The first monster to leave the wall crouched low, its sharp claws leaving several white marks on the ground.
It didn't pounce immediately, but several other monsters spread out from both sides and surrounded Lin Yuan from behind along the rock wall.
There was no shouting, and no reminders to each other.
From the moment they appear, they know how to surround their prey.
Lin Yuan drew the Nameless.
The monsters at the front leaped up simultaneously. Two sharp claws reached for his head and chest respectively, and their open mouths were filled with interlocking sharp teeth.
The sword's edge swept past from below.
Nameless first severed the right claw, then slashed across the monster's neck. The bluish-black head crashed into the cave ceiling, but the body still flew forward, only to be dodged by Lin Yuan.
Three other monsters have already pounced from different directions.
Lin Yuan did not retreat to the rock wall where he had left his coordinates. He took a step forward, his figure covering more than ten meters, and appeared directly behind the three monsters.
The three sword lights appeared almost simultaneously.
Before the monster even hit the ground, its body was severed at the waist. Several mangled remains crashed to the ground, purple blood slowly seeping out along the cracks in the rocks.
The remaining monsters paused for a moment.
Lin Yuan saw hesitation in their eyes, but no fear. After a brief pause, they charged forward again, stepping directly over the still-present corpses of their kind.
This time, Lin Yuan did not use his sword again.
Black and silver magic spread along his right arm, and two arc-shaped spaces closed from the left and right sides of the passage.
" The Space God's Folding Wings."
The monsters charging ahead simultaneously lost their balance and were squeezed towards the center of the passage by the rapidly compressed space. Lin Yuan tightened his five fingers, and the two curved surfaces continued to close, pressing more than a dozen monsters together, with the sound of bones breaking ringing out one after another.
The last monster tried to pounce on the rock wall from behind.
Lin Yuan turned and threw a punch.
The distance between the fist and the monster vanished instantly. A dull thud echoed as the monster crashed into the opposite wall, its entire head and chest collapsing together.
The passageway fell silent again.
Lin Yuan withdrew his magic and first glanced at the location where he had left spatial coordinates. The rock wall remained intact, and the six voids inside were unaffected.
His magical abilities were also not restricted by this world.
In Aincrad, the rules of the entire world forbade the existence of True Magic. However, here, the Space God Slayer Magic can be used normally, just like in the Fairy Tail world.
Lin Yuan flicked the blood off Nameless and walked to the first fallen monster's corpse.
His spatial perception allowed him to clearly detect the energy core inside the corpse. Lin Yuan used the tip of his sword to cut open the flesh and took out a purple crystal from the chest cavity. The moment the crystal left the body, the entire corpse quickly disintegrated into black ash, leaving only an exceptionally hard claw in place.
Lin Yuan removed the purple crystals from the remaining corpses one by one. With each crystal lost, a corpse turned into black ash; however, a few claws and scales remained.
He picked up one of the purple crystals.
It contained a faint energy, somewhat similar to the Magic Crystal, but not the kind of magic he was familiar with. The crystal still retained a very thin connection between the monster and the cave, but that connection had been severed after the monster's death.
He put the crystals and the monster materials that hadn't turned to ash into an empty bag.
A soft sound came from behind me again.
Lin Yuan immediately turned his head, but did not see any new monster.
The sound came from the wall where the monster had been born. Several indented marks were slowly healing, with grayish-white stone growing from the edges, and soon the wall was whole again.
Lin Yuan walked to the wall and tapped it twice with his knuckles.
The walls felt like rock to the touch, but the spatial perception was completely different. The interior wasn't a solid mountain, but rather layers upon layers of overlapping passages. Further away, there were countless moving presences, too numerous to discern.
This is not an ordinary cave.
It can create monsters, and it can also repair itself. If Lin Yuan were to randomly cut open the wall to find a shortcut, he would likely only end up in another, even more unfamiliar passage.
He examined the human footprints on the ground again.
The footprints originated from the right, became disordered near where the monster appeared, and then all returned to the right. The person who left the footprints clearly did not venture further but retreated along the same path.
There were no traces of humans on the left, only a few sets of monster footprints disappearing into the darkness.
Lin Yuan decided to go to the right first.
He didn't clean up the black ash on the ground. The fact that someone had been there, and the signs of a battle, proved that something was amiss behind them. If the other party had the ability to judge danger, they would naturally be on high alert.
After walking for a while, the passage begins to slope upwards.
More traces of battle appeared along the way: cleaved rock walls, broken arrows, and monster fangs that hadn't been retrieved yet—all indicating that people frequently passed through this area.
Just as Lin Yuan was about to examine a sword mark, he suddenly felt a slight tremor beneath his feet.
The tremors did not originate nearby.
After passing through layers of rock walls, the sounds became very muffled, but the clanging of metal and the roars of monsters could still be heard.
Someone is fighting at a higher vantage point.
Lin Yuan looked up at the end of the slope.
When the next roar came, he had already disappeared from the spot.
The black ash left in the passageway was blown away by the airflow, and the walls further away bulged outwards again.
The monsters that just died weren't all there were on this path.
There's more inside the wall.