After forming an encirclement, the beast tamers stayed well outside the forest, but sent beasts such as Lightning Snakes and Earth-Burrowing Poison Scorpions into it to search for Jiang Ziliu.
Jiang Ziliu did not move recklessly, but sent the Azurite Rock Man into action.
The Azurite Rock Man ran over. Its Rock and Earth Avatar directly controlled the rock and soil underground, squeezing the burrowing Earth-Burrowing Poison Scorpions into the rocks and leaving them unable to move.
When beasts contested one another with two skills of the same attribute, the beast with the higher-ranked skill had the advantage.
The Azurite Rock Man's Rock and Earth Avatar was an S- rank skill.
Although this skill had "Avatar" in its name, it was essentially a control skill that manipulated rock and soil.
By comparison, the Earth-Burrowing Poison Scorpions' ability merely let them burrow through the earth.
In this contest, the Earth-Burrowing Poison Scorpions suffered a complete defeat. The rocks controlled by the Azurite Rock Man crushed their flesh, killing them underground.
Three Earth-Burrowing Poison Scorpions appeared underground, but the Azurite Rock Man dealt with all of them extremely quickly.
Near the encirclement, three beast tamers immediately suffered backlash from their beasts' deaths.
They vomited great mouthfuls of blood, and their souls also suffered considerable damage!
This had originally been a good opportunity to finish them off, but Jiang Ziliu did not do so.
He had the Azurite Rock Man continue moving, using Rock and Earth Sneak Stab from underground to attack the three Lightning Snakes that had entered the forest with its blade.
These Lightning Snakes belonged to the same snake species as Jiang Ziliu's Mutated Lightning Snake.
Only, the Mutated Lightning Snake had undergone a mutation and had white jade-colored skin, while theirs was purplish-black.
The Azurite Rock Man succeeded again, killing one Lightning Snake.
Jiang Ziliu's Mutated Lightning Snake also moved out directly, intimidating the other Lightning Snakes' wills with the pressure of a higher-order life-form before charging forward and biting the remaining two to death through sheer physical strength.
At the same time, he had both beasts drag back the enemy beasts' corpses and put them into the spatial orb.
Leaving no corpses also left his opponents with no way to determine the details of Jiang Ziliu's beasts.
The effects that a beast's death had on the soul would also prevent the beast tamers suffering backlash from fully remembering the information their beasts had relayed.
Jiang Ziliu handled anything that might expose information about himself with great care, not even leaving corpses for the enemy.
He did not unleash his own powerful skills or those of his beasts. Instead, he sliced flesh with a soft knife, using the backlash from their beasts' deaths to continually cripple the enemy's strength.
Once a beast tamer suffered backlash, they could no longer command their other beasts effectively in battle.
These people's beasts had died outright, so the backlash was relatively severe.
Jiang Ziliu's parents had also told him about their situation. They had been relatively cautious at the time and recalled their beasts immediately after they were gravely wounded, so all their beasts had merely fallen asleep rather than dying outright.
The successive incidents made the Blood Eye Adventure Group realize their opponent was not easy to provoke, but also allowed them to confirm some information: the enemy was not particularly powerful, only very clever, making good use of the forest's advantages to launch ambushes.
They also obtained some information, such as Jiang Ziliu having at least one beast that could burrow underground and a snake beast that could fly.
The Blood Eye Adventure Group only knew that the Mutated Lightning Snake could fly, but had not determined what kind of beast it was.
After all, it was a mutated variety!
They became cautious, but also stopped worrying quite so much about Jiang Ziliu's terrifying means of killing.
Their assessment was exactly what Jiang Ziliu wanted.
During this process, Jiang Ziliu gradually completed his arrangements.
While his two beasts fought, he took over a hundred metal spikes out of the spatial orb. This B-grade metal allowed the spikes to pierce the defenses of Bronze Rank beasts; they were backup supplies he had prepared at great expense.
Jiang Ziliu made them advance slowly along the ground, gradually hiding a layer of them around these beast tamers, in the grass outside, and beyond their encirclement.
It could be said that he had laid these metal spikes in ambush at many key positions.
A leader had come with the Blood Eye Adventure Group this time. After discussing matters with his subordinates, he had originally intended to launch a fire attack by burning the forest.
But remembering the instruction in their orders to capture the target alive, they had no choice but to adopt an aerial assault approach.
The Blood Eye Adventure Group's beast tamers first prepared to send out the Dark Blood Black Bat to conduct an aerial search.
Only its ultrasonic ability could penetrate the forest and pinpoint their target's location, but the Dark Blood Black Bat would have to fly very low, making this dangerous.
Previously, doing so had been risky, but after weighing things up now, it had instead become a relatively good method.
Thus, the Dark Blood Black Bat moved out, with the Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle and Lightning Thunder Eagle providing cover in the air, and began searching the forest.
But just as it flew over the forest, two flashes of lightning streaked past. Jiang Ziliu and the Mutated Lightning Snake launched Electromagnetic Cannon attacks together.
Jiang Ziliu's shot blasted off the Dark Blood Black Bat's head.
The Mutated Lightning Snake's shot severed the Lightning Thunder Eagle's neck.
The last Wind-Piercing Blue-Feathered Eagle also died suddenly, and the Blood Eye Adventure Group never saw what had attacked it.
They did not know that Jiang Ziliu had used metal hidden among its feathers to pierce its heart directly.
Three kills in one wave-Jiang Ziliu had eliminated all the enemy's aerial beasts!
Another three beast tamers suffered severe injuries, temporarily losing their main fighting strength.
Even now, the Blood Eye Adventure Group had not figured out what kind of attack Jiang Ziliu had launched.
The Blood Eye Adventure Group only knew that this attack had something to do with lightning, and that it was fast and powerful!
Ordinary beast tamers paid little attention to scientific theory, and the Blood Eye Adventure Group's members were even more poorly educated, leaving them unable to recognize this as an Electromagnetic Cannon attack.
After their flying beasts were killed, the Blood Eye Adventure Group lost its aerial fighting strength.
But they still did not give up, because that kind of attack was difficult to launch within the forest and was only suited to fighting in open terrain.
They did not believe Jiang Ziliu had the ability to kill them. They merely judged him to be very clever, constantly targeting things that posed a greater danger to him.
The enemy was only one person, and his strength was not that great.
The Blood Eye Adventure Group therefore had no choice but to leave only one beast beside each beast tamer and send all the others into the forest in teams of three.
They intended to use their numerical advantage to suppress the mysterious fellow in the forest.
But what they did not know was that everything they were doing was exactly what Jiang Ziliu wanted!
Jiang Ziliu had now completed the development of a special derivative skill: Bioelectromagnetic Induction, based on Electromagnetic Manipulation.
This derivative ability allowed him to determine many aspects of a life-form, including its strength, location, and type.
It could be said that, by now, the entire battlefield was transparent to Jiang Ziliu.
Electromagnetic Manipulation, an ability that depended heavily on knowledge and learning, had been an enormous help to him!
It could be said that, developed to its present point, Electromagnetic Manipulation was already an all-round skill capable of forming subsidiary applications of several types, including attack, defense, and reconnaissance.
The beasts had all left their tamers' sides, giving Jiang Ziliu his opportunity.
Because the defenses around these beast tamers had now weakened to the extreme!
He sent the Azurite Rock Man to lie in ambush on the outermost perimeter.
Then the Mutated Lightning Snake guarded him while he deployed Electromagnetic Manipulation's metal-control ability.
There were only three beast tamers to the west of the forest.
Metal spikes suddenly rose behind them and pierced two of their necks directly.
But the third beast tamer's feedback skill was actually petrification.
He petrified his own body and blocked the metal spikes. They only shattered some of his bodily tissue, without piercing his neck.
Jiang Ziliu had already prepared for this.
The moment he petrified, a metal spike entered through his nostril and pierced his brain, which was still flesh and blood.
His petrification skill was not high-level. It could only petrify his skin and some of his bones, not fully petrify his internal organs.
The inside of this beast tamer's head was still flesh and blood.
The deaths of these three beast tamers directly caused five beasts in the forest to begin screaming and dying as well.
These were their beasts!
Jiang Ziliu paid no further attention to this side, immediately shifting his mental control to the northwest.
There were five beast tamers here, but they were scattered.
Thus, one after another, Jiang Ziliu used sudden attacks with the metal spikes to target the beast tamers themselves, swiftly killing four of them.
The last one actually had a special healer-type life-recovery skill. He quickly suppressed his injuries and began to flee.
But he did not know that Jiang Ziliu was paying him no attention at all.
Just as he was preparing to escape, the Mutated Lightning Snake launched an Electromagnetic Cannon shot from atop the tallest tree in the forest, blasting his body into fragments that could not even be pieced back together.
Jiang Ziliu carried out the group kills, while the Mutated Lightning Snake finished them off from afar!
Next, the five beast tamers on the western side were also dealt with instantly. This time, nothing unexpected happened.
South, southeast, north, northwest, northeast...
Direction by direction, Jiang Ziliu used his previously concealed metal spikes to carry out close-range group kills targeting the relatively weak beast tamers.
The leader of this Blood Eye Adventure Group force, however, was directly to the east.
As streaks of lightning and the screams of beasts kept coming from the other directions, they sensed something was wrong, but their subordinates died too quickly to relay any useful information.
Still, this made the leader of this force sense tremendous danger.
But by the time he reacted, everyone in their party had been killed except the few around him.
For Jiang Ziliu, it did not matter if a trick was old, as long as it was reliable and could deal with his opponents safely and effectively.
Although he was confident in a head-on confrontation with those beasts, exposing detailed information about himself would have been inevitable, and it would also have allowed some enemies to slip through the net and escape.
Holding the beasts up while targeting their tamers was an effective way to fight.
His earlier series of actions had been intended to make his opponents judge the forest dangerous, making their beasts cautious and slow within it, thereby buying him time to slaughter these beast tamers directly.
In clashes between beast tamers, skills and strength were important, but strategy and control over the tempo of battle were equally important.
Had he not first dealt with the aerial and underground forces, this move would have put him in great danger!
Jiang Ziliu attacked the final wave of enemies in the east.
There were eight beast tamers here, but Jiang Ziliu killed only four in one go, because the other four actually had defensive abilities similar to Metal Avatar, allowing them to turn their bodies into metal and giving them powerful survival capabilities.
One of them was also a genuine healer-type beast tamer.
How could these four beast tamers fail to realize they had fallen into their opponent's scheme? They immediately began to flee.
But the Mutated Lightning Snake immediately launched ranged strikes, first shattering the healer-type beast tamer's body.
Then it killed another two!
Even Metal Avatar could not withstand the terrifying power of an Electromagnetic Cannon attack.
The final leader could actually turn himself temporarily into a slender snake, moving at tremendous speed in wide S-shaped maneuvers close to the grass to evade Jiang Ziliu's metal spike attacks and the Mutated Lightning Snake's electromagnetic strikes.
Had Jiang Ziliu not made his arrangements earlier, he would already have escaped.
But in the next instant, he fell straight into a pit. This was a hollow trap the Azurite Rock Man had created in his path, burying him directly before the rock and soil squeezed hard in an instant, crushing him into bloody pulp!
With that, every member of the Blood Eye Adventure Group besieging Jiang Ziliu had perished!
Only now did Jiang Ziliu let out a long sigh of relief.
A powerful adventure party of over thirty beast tamers, combining Black Iron and Bronze Rank strength, had been annihilated instead through his absolute advantage in controlling the tempo.
Throughout the process, he had expended an enormous amount of soul power.
After this battle, not only was he mentally exhausted to the extreme, but his Dark Energy had also completely bottomed out.
After this battle, he would need at least three days to recover.
Jiang Ziliu's gains in battle were enormous; this single strike was equivalent to wiping out a small-to-medium-sized beast tamer faction.
But he did not relax completely. He immediately sent the Mutated Lightning Snake and the Azurite Rock Man out to drag back the enemies' corpses and every item nearby that might belong to humans.
Jiang Ziliu knew about the Blood Eye Adventure Group. They numbered around a hundred, and even had some hidden beast tamers.
His achievement seemed enormous, wiping out over thirty of them in one go, but this was still less than a third of their strength.
Moreover, the enemy had only deployed Initial-Stage Bronze Rank strength this time. Next time, they might send middle- or late-stage Bronze Rank fighting forces, or even Silver Rank ones.
Jiang Ziliu would not naively believe that a bandit group capable of making every base keep its mouth shut had no Silver Rank strength.
He stuffed all these corpses and items into the spatial orb, preparing to move to a concealed location to deal with them.
The reason was that he wanted to erase every trace as thoroughly as possible, leaving the Blood Eye Adventure Group unable to find any information he had left behind, or even determine where the battlefield had been.
After putting everything away, Jiang Ziliu destructively worked over all the ground and retrieved every single metal spike he had released.
At the same time, he used a highly volatile chemical to mask the smells here, making it difficult for the enemy to pinpoint this place through scent.
He checked the weather. It might rain within the next two days.
Once it rained, the downpour would cover everything. Besides, this area was very close to the beastman battlefield, and the movements of those werewolves might also provide concealment.
Only after everything was finished did Jiang Ziliu sit on the Mutated Lightning Snake's back and leave this place far behind.