After this small improvement, Jiang Ziliu prepared to continue his hunt.
After two months of adjustment, he had gradually figured out the habits of his opponents, the werewolves.
The werewolves had an extremely keen sense of smell!
They could detect unusual scents within twenty kilometers. This was their advantage as they ranged across the wilderness, allowing them to discover opponents and dangerous enemies in advance.
That was why a single squad with a flying beast dared to ride their wargs through the wilderness without restraint.
Ordinary beast tamers could not ambush them at all, because they would detect anyone who came close enough.
That made werewolves difficult to kill. The only option was to form a broad encirclement, wait for an opportunity to surround them, then wage a battle of annihilation.
But this method of frontal combat also required cooperation between large numbers of adventuring groups.
Only Jiang Ziliu's Life Aura Concealment skill could perfectly hide even his scent.
This alone made his single-handed slaughter of so many werewolves seem so extraordinary, and gradually earned him a reputation.
The werewolves rose by their sense of smell and fell by it too.
Later, some adventuring groups began scattering large quantities of chili powder, pepper, ammonia solution, and other pungent substances around battlefields, making the werewolves afraid to use their sense of smell. Only then did they achieve decent results.
After all, a keen sense of smell also meant extreme sensitivity to pungent odors.
If they truly fell for such a trick, they would suffer terribly unnatural discomfort for a long time, directly affecting their fighting strength.
Werewolves also liked to appear in hard, dry places. In areas with plenty of mud and marshland, their movements became cautious and slow.
After all, both werewolves and wargs were very heavy. One careless step could leave them trapped in a mire, unable to get out easily.
Another point was that the contracted beasts most suited to werewolves were generally wolf-type beasts.
The difficulty increased greatly when they tried to contract beasts of other species.
Although werewolves also had flying beasts, a Bronze Rank werewolf might only be able to contract a flying beast whose growth potential was at the early or middle stages of Gray Rock Grade.
They could not contract those with high potential at all.
Their flying forces therefore served mainly as aerial scouts, with very weak air combat capabilities.
When Jiang Ziliu first killed werewolves, that eagle beast had only possessed middle-stage Gray Rock strength and had been utterly unable to resist his aerial sniping.
After setting out this time, he chose a wetland as his ambush site.
This place was ill-suited to werewolves, but it was a location they had to scout for both offense and defense.
Werewolf scouts appeared here, and they were Jiang Ziliu's new targets.
Three days later, a group of werewolves cautiously explored this stretch of marsh and mud, searching for signs that human forces had passed through the area.
This werewolf squad had only five members.
The restrictions of the unusual terrain had forced them to reduce the size of each squad while increasing the number of squads.
It was the same old routine: a dagger flew into the sky and killed the flying beast overhead.
On the ground, a metal wire silently sliced off every werewolf's head.
The entire process flowed like drifting clouds and running water, clean and efficient, completing the sweep in the blink of an eye.
But this time, Jiang Ziliu did not immediately show himself. Soon, two squads of five werewolves swiftly approached, on high alert.
There were only ten of them in total. Although they were cautious, Jiang Ziliu still struck swiftly.
This time, he had brought three such metal wires. Combined with his practiced movements, they allowed him to kill a team of twenty werewolves in one go.
The metal wires slipped past without a sound, one on either side, swiftly shearing off the heads of five werewolves.
On the other side, another identical metal wire arrived in an instant, coiling like a snake around each werewolf's neck before tightening inward and cutting their heads clean off.
The ten newly arrived werewolves were also killed in an instant.
Only then did Jiang Ziliu swiftly emerge from nearby. He ran over, collected all the werewolf corpses and everything associated with them, then sat on the Mutated Lightning Snake's back and rose into the air, leaving the area.
Only bloodstains remained now, but even those would be cleaned away by the marsh's scavenging insects.
Not long after leaving, Jiang Ziliu landed on a hilltop.
He had not reached his safe house. Rather, he had detected an enemy.
Several thousand meters up in the sky, a Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle had been flying along while watching him.
Clearly, someone had their eye on him.
With the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle flying so high, he could only eliminate this scout if he flew up there himself.
But the Mutated Lightning Snake could currently fly no higher than a thousand meters, nowhere near the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle's altitude.
Clearly, the beast tamer controlling the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle was quite a cautious fellow.
Jiang Ziliu disappeared into the forest, completely escaping the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle's sight.
He quickly concealed himself, intending to see who had set their sights on him.
Someone was targeting him. One possibility was wealth; another was that they coveted his method of always succeeding.
Beastmen represented military merit and access to channels for exchanging it for even richer resources.
His gains alone surpassed those of many groups, naturally making it easy to attract covetous eyes.
He had originally planned to use the Zhang Feng identity for three months before changing it, but now it seemed that even three months was not safe.
After concealing himself here, Jiang Ziliu had the Azurite Rock Man quickly dig a small underground passage leading to another hilltop as a backup escape route.
He himself remained still. He wanted to see who was scheming against him.
Without learning about this enemy, he would not feel at ease even if he changed identities.
Jiang Ziliu's concealment in the forest forced the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle watching him from high above to descend.
But when it dropped to three hundred meters above the ground to scout, Jiang Ziliu controlled a short piece of metal wire, only ten centimeters long, to land on its back and hide between its feathers, where it waited quietly.
Since Jiang Ziliu had decided to meet the people behind this, he would not beat the grass and startle the snake.
Before long, a group of people riding Giant-Horned Wind Sheep rapidly approached the area.
There were over thirty of them in total, each with a Giant-Horned Wind Sheep mount. After arriving, they swiftly summoned their beasts and directly surrounded the forest where Jiang Ziliu was hiding.
At the sight of the red eye insignias on their clothes, Jiang Ziliu knew who they were.
The Blood Eye Adventure Group!
The Blood Eye Adventure Group was privately known as the Blood Eye Bandit Group!
On the surface, they were an adventuring group made up of beast tamers. In reality, they were bandits who delighted in slaughter and robbery.
The Blood Eye Adventure Group operated near several fourth-tier bases, including Base 12, and was the greatest malignant tumor in the area.
Yet they had never been dealt with, and even information about the Blood Eye Adventure Group was strictly controlled in every base.
Jiang Ziliu had only learned of this adventuring group's existence after purchasing some secret intelligence on the black market.
It was the black glove of certain higher-level lineages or powerful figures, specializing in handling matters they found inconvenient to handle themselves, or helping those upper-level powers dispose of illicit goods they could not openly sell.
One could say that the Blood Eye Adventure Group observed no taboos in this area and acted with extreme arrogance.
Jiang Ziliu understood that their targeting him very likely did not reflect the Blood Eye Adventure Group's own wishes. Instead, someone among the base's higher-ups had taken an interest in him and wanted to learn the secret behind his ability to silently hunt beastmen alone.
What they sought was military merit!
Only military merit could be exchanged for precious, high-grade, special resources unavailable through ordinary channels.
Military merit was the greatest hard currency at this stage.
At its core, their targeting him was still about gaining more military merit.
If his method of hunting beastmen could be used by everyone, these factions could leverage their numerical advantage to quickly accumulate vast amounts of military merit and obtain more precious resources.
After analyzing the situation, Jiang Ziliu no longer intended to show any courtesy.
He sent the Azurite Rock Man to the outermost perimeter to intercept and kill anyone who fled.
He intended to kill every member of the Blood Eye Adventure Group here!
After carefully thinking it through, Jiang Ziliu devised his combat strategy.
By now, there were already many flying beasts in the sky. Unlike beastmen with their innate limitations, human adventuring teams generally deployed more than three flying beasts.
Moreover, human adventuring groups placed greater emphasis on teamwork, and their flying beasts were generally powerful.
Besides the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle, the Blood Eye Adventure Group also had two flying beasts with powerful attacks: a Lightning Thunder Eagle and a Dark Blood Black Bat.
Their Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle was a three-star Black Iron Grade beast and was relatively weak.
But the Lightning Thunder Eagle and Dark Black Blood Bat were both Bronze Rank beasts, with the Lightning Thunder Eagle at three-star bronze and the Dark Black Blood Bat at five-star bronze.
The Lightning Thunder Eagle could launch skills that brought lightning down from high above. The Dark Black Blood Bat could disrupt an enemy's blood flow from the sky and use ultrasound for positioning, or even form sonic vibration attacks that caused unconsciousness.
The strength of these three flying beasts alone was already terrifying.
An ordinary beast tamer facing this situation would inevitably end in defeat.
Their formidable strength was also an important reason the Blood Eye Adventure Group had run rampant for so many years.
Besides the three strong flying beasts in the sky, on the ground they also had Black Iron Grade Earth-Burrowing Poison Scorpions, beasts with both earth and poison attributes; agile beasts such as nine-star black iron Gale Lions; speed-type nine-star ordinary Lightning Snakes; Nine-Star Black Iron Grade Hellfire Two-Headed Dogs; and strength-type beasts such as Nine-Star Black Iron Grade Earth Savage Bulls.
Added to these were their original Giant-Horned Mad Sheep and large numbers of ground-traveling beasts ranging from one-star to six-star black iron.
The Blood Eye Adventure Group's force that had come here was extremely powerful and comprehensive, covering the sky, land, and underground.
They had every type of attack skill, including speed, strength, and energy.
This formidable force formed a special encirclement around the forest where Jiang Ziliu was hiding.
But after figuring out their deployment, Jiang Ziliu still did not panic in the slightest.
Battles between beasts were terrifying, but in the path of beast taming, the beast tamers themselves remained a tremendous weakness.
Jiang Ziliu was very confident when it came to striking at beast tamers!