Every spirit beast over ten thousand years old in the Sunset Forest had formed a symbiosis with the fungal threads, and the Mycelium Network had spread throughout the forest.
Lately, people accustomed to hunting spirit beasts in the Sunset Forest had all come back empty-handed.
Either they could not find a spirit beast over ten thousand years old, or they could not kill one.
Spirit beasts bonded with the Mycelium Network became much harder to kill. They also knew how to flee and hide, and the forest was their home ground.
As long as spirit beasts made a conscious effort to flee and hide, human Soul Masters had few ways to deal with them.
Which brought to mind the grand spectacle of Xiao Wu's sacrifice in the original story.
Any reasonable person had to wonder whether Tang San had deliberately gotten Xiao Wu killed for his own gain.
After all, without Tang San, if Daming, Erming, and Xiao Wu had wanted to hide, Spirit Hall's people would have had a hard time finding them.
Setting that aside, after leaving the Star Dou Great Forest, Lan Yu and the others headed for Vast Sea City as planned to put out to sea.
As they passed a village, they found it had just been ransacked. Quite a few bodies lay on the ground, all of them men, their blood not yet fully dry.
"Could bandits have done this? Damn it!"
"It could also have been those Fallen Soul Masters who've been hunted all this time."
"No. Look at the footprints on the ground."
Upon examining them, Ning Rongrong and Zhu Zhuqing saw that something was wrong. The footprints were not human.
"Wolf Bandits! I never thought we'd run into them here. No wonder only men's bodies are left. The Wolf Bandits took