantities of Earth Elements from heaven and earth in an instant. With its help, he could release Earth Magic spells; he could instantly cast a Level 7 Earth Magic spell more than ten times.
"If I use the stone orb to cast a Gravity Field, it's even stronger than the Gravity Spell of an Level 8 Earth mage. Even a Level 8 magical beast would move very slowly inside it, even if it wasn't crushed."
"Having all the blood in your body and your bones squeezed by tenfold gravity is no pleasant experience!"
"Low-level magical beasts trapped inside would probably have their organs and bones crushed in an instant."
"Besides, with this Gravity Field and the recovery property of the Dao Fruit, I can try to break through my limits and train my body to Level 7."
Originally, aside from magical beasts, only warriors with special bloodlines could possibly reach this level of physical strength.
No matter how hard ordinary people trained, their bodies could only reach Level 6.
Jonathan had been no exception.
But after obtaining the stone orb, he saw a glimmer of hope for breaking through.
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