A month after Li Yan and his two companions left Jiaoming Prefecture, they encountered increasingly varied kinds of Wind Beasts as they continued flying north.
Many were creatures Li Yan had never even seen in the records. Unfamiliar with their methods of attack, he found them rather troublesome to handle.
Moreover, the places these Wind Beasts haunted were usually their own territories. They lived in packs, with a single population commonly occupying thirty to fifty thousand li.
Although called Wind Beasts, not every kind excelled in speed. Rather, they had been born from the "strange winds" generated beneath the Wind God Continent.
Some Wind Beasts moved slowly, their bodies covered in armor as solid as rock; some could travel through earth with astonishing speed, launching attacks that caught their victims completely unprepared; others came and went like the wind...
Along the way, they saw many towns destroyed by Wind Beast attacks. They even came across several cultivation sects whose entire grounds had been gnawed nearly flat.
Only the surviving stone tablets and buildings, along with the density of spiritual energy, revealed that cultivation sects had once stood there.
Ever since leaving Jiaoming Prefecture, Li Yan had been sitting cross-legged, studying the "Golden Bead Dragon-Subduing Art." More than ninety percent of the encounters with Wind Beasts had been handled by Qianji and Zi Kun, or the two simply piloted the "Cloud-Piercing Willow" swiftly past them.
After a month of painstaking study, Li Yan had indeed gained an unexpected surprise.
Not only had the eighteen prayer beads become much more powerful when he summoned them again, but he had even met little resistance when attempting to refine the tailbone of the "Sinking True Dragon" Demon Beast into one of the beads.
It was just that Li Yan currently had no quiet surroundings