First Arrival in the Star Dou Great Forest, Soul Beasts That Could Return to Their Ancestors

Time flew by,

the holidays ended, and a new school year began.

Wang Sheng, Xiao Chenyu, and the others had all graduated long ago. Xia Yan moved up to his second year, while the newly enrolled students, especially the Work-Study Students,

were utterly in awe of his legend,

powerful, mysterious... These were the marks of a true powerhouse!

The freshmen who had never seen him with their own eyes and could only imagine the scenes from other people's excited accounts

wished they could glue their eyes to Xia Yan,

hoping to see him make a move again.

Xia Yan's life remained unchanged: cultivating, eating, sleeping, cultivating, eating...

A year later,

his Soul Power reached level twenty.

By then, two years had passed since he obtained his First Soul Ring.

The Star Dou Great Forest.

Standing atop the outer tree canopy, Xia Yan gazed ahead at the endless forest stretching for tens of thousands of miles. Its lush greenery, like life made visible, surged in the wind.

In the distance, Soul Beasts circled above the forest, and mountain peaks towered high.

This was the place on the continent with the greatest concentration and variety of Soul Beasts.

"Sss~"

Beside him, the seven-meter-long Datura Snake coiled around a tree trunk, curiously observing the forest and sky. This place was countless times larger than the Soul Hunting Forest.

Feeling the murderous air in the wind,

it couldn't help but grow wary. Even without Xia Yan saying a word, it could sense it:

this forest was dangerous.

Xia Yan held out his hand, and a yellow map appeared in his grasp. He unfolded it, confirmed their direction and location, then looked east.

"Xiao Qing, let's go."

"Sss!"

Xia Yan and the Datura Snake leaped lightly down,

and the man and snake pressed warily onward.

Needless to say,

Xia Yan had come to the Star Dou Great Forest to obtain his Second Soul Ring.

His second Soul Beast would ideally have wind attributes and be capable of flight, making it convenient to travel long distances.

In truth, he had already made up his mind. He had his eye on a flying Soul Beast known for its incredible speed: the Jade Green Bird.

This Soul Beast was unbelievably fast and perfectly suited to agility-type, assassin-style Soul Masters.

But that wasn't why Xia Yan had chosen it.

In fact, almost no one knew that the Jade Green Bird could possess tremendous strength in addition to its speed.

That was—returning to its ancestors!

That's right. In ancient times, the ancestors of the Jade Green Bird had gone by another name:

the Jade Green Luan.

A true wind-type overlord, it possessed the power to rule the skies.

The Jade Green Bird was descended from the Jade Green Luan. Though it fell short of its forebears, it still possessed a trace of dormant bloodline power.

As long as it consumed an Immortal Herb called the Luan-Condensing Flower,

it could awaken that bloodline power, return to its ancestral form, and become a Jade Green Luan—

a true top-tier wind-type Soul Beast.

As for where the Luan-Condensing Flower could be found, that went without saying: the Ice and Fire Yin-Yang Well. And how did Xia Yan know they could return to their ancestral form? Of course, because much later, someone had made the surprising discovery.

Fortunately, the Jade Green Bird wasn't rare. It inhabited a vast area of the Star Dou Great Forest, and traces of it could be found everywhere from the Mixed Zone in the middle reaches to the outer forest.

So Xia Yan had bought a marked map,

and was following it.

The Star Dou Great Forest was far more complicated than the Soul Hunting Forest.

Xia Yan moved very slowly. As a level-twenty Soul Master, he couldn't venture deeper, so he could only search the outer forest.

A whole day passed in the blink of an eye.

Night was the most dangerous time in the Star Dou Great Forest. Darkness hindered Soul Masters' vision, and low-level Soul Masters had very limited perception. But the Soul Beasts had exceptionally keen senses and noses.

So

Xia Yan promptly returned to the Demon Suppressing Pagoda.

"Sss~"

The tension eased at once.

Being able to enter the Demon Suppressing Pagoda whenever he wanted was Xia Yan's greatest assurance as he explored the Star Dou Great Forest alone.

It was almost night inside the Demon Suppressing Pagoda too, but here he was completely safe.

Crickets chirped, and fireflies flitted among the grass, glimmering faintly. A clear stream wound through the forest and grassland.

There were also more than a hundred pounds of dried meat piled on the grass, several cooking pots, over thirty vats of clean water, neatly stacked vegetables and fruit, tons of firewood, all kinds of seasonings, a simple tent, medicinal ointments, antidote pills, crossbow bolts, shields, and five tons of high-explosive sulfur charges...

They were piled into a small mountain.

Just looking at it made him feel safe.

Xia Yan had made thorough preparations for exploring the Star Dou Great Forest. If anything set its sights on him, he could immediately enter the Demon Suppressing Pagoda and evade danger.

Even if he was trapped at his spawn point, he had nothing to fear.

His food supplies alone would last him more than a month inside the pagoda, and that didn't even include the field mice, rabbits, wild boars, and goats in the woods... or the fish and shrimp in the water...

Besides, he had more than five tons of sulfur explosives.

Almost no Soul Beast or Soul Master in the outer forest could withstand the blast of five tons of sulfur charges.

If something could withstand it and was willing to risk its own life just to bite Xia Yan to death, then he'd accept that.

At worst, he'd give up this space,

go outside, and invite the Soul Beast or Soul Master in. It was comfortable here, sure, but who knew where they'd end up when they went out?

Those who couldn't fly would be dropped off a cliff; those who could breathe fire would be tossed into water. If all else failed, he'd drop them into the human world—

and let them experience the righteous joy of a group beatdown.

Whether Soul Masters or Soul Beasts, they were bound to have something valuable on them.

He could even loot a few Gold Soul Coins at the end.

Xia Yan couldn't help marveling at how convenient the Demon Suppressing Pagoda was. He didn't have a Storage Soul Tool, but he had the Demon Suppressing Pagoda.

Even a Storage Soul Tool worth a thousand Gold Soul Coins might not be able to hold all this, and that wasn't even counting the fact that living creatures could survive and reproduce inside the pagoda.

Who could beat that?

After a day of exploration, Xia Yan was tired too. He built a fire, its flames swirling in the gloom, the only splash of orange-red light around. He went to the stream for a bath. The Datura Snake clearly only needed a rinse with water,

but it insisted that Xia Yan scrubbed it.

After they washed up,

Xia Yan made a pot of stew.

When he'd finished eating, he lay in his tent and slept until dawn.

In the Star Dou Great Forest, this counted as the height of luxury.

He continued exploring the next day. The Star Dou Great Forest was incredibly dense and complex. Ordinary methods of judging direction by the sun or instinct were completely useless.

Fortunately, he had the Datura Snake.

It could tell which way was which.

Along the way, Xia Yan encountered plenty of Soul Beasts, from ones that were less than ten years old to ones over a thousand years old.

Generally speaking, the absorption limit for a Second Soul Ring was seven hundred and sixty-four years. Countless predecessors had paid for that number with their lives.

But Xia Yan's physique was far stronger than an ordinary person's. For the past two years, he had been eating Whale Rubber and training his body, on top of the physical enhancement he'd gained from the Datura Snake.

He could easily contract a Soul Beast that was eleven hundred years old.

The second day passed without results, but Xia Yan noticed that the Datura Snake loved a kind of small, bright-red fruit, juicy and fragrant.

It smelled sweet and looked delicious.

The whole plant stood below his chest. Its leaves were small and rounded, and it grew in clumps.

Since the Datura Snake liked it, Xia Yan naturally wasted no time transplanting the plant, along with all the surrounding spirit plants, into the Demon Suppressing Pagoda,

so the Datura Snake could enjoy them at its leisure.

The third day, the fourth, the fifth... the seventh...

Until the tenth day,

just as Xia Yan was starting to doubt whether the map was real and wonder if he'd been swindled—

"Sss!"

The Datura Snake suddenly cried out excitedly from the forest ahead, then slithered back to Xia Yan.

Xia Yan's gaze sharpened. He saw a long, slender feather dangling from the Datura Snake's mouth.

He took it. The feather was so light it seemed weightless.

It was a gradient shade of green,

pure green at the tip,

but the closer it got to the quill, the whiter it became. The quill itself was pure white as snow.

The green feather was still fresh. It looked as if it had fallen only recently.

We finally found one!