Jiang Ziliu had the Azurite Rock Man scout the terrain ahead underground, while he cautiously walked through the wilderness beneath the night sky with a pack on his back.
His backpack was heavy, as though something was inside.
Advancing a step and peering around each time, Jiang Ziliu proceeded with great caution, seemingly terrified that someone nearby might notice him.
From time to time, he even hid in the grass to observe his surroundings!
Jiang Ziliu looked exactly like an inexperienced lone traveler who had obtained a treasure and was desperately nervous.
This was precisely what the fat man on a nearby hill saw.
Seeing Jiang Ziliu behave this way, the fat man of the duo grew cautious rather than excited.
As a seasoned adventurer who braved danger, with broad experience and knowledge, how could he fail to understand one particular principle?
The finest hunters often appeared in the guise of prey!
In fact, the two cousins often did this themselves.
Anyone with a little brains and knowledge could use such a fishing tactic.
Seeing Jiang Ziliu now, the fat man was certain that he had something to do with the Thunder Sparrows' riot. He was the fellow who had taken their treasure.
However, Jiang Ziliu wore a hood over his face, making it impossible to see what he looked like.
Moreover, though his movements were well acted, they still showed traces of deliberate effort, allowing the experienced fat man to notice something amiss.
Adventurers who had truly obtained treasures would not display that hint of exaggeration Jiang Ziliu showed through the fat man's night-vision binoculars.
The fat man frequently robbed people and knew very well how someone carrying a precious treasure truly behaved.
What Jiang Ziliu did not know was that he had still underestimated the people lying in ambush for him!
These adventurers who survived in the wild and dared to rob others all made their living with their lives balanced on a knife's edge.
When it came to their own lives, none of them dared to be anything but cautious!
They dared not be careless on any operation.
After all, none of the adventurers in the wilderness were simple. They all had tamed beasts and supernatural powers.
Every tamed beast had different skills.
Even tamed beasts of the same species might develop different skills due to factors such as mutation and evolution.
And the skills beast tamers had obtained through feedback were their most closely guarded secrets.
You could never know what strange, bizarre, or uncanny skills the beast tamer before you possessed!
Even the most ordinary gray rock grade beast tamer might take the life of another powerful beast tamer if their skills were sufficiently unusual.
Greedy, yet cautious and cunning-these were the defining traits of veteran wilderness bandits.
The fat man was no exception. The moment he saw Jiang Ziliu's performance of "carrying a precious treasure," he knew this fellow was fishing!
He might look like prey, but he could become a hunter the very next second.
The fat man's tamed beast, the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle, could see extremely far from high in the sky and sense the life levels of creatures on the ground.
After all, eagle-type exotic beasts swooped down from the sky to hunt. If they could not determine their prey's level, and only discovered after diving toward what they thought was food that it was a vicious predator, would that not end in tragedy?
Thus, through the long process of evolutionary selection, most carnivorous aerial exotic beasts had developed the ability to accurately sense other creatures' life signatures.
His Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle told him that the fellow below was only three-star gray rock grade!
Yet the fat man still felt something was wrong.
Without some confidence to rely on, how would this fellow, who was clearly acting, dare consider himself the hunter?
In the real wilderness, the roles of hunter and prey often reversed in an instant.
Clearly, their original target had such confidence.
"Younger cousin! Something's wrong! Don't come out yet! This fellow might well be waiting for us to show ourselves!"
The fat man could not figure it out, but he immediately contacted his skinny younger cousin over the radio and told him not to act rashly.
His little eyes darted around as he wondered what to do.
Should he rob the treasure and put it in his own pocket? Or handle this cautiously and sell information about the brat?
Without question, the latter was the safer choice for the cousins, but it could easily cost them a major opportunity!
While the fat man considered what to do.
Jiang Ziliu had already reached the safe exit area of this region.
At that very moment, Jiang Ziliu's tamed beast, the Azurite Rock Man, had locked onto the skinny man's position and discovered where the ambusher was hiding.
The fat man was now considering a possibility: perhaps his younger cousin had already been exposed.
The thought made his heart tighten, but when another thought arose, he did not pass this information on to his younger cousin.
The fat man had never told anyone that, when receiving skill feedback from his contracted Shadow Cat, he had not selected the shadow-type skills people usually chose. Instead, he had chosen a special skill called Wilderness Intuition.
It made his intuition extraordinarily keen, allowing him to perceive certain unseen dangers.
His intuition told him that not giving his younger cousin any further warning was the best choice!
So the fat man lay there, waiting to see what Jiang Ziliu would do.
Would he pass straight through, or attack his younger cousin?
To his surprise, however, Jiang Ziliu did not attack immediately. Instead, he chose to pass through the area as though he had not discovered the skinny man's ambush at all.
"Older cousin, did you get it wrong? Is this fellow doing this deliberately to make us wary? Should I follow him now and finish him off?"
After a while, his skinny younger cousin began to lose patience.
He felt that Jiang Ziliu did not seem to be acting to lure them in. After all, his powers of observation and intelligence were still inferior to his fat older cousin's.
"All right! Go take a look!"
The fat man's Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle watched Jiang Ziliu's movements and saw that he continued onward in the same manner as before.
Did I get it wrong? Is this man really just a rookie adventurer?
The thought could not help surfacing in his mind.
"Moo-"
"Rrroow-"
Suddenly, the agonized cries of the Earth Savage Bull and Wind-Thunder Leopard rang throughout the wilderness, then swiftly fell silent.
The fat man's heart jolted. He recognized those sounds-tamed beasts only made them when they were dying rapidly.
Only one situation could make tamed beasts scream so terribly.
Their beast tamer had died, causing the tamed beasts outside the Beast-Taming Space to die along with him.
If tamed beasts died inside the Beast-Taming Space, they would make no sound at all, merely turning to dust as the Beast-Taming Space collapsed!
His younger cousin had actually died so quickly!
This fellow suspected of carrying a precious treasure truly was a terrifying hunter disguised as prey.
The fat man had no time to think further and immediately recalled his Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle.
The Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle was immensely strong. As it swooped down, the fat man sprang nimbly onto its back, having his tamed beast carry him away.
His reaction was certainly quick!
The fat man was heavy, but the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle was an exotic beast, after all, and could readily carry him away in flight.
But the next moment, the fat man's intuition sensed a terrible danger, and he immediately had the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle change direction in midair.
A piercing shriek exploded beside him.
Immediately afterward, the fat man let out an agonized scream. One of his arms was blasted apart at the shoulder, and the mangled limb fell from the sky.
But the fat man possessed an exceptionally tenacious will. Enduring the excruciating pain, he had the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle fly swiftly forward.
Throughout this process, the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle kept changing its trajectory under his direction.
The fat man escaped!
He knew that the mysterious, powerful strike had been aimed at his Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle. But because he had made his tamed beast change course in time, the strike had hit his arm instead of blasting his eagle apart.
Far from being angry about this, the fat man felt extremely fortunate.
Had the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle died, he would certainly have fallen. Even if the fall did not kill him, that mysterious fellow deliberately posing as prey would have finished him off!
That strike had been far too fast, far too terrifying!
Elsewhere, Jiang Ziliu, who had already traveled a considerable distance, learned through his connection with the Mutated Lightning Snake that the surprise attack had failed.
He could not help sighing, feeling that he had underestimated these adventurers who fought for their lives in the wilderness.
Originally, he had intended to fight a life-and-death battle of tamed beasts against the ambushers.
But when he passed through while pretending to be prey, the ambusher actually refrained from attacking. Jiang Ziliu therefore understood that the other party might have seen through his disguise and adopted a cautious approach.
Jiang Ziliu changed his response.
He sent the Mutated Lightning Snake to the highest peak in sight to search for the other ambusher's position and kill him with the Electromagnetic Cannon.
He had placed an iron pellet in the Mutated Lightning Snake's mouth so it could launch an attack in Electromagnetic Cannon mode at any time.
But the fat man was unlucky. He had sent his Shadow Cat out to follow three hundred meters behind Jiang Ziliu, monitoring him from the ground.
He did not have a single tamed beast beside him.
Thus, even when the Mutated Lightning Snake crept close to him, the fat man failed to notice.
Though the fat man's intuition was formidable, it had certain limitations. While intuitively sensing one matter, it could not sense another kind of danger.
At the time, the fat man's intuition was sensing the situation around Jiang Ziliu.
The Mutated Lightning Snake could now use Electromagnetic Manipulation to produce a natural sensitivity to biological magnetic fields.
With this, it easily found the fat man.
However, this ability of the Mutated Lightning Snake fell under its Electromagnetic Manipulation skill.
Even Jiang Ziliu himself did not know that Electromagnetic Manipulation had such an application, much less that the Mutated Lightning Snake possessed this natural searching instinct.
The fat man was relatively lucky. His skinny younger cousin died before him, and the deaths of his cousin's tamed beasts gave him a warning.
He therefore reacted and swiftly fled on his eagle!
Only because of this did the fat man preserve his life despite losing an arm.
Had the Mutated Lightning Snake not been limited to carrying one iron pellet at a time, leaving it unable to fire a second shot, he would certainly have died.
His skinny younger cousin's death, however, was no accident.
That, too, had been Jiang Ziliu's doing. Before coming, he had prepared a bottle of tiny, highly venomous centipedes as a special fallback.
This time, the Azurite Rock Man had quietly approached the skinny man and released the bottle's tiny, highly venomous centipedes.
The skinny man had the Earth Savage Bull and Wind-Thunder Leopard beside him.
The Wind-Thunder Leopard had a keen sense of danger, so Jiang Ziliu had not ordered the Azurite Rock Man to attack directly from beneath the skinny man. Instead, he had released the venomous insects.
These venomous centipedes were particularly aggressive toward humans.
Sensing the skinny man's presence, they crawled toward him.
As a result, while the skinny man focused solely on Jiang Ziliu, one of these centipedes crawled onto his hand and bit him, poisoning him with a venom that killed once it entered the blood.
The moment the centipede injected its venom beneath his skin, his swift death was assured.
These centipedes had very weak life signatures and did not trigger the Wind-Thunder Leopard's sense of danger. Thus, his skinny younger cousin received no warning and fell victim in one go!
Jiang Ziliu's intelligence and caution allowed him to kill one ambusher.
The fat man's cunning and experience also allowed him to escape Jiang Ziliu with his life.
In the contest between ambushers and counter-ambusher, Jiang Ziliu held a slight advantage!
Having failed to achieve complete success, Jiang Ziliu left regretfully without searching for his spoils.
Not long after leaving the area, he finally threw away the contents of his backpack. It turned out to contain nothing but a pile of rotten wood fragments.
He had had the Azurite Rock Man hide the Lightning Treasure Peach in the safe house he had previously excavated and had never carried it with him at all!
Both sides had concealed moves, but Jiang Ziliu proved more cautious!
The next day, he returned through the north gate on another side of the base.
This time, however, he was searched by several powerful bronze rank beast tamers.
The reason they gave was that they were searching for a wilderness bandit.
Anyone could see that these people were merely using the search for a bandit as a pretext to achieve their own ends.
They must have received word that someone had obtained a treasure in the wilderness and wanted to intercept it here.
Jiang Ziliu understood that the fat man who had escaped had sold information about him very quickly!
But he let these powerful figures inspect him, even displaying considerable displeasure, and ultimately returned successfully to Base No. 12!