It took Loa a month to travel three hundred li.
Not because he couldn't move fast, but because he didn't dare.
Heading south along the central axis of the Magical Beast Mountain Range, he was in completely unfamiliar territory. He had no map, no guide, only a general direction. Every time he crossed a mountain, he had to spend hours observing first, making sure there were no signs of high-ranking magical beasts before daring to continue.
Detours became routine.
Sometimes he could clearly see a flat valley ahead with no creatures in sight, yet the moment he approached, he sensed a faint pressure. It was so faint that it was almost imperceptible, but anyone with keen senses would know what it meant-a high-ranking magical beast's territory.
Whenever that happened, he took a detour without a second thought.
Each detour added dozens of li.
And so a straight-line distance of three hundred li took him an entire month.
By late February, the weather began to warm.
Loa stood on high ground and looked down.
Then he fell silent.
Below lay a scene of devastation.
The ground looked as though countless enormous beasts had trampled it, riddled with deep pits and fissures. Some fissures were over a hundred feet wide, their bottoms nowhere in sight. Swaths of trees lay toppled, some uprooted, others snapped in half, their broken ends charred black. Rocks had been blasted apart, their fragments scattered everywhere.
Farther away stood a mountain peak.
The entire mountain was dark gold, gleaming like metal in the sunlight. Its slopes were steep, pointing skyward like a sword. Its summit towered into the clouds, but those clouds weren't white-they were blue-gray thunderclouds, thick and churning.
Lightning flickered through them from time to time, illuminating half the sky.
Loa stared at the mountain for