"Chief Fred, I'm confident about this."
Hearing the chief's doubts, Elder Rich was brimming with confidence. He knew that Xia Ping had formed a contract with the World Tree. With the World Tree's power, Xia Ping was equivalent to wielding the most ancient power of plants and life itself.
If even Xia Ping could not save the Treant Race's sacred tree, then no one could.
"Confident? What exactly are you confident about?"
Chief Fred sneered. "You know perfectly well what humans are like—every last one of them is treacherous and vicious, without a shred of credibility. How many times have they deceived our Treant Race? Can you still count them?"
"This!"
Elder Rich was rendered speechless for a moment.
Humanity's reputation in the universe truly was not very good. After all, there were simply too many humans. While quite a few of them were good people, some were villains and unscrupulous merchants.
These people specialized in selling shoddy counterfeit goods to other races. They frequently broke contracts, preyed on one another, murdered for treasure, and committed all manner of acts, causing losses that other races could never erase and making many races hostile toward humanity.
Many Treant Race soldiers understood Chief Fred's thoughts very well. In particular, Chief Fred had once dealt with humans himself, attending a human auction to purchase medicine that might have cured the sacred tree.
Unexpectedly, that information had been false. Certain human factions had deliberately released it to lure the Treant Race into a trap. Chief Fred had fallen for it then and was ambushed by several powerful human experts.
As a result, Fred's friends and family—even his wife—had died in that incident. He alone had returned alive.
From then on, Fred had held boundless hatred and hostility toward humans, a hatred as irreconcilable as