Mid-August.
It had been three days since he entered the Core Region of the Magical Beast Mountain Range.
This place was a completely different world from the outskirts and middle reaches. The trees were taller, blotting out the sky and sun, their trunks so thick that it took several people to encircle them. Damp moisture and the smell of rotting leaves lingered in the air year-round. Sunlight barely reached the ground; only at noon did a few shafts slip through the exceedingly sparse gaps in the foliage.
Loa slowed his pace.
Over those three days, the magical beasts he encountered gradually went from the fourth and fifth levels to the sixth. Those sixth-level magical beasts that held territories and could throw their weight around outside were merely the lowest residents here. Yesterday, he had even seen an enormous claw mark on a dead tree-as thick as a human thigh, gouged deep into the trunk, running from halfway up the tree all the way to its crown.
That was a mark left by a magical beast of at least the eighth level.
So he rarely spread his Nine Heavens Wind-Thunder Sword Force now. In the outskirts, his sword force was a tool for driving off small fry. Here, using it was equivalent to announcing to everything within several miles: some fool who didn't know his limits had come to stir up trouble.
Provoking eighth-level or level nine magical beasts was not wise.
Still, his haul over those three days was good. Ten sixth-level Magic Crystal Cores, including wind, fire, earth, and water attributes, lay neatly stowed in the compartment at the bottom of his pack. Now, he didn't even need to unleash his sword force to kill these sixth-level magical beasts. With the quality of his two forms battle-qi and his