After leaving the village, Lin Chen headed north for about half a day. The plains gradually gave way to hills.
Villages grew fewer along the road, trees grew thicker, and the faint spiritual energy in the air seemed to grow stronger.
He took his time, sometimes stopping to look at wildflowers by the road, sometimes raising his eyes to the rolling ridges in the distance.
The world of Holy Demon Star was fresh and fascinating to him, utterly unlike Douluo Star.
There were no Soul Beasts or Soul Rings here. In their place were Spiritual Power, Battle Qi, and Magic, forming a cultivation system of their own.
Lin Chen even considered bringing a few talented people from this world back to Federation Academy someday, so they could learn from one another's paths of cultivation.
As he thought about it, hurried footsteps sounded from around a bend in the mountain road, mixed with a low, rasping sound like blades scraping across stone. Lin Chen paused and looked ahead.
At the far end of the road, a small figure came stumbling toward him.
It was a girl of about seven or eight, dressed in a rough gray-white dress stained with dust and blood. A tear ran from her shoulder to her elbow.
She was small and thin, her face so pale it was almost translucent, without a trace of color in her lips.
What caught Lin Chen's attention most was her eyes.
A child being hunted ought to have looked frightened and panicked. But the girl's gaze was empty, as though veiled in gray. She seemed unable to see anything and could only stumble forward by feel.
Her cloth shoes had worn through, exposing toes streaked with blood and caked in mud.
Farther down the mountain road behind her, three figures were