A sword cleaved down.
The Black Jade Heavy Sword struck an old tree growing sideways, without the clang of metal or the explosive roar of battle qi. The 3,600-jin blade simply bore down heavily. The bark caved inward first, followed by the groan of wood unable to bear the weight. The trunk, thick enough to take two people to encircle, shuddered violently, and layers of wood chips burst from beneath the sword.
Linley turned his wrist, changing the heavy sword's downward cleave into an upward sweep.
The tip skimmed the break, forcibly tearing through the last layer of wood fibers still holding it together. The enormous tree slowly tilted, crushed several smaller trees nearby, and finally crashed into the forest, startling a flock of gray-feathered birds in the distance.
He did not look at the fallen tree, only at his right hand gripping the sword.
"I still can't comprehend 'imposing force.'"
His low voice fell into the mountain forest and was soon scattered by the wind.
In the past, an elderly voice would always speak beside him at times like this. Sometimes it praised his steady progress; sometimes it bluntly pointed out that he had exerted force through his waist and abdomen too early. If the argument turned to Earth Element magic and the warrior's path, the white-haired old man would even bristle with anger, insisting that Linley admit Earth Element magic was the strongest means of walking the earth.
Now there was nothing.
Only the wood chips shaken onto the blade slid down its black jade surface.
Linley slid Edgeless back into the half-length sheath on his back, his left hand unconsciously moving to his chest. His fingertips first touched a cold black ring, paused for a moment, then shifted to the sheath's strap and tightened it again.
"Boss, you've already swung your sword over a thousand times today." Bebe crouched on a moss-covered rock, his tail hanging behind him. "Keep chopping, and the trees around here are going to suffer."
Linley glanced at the sky.
The canopy obscured most of it, letting only a little dim yellow light through the branches and leaves. Late autumn came to the Mountain Range of Magical Beasts earlier than to human towns. Damp wind passed through the woods, carrying the mingled smells of rotting leaves, soil, and magical beast droppings.
"It's not evening yet," he said.
Bebe rolled his eyes. "I knew you'd say that."
Linley bent down, picked up a dead branch, and scratched two lines into the exposed surface of the broken trunk. The first marked where Edgeless had actually struck. The second lay off to one side, where he had originally intended his power to erupt in full.
The difference was less than half a finger's width.
In the past, Grandpa Doehring probably would have made him practice another hundred times, until that half-finger discrepancy disappeared. Linley stared at the two scratches for a while, brushed away the wood chips, and turned toward the forest.
"That's enough for today."
Bebe immediately leaped onto his shoulder, a little smugness entering his Soul Transmission. "I thought you really were going to practice until dark. Boss, there's a kind of silver-tailed fish in the stream to the north. Grilled, it's much more tender than velocidragon meat."
"We're going east first."
"East?" Bebe froze. "That Azure-Backed Savage Ape?"
Linley nodded.
Two hours earlier, they had discovered a fresh trail of footprints nearby. The prints were broader than a human chest and sank nearly half a foot into the soft, damp earth. Along the way, many branches had been torn off high above the ground. Sap still seeped from the breaks, while a pungent, rank smell lingered on nearby rocks.
Those were territorial markings left by a Level Nine Magical Beast, an Azure-Backed Savage Ape.
Linley had no intention of hunting it. With his current strength, his human form could fight an ordinary level eight magical beast head-on, but a Level Nine Magical Beast was still far beyond him. Bebe had already reached level nine, and together they might have a fighting chance, but taking such a risk for a Magic Crystal Core was meaningless.
He only wanted to follow it.
Without alerting it, he wanted to see how far he could follow and when he would be detected. The Mountain Range of Magical Beasts would not arrange a perfectly even battle for him. Judging when to advance and when to retreat was itself part of training.
Bebe muttered through their souls, "Following a bad-tempered Level Nine Magical Beast is worse than catching fish."
Despite his words, he still leaped down from Linley's shoulder. His small black figure flashed through the shrubs and landed silently more than ten meters away.
Linley stepped barefoot over the thick layer of rotting leaves.
His upper body was bare, and he wore only a pair of linen trousers damaged by several Dragonform transformations. Nearly a year of exposure to wind and sun had stripped his skin of the fairness nurtured in a noble estate, giving it a healthy dark tone. His once-neat short hair now hung to his shoulders, and a beard had begun sprouting along his jaw.
As his soles pressed against the earth, faint vibrations traveled up through his leg bones. Somewhere, a small animal burrowed through rotting leaves; elsewhere, a stream washed through gaps in the rocks. Farther away, heavy, rhythmic tremors were moving southeast.
Linley did not cast Wind of Perception.
The magical fluctuations might alert the Azure-Backed Savage Ape. He softened his breathing and advanced when the mountain wind stirred the branches and leaves, setting down each foot when the wind was loudest. When he encountered thorns, he went around them, never swinging his sword to clear a path.
Grandpa Doehring had taught him all these rules.
Leave no unnecessary traces in the mountains. Do not light fires at night. Check the wind direction first when you smell fresh blood. Be more wary of overly friendly people than of magical beasts.
A year ago, he needed only to hear a reminder to know what to do next.
Now every rule remained, but the person who reminded him was gone.
"Boss." Bebe's voice suddenly came from deep within his soul. "Up ahead."
Linley stopped.
More than thirty meters away, a tuft of gray-brown fur hung on rough bark. The hairs were as thick as steel needles, their ends stained with blood that had yet to dry. Several broken pieces of bony armor lay scattered beneath the tree, and a large amount of blood had soaked the mud dark red.
The Azure-Backed Savage Ape had just killed a level eight Armored-Back Dragon.
But there was no corpse anywhere nearby.
Linley crouched and picked up a small piece of broken armor between two fingers. The fracture was fresh, and the blood was still warm. Given the Azure-Backed Savage Ape's size, it could not possibly have eaten so cleanly, much less left no trace of dragging the corpse away.
Bebe twitched his nose. "That big fellow's injured. Its scent is in the blood."
Linley had seen it too.
A piece of azure hide lay at the edge of the pool of blood, bearing three claw marks deep enough to expose bone. The Azure-Backed Savage Ape had not emerged unscathed from its fight with the Armored-Back Dragon, and judging by the amount of blood, its injuries were by no means minor.
"Still following?" Bebe asked.
Linley did not answer immediately.
An injured Level Nine Magical Beast was more dangerous than one in its normal state. It would become vigilant and irritable, and might regard anyone approaching as an enemy trying to seize its territory. Yet precisely because it was injured, the traces it left would be clearer, making them better suited to testing tracking and concealment.
He raised his head and looked southeast.
The trees there were sparser than those around them, and the ground gradually sloped downward, resembling a long, narrow valley squeezed out between the mountains. The Azure-Backed Savage Ape's heavy footprints extended into it, with occasional drops of blood visible on the rocks.
"Another three li," Linley said. "If it stops, we retreat immediately."
Bebe did not object. He merely leaped onto the treetops ahead to scout the way first.
The two continued onward.
One li.
Two li.
The sounds of the mountain forest gradually dwindled.
At first, they could still hear birdsong and the flutter of insect wings. Later, even the small animals crawling beneath the fallen leaves disappeared. Yet the traces left by the Azure-Backed Savage Ape grew increasingly erratic. Its footprints veered left and right, and several ancient trees had even been snapped in half by collisions. The Level Nine Magical Beast seemed less like it was returning to its lair than fleeing something.
Linley stopped for the third time.
He looked at the muddy ground ahead.
There were only the Azure-Backed Savage Ape's footprints going in, with no sign of it coming out.
"Bebe, come back."
The black shadow immediately dropped from the canopy.
Bebe did not complain as he usually did. As a Level Nine Magical Beast, he was far more sensitive than humans to the auras of powerful members of his kind. There was no obvious pressure ahead, nor even the rank scent left by magical beasts, but that unnaturally clean silence instead made the fur on his back rise slightly.
"Boss, something's wrong here."
"This is a Saint-level magical beast's territory."
Linley spoke very slowly.
Grandpa Doehring had once told him that, in the central region of the Mountain Range of Magical Beasts, if there was not a single magical beast for dozens of li, it often meant not that the area was barren, but that a more terrifying existence forbade other creatures from approaching.
After being injured, the Azure-Backed Savage Ape had fled blindly into this ecological void.
Linley swiftly retreated without the slightest hesitation.
Just then, a muffled sound came from afar.
It did not sound like a magical beast's roar, but more like a mountain that had slept for years splitting open from within. The ground first trembled gently. Immediately afterward, a powerful vibration raced through the rock strata.
Rumble...
Large swaths of rotting leaves jumped, and the soil around the roots of ancient trees cracked one patch after another. The ground beneath Linley's feet sank. A stretch of earth dozens of zhang long collapsed in its entirety along an old fissure.
"Bebe!"
The black figure lunged toward Linley before falling. Linley reached out and sheltered him against his chest, drawing Edgeless with his other hand and driving the heavy sword hard into the slanting rock wall.
The sword tip struck rock, sending sparks flying.
At that moment, its weight of 3,600 jin became a burden instead. The blade tore through the rock wall's surface, but Edgeless failed to catch, and Linley continued falling with his sword. A boulder hurtled down from above. He twisted in midair, poured battle qi into both arms, and swept his sword horizontally.
Bang!
The boulder shattered, and small fragments grazed his shoulders and back like a torrential rain.
The fall continued for more than ten breaths.
Linley repeatedly thrust the heavy sword against the rock walls on either side, finally shedding most of his momentum as he neared the bottom. He landed on both feet and bent his knees, the black rock beneath him cracking with a crash. Broken stones and dirt poured down from above, soon sealing off the way they had come.
Darkness swallowed everything.
Linley did not move. Only after confirming that Bebe's breathing was fine did he release him.
"I'm fine," Bebe immediately transmitted. "Boss, your shoulder's bleeding."
"Just a scratch."
Linley took an old shirt from his interspatial ring. Instead of putting it on, he tore off a strip of cloth and bound the wound tightly. As the cloth returned to the ring, his fingertips touched a small object wrapped in layers of linen.
It was a fragment of a stone sculpture.
Many years ago, when he had first tried the Flat Blade Style, even the features of the face he carved had been out of proportion. Grandpa Doehring had laughed for a long time after seeing it, then finally told him to smash the failure and start again.
He had indeed smashed it.
But he had kept the smallest fragment.
Linley's fingers lingered on the cloth bundle for a moment. Then he was about to cast fire magic, but immediately abandoned the idea and took out several illumination stones instead.
Soft white light shone.
What lay before them was no ordinary cavern.
They had landed in an astonishingly wide underground fault. The rock walls on either side were almost pure black, streaked with dark golden mineral veins. Farther away, enormous, ghastly white bones were embedded in the stone walls. Some had already fused with the mineral strata, while others jutted diagonally from the rock. A single section of rib was more than ten meters long.
Bebe raised his head and said nothing for a long while.
Linley gripped Edgeless, his gaze following the bones into the depths.
There lay a pitch-black scale the size of a palm, its edges retaining an extremely faint dark golden sheen. Below it, the Azure-Backed Savage Ape's corpse lay prone on the ground, its head lowered and its body bearing no torn wounds, as though simply walking here had robbed it of all strength to resist.
Yet the rock ahead of it was empty.
There were no footprints, no lair, and no living creatures.
Linley slowly took a step backward.
An exceedingly faint crunch came from beneath his foot.
The sound traveled far through the empty cavern.
The next instant, deep in the darkness studded with dragon bones, a golden-brown eye with a vertical pupil lit up.
An invisible weight descended. Linley felt Edgeless on his back suddenly grow several times heavier, and his feet instantly sank into the rock. Bebe lowered his body, sharp claws springing from his paw pads as he stared fixedly at the approaching eye.
Rock slowly scraped against rock.
A voice so deep it seemed to come from far beneath the earth echoed throughout the fault.
"Leave this place or die!"