The young hunters of the You Zui Hunter Team stood at the edge of the "clearing" in the Bewitching Forest, staring at the flat, "clean" ground in silence for a long time.
Although there was some distance between Ulthar and the Bewitching Forest, it was not enough to conceal the light that had blazed like a rising sun the night before.
The immense, astonishing magical fluctuations, so unlike anything in the Dreamlands, and the telling direction they had come from gave the young hunters, who had been running around like headless chickens since losing their captain, an immediate destination—even if Zheng Qing was not there, they would surely find enough clues there.
That was the conclusion Xiao Xiao had reached after divining with a crystal ball and a tortoise shell.
So, the next day, before the sky had fully brightened, while Elder Attar was still sleeping off his hangover, the young hunters gathered their equipment and set out for the Bewitching Forest.
With a clear destination and a swift pace, they reached the edge of the Bewitching Forest by noon.
This time, they encountered neither those furtive brown figures in the forest nor any obstacles or attempts to stop them—Xiao Xiao even gave up collecting the new mushrooms he found—so they soon reached an area near the forest's center.
Then the young hunters stopped.
It was not because they had found traces of Zheng Qing, nor because the masters of the Bewitching Forest had suddenly appeared to bar their way—in fact, they seriously doubted whether anything was still alive in this forest, since they had barely seen even a few living insects along the way. They stopped because they had seen the landscape destroyed by the power Zheng Qing had "unleashed."
Almost a quarter of the forest had vanished.
All