After entering the hills, Jiang Ziliu began making his way along their midsections.
He did not take the bottoms of the gullies. There were rivers there, but the waterside was usually frequented by beasts coming to drink, as well as aquatic beasts, making it a relatively dangerous route.
The higher parts of the hills were usually home to the lairs of powerful beasts.
They placed their lairs at the highest points so they could easily survey their entire territory.
Beasts of Bronze rank and above were also highly territorial. Unless their lives were in danger, they would be wary of anything that entered their territory, especially their own kind.
The middle stretches of the hills he traveled through were usually areas unsuitable for hunting, where fierce beasts appeared less often.
Some habits of low-level wilderness beasts differed little from those of wild animals before the world's great transformation. They were simply more powerful.
There really were more beasts in dangerous areas.
The area he was passing through now was far from the base and relatively dangerous.
Before he had traveled even a hundred meters, his contracted beast, the Azurite Rock Man, discovered a colony of beasts up ahead.
They were Rock Armor Rats hiding underground!
Like the slimes in instance spaces, rat-type beasts were among the basic types of beasts, serving as food for many powerful carnivorous beasts.
They were omnivorous beasts that could live alone or form colonies.
Jiang Ziliu understood one fact: the sort of super beast tide formed by tens of millions of rat-type beasts in stories from his previous life was generally bullshit.
A rat-type beast needed higher-grade food. If it ate less, the quality had to increase.
Moreover, rat-type beasts had a limited travel range. Once they traveled beyond a certain distance, they had to rest and eat.
Within that range, resources were extremely tight, and there was a limit to the number of rat-type beasts they could support.
It was just like marching to war: a large army did not move quickly, yet its logistical demands were enormous.
Without enough food, a huge gathering of rats could only go hungry, unable to run.
A car would break down when it ran out of fuel, and the same went for small creatures such as rats.
When certain snakes hunted rats, they simply kept chasing them from behind until the rats were too exhausted to run and could only become food for the snakes.
Thus, a rat colony could gather only around fifty to sixty members at most.
This world had no terrifying spectacles such as rat tides, either.
The colony the Azurite Rock Man discovered was underground and consisted of only thirty rats.
These Rock Armor Rats had a rock-type energy attribute, a subdivision of the earth attribute. In times of danger, they could gather a layer of light rock armor over their bodies to defend themselves.
Forming light armor was also their only supernatural skill!
There was one rule governing beast life: the smaller a creature was, the fewer skills it could possess, and the less dark energy it had.
The larger a beast was, the more skills and dark energy it possessed, and the more terrifying its strength became.
Rock Armor Rats possessed only defensive abilities. They ate insects and had high poison resistance, but they were very timid.
Jiang Ziliu did not take a detour and walked straight past their nest.
As a result, not only did the Rock Armor Rats fail to emerge and attack him, they temporarily fled that underground area instead.
In the world of beasts, not every beast posed a threat to ordinary humans and low-level beast tamers.
On the contrary, humans were the threat to most low-level beasts.
What was truly frightening in the wild was not the little creatures, but the big ones.
As Jiang Ziliu crossed this hill, he encountered ten nests of Rock Armor Rats in total.
Humans frequently cleared this area, sharply reducing the number of large beasts. With fewer natural predators, the Rock Armor Rats' living conditions had improved instead.
They had little value as resources, so no beast tamers were willing to spend the effort on them.
Aside from those, he also encountered some basic beasts such as Gale Earth Rabbits.
Gale Earth Rabbits were two feet long and a foot and a half tall. They possessed earth-attribute skills called Earth Swift Movement and Rock and Soil Perception.
Earth Swift Movement allowed them to race along using the power of the earth, as swift as a gale, hence the word "Gale" in their name.
Rock and Soil Perception meant they could use the earth to sense movements far away, judging the size and strength of others through faint vibrations in the ground.
This perceptive ability made them very alert.
Few large beasts on land could catch them, but they were the favorite prey of carnivorous birds such as eagles and sparrowhawks, because they were sensitive to the earth but slow to notice the sky.
Although their hearing was also good, avian beasts were faster, with some even flying at supersonic speeds!
They were unfailingly successful against Gale Earth Rabbits.
Gale Earth Rabbits were also basic beasts, with at least several million distributed around Base Number Twelve.
Jiang Biliu passed one's nest, startling it, and watched it vanish swiftly before his eyes.
This Gale Earth Rabbit never fled far, watching him from a distance. It acted so boldly because there were young in its nest.
Jiang Ziliu merely glanced at the little creatures in the nest before turning to leave.
The Gale Earth Rabbit was likewise a beast harmless to humans, and one of the branches that had evolved from the world's original rabbits.
There were a few forests among the hills, but dense grass covered much more of the ground.
After crossing this hill, Jiang Ziliu would have to pass through a low valley to continue south.
Humans had once built large bridges here, but now, eroded by time and nature, they had become nothing more than broken ruins.
But as he reached the low valley, the Azurite Rock Man sent him a warning.
There was a group of big creatures below!
Jiang Ziliu immediately dropped flat on the ground, activated his SSS-grade Life Aura Concealment at full power, then carefully crawled onto a rock face and looked down.
Below was actually a herd of wild boar-type beasts!
A row of swordlike bone spikes grew along their spines, protecting them against large beasts pouncing from behind.
Their fur was also extremely sharp and tough, with a metallic sheen!
These were boar-type beasts called Sword-Spiked Golden-Furred Wild Boars.
They were also metal-attribute beasts, feeding on nuts, tender shoots, grass roots, and hard-shelled insects.
What they loved most was swallowing fine sand beside rivers.
Not only could this fine sand help them grind down hard-to-digest things in their stomachs, such as grass roots, nuts, and insect shells, it also allowed them to absorb the metallic elements in the river sand and add them to their fur, forming metal-attribute bristles.
Likewise, these metallic elements could also toughen their bones!
A magnet could draw large amounts of iron filings from sand, and it was this portion of the metal that these wild boars absorbed.
Despite being omnivores, they were hot-tempered, dangerous animals just like ordinary wild boars.
The leader of this herd of Sword-Spiked Golden-Furred Wild Boars was an enormous male nearly two and a half meters long, weighing at least one tonne, or even as much as two!
The swordlike bones on its back were longer and tougher, and blood-red traces still marked them.
Its fur was brighter and contained more metal.
Moreover, this creature's life level was very high. It was a life-form of at least five-star Black Iron rank!
Fierce as they were, this was the world of beasts.
As they chewed on river sand beside the valley stream, a pack of wolf-type beasts had already surrounded them without their noticing!
A great hunting battle between beasts was about to erupt!