"Huh? That's strange. No matter where I go, everything looks exactly the same."
Ye Chen had wandered through the Mysterious Jungle for a long time. Wherever he turned, the trees looked identical. It felt as though he had been walking in circles.
He pushed off hard and leaped into the air, but mist surrounded him. Apart from endless black fog, he could see nothing.
After hovering for a moment, he lightly touched a treetop with his toes, ready to leap again. Then he noticed the trees around him turning once more.
The sight reminded him of Huang Yaoshi's Peach Blossom Island. The trees were not moving on their own. There was a mechanism beneath them, and every tree planted here looked identical, making it easy to lose his bearings.
Ye Chen landed and curled his fingers into claws. As he walked, he used Eagle Claw Technique to mark the nearby trees, but it did no good. As long as the trees kept turning, their positions could change no matter how he marked them.
Still, after wandering for a while, Ye Chen finally came across another contestant.
He was an elderly man with white hair. His clothes had long since fallen to rags, and he leaned against a tree, listlessly chewing grass he had picked up from the ground.
"Hey, who are you?"
Ye Chen walked up to the old man and raised a hand in greeting.
Only after Ye Chen called out three times did the old man come to his senses. "Ah, another poor fool. I'm Sage, captain of the Ghost God Pirates."
"The Ghost God Pirates? That's quite a name. Are you in the competition too?"
Ye Chen studied the old man as he asked.
"Yeah. By my reckoning, I've been trapped here for ten whole years."
"What?