Azure Yang Qi

"I'm already 28. I'm basically nearing retirement age."

"When athletes like me retire, we basically end up like Uncle Chen, Hu Jun, Li Guohua, and the others. We spend every day at the club, teaching students day after day, year after year."

"I've lived that kind of life for more than ten years, and I don't want to continue. I told my parents what I was thinking."

"Only then did they stop trying to keep me from taking part."

The Avatar offered no comment on her thoughts.

Instead, he answered her earlier question.

"If you want to know how I trained my archery, you can join our exploration team after this expedition. If you can convince your parents, that is."

Mo Yuemei's eyes lit up at the Avatar's invitation, but then she grew dejected and a little uncertain.

She merely said, in a flat voice:

"Thank you for saving me earlier, Captain."

The Avatar simply grunted in acknowledgment and continued forward in silence.

After following the traces of the monkeys' retreat for twenty minutes, they gradually began to hear scattered monkey calls carried on the increasingly fierce wind.

The two walked out of the tall, deep forest toward the bright world ahead.

As they stepped out of the forest, a massive sinkhole came into view. In the sheer cliff on the opposite side was a huge cave, big enough to hold a basketball court.

Outside the cave, more than a dozen vines hung down from the top of the cliff like a crude curtain.

Dozens of monkeys of all sizes, old and thin, were busy inside. The white-furred monkey king lay on a bed of white stone, enjoying the various foods the other monkeys offered him.

The monkey king's guard monkeys held objects that looked like whips and drove the troop to work on branches gathered from who knew where. They were "taking their sweet time" and appeared to be making "spears."

Both the Avatar and Mo Yuemei looked grave at the sight. If the monkeys were allowed to prepare their weapons and caught up to attack them, the exploration team might really suffer casualties and be forced to call off the expedition.

After warning Mo Yuemei not to act rashly, the Avatar took out his binoculars and carefully examined the cave for any obvious signs of damage from a meteorite.

He found no signs of damage, but behind the monkey king, he spotted several smaller black stones with a metallic sheen.

He increased the binoculars' magnification. Faint patterns flowed across the stones' surfaces; they were Class Change Stones that had yet to be used.

He carefully studied the number of monkeys and the monkey king's size. The monkey was already as large as an adult human. It was definitely a mutated creature. The guard monkeys were somewhat stronger than ordinary ones, but they still fell a little short of being mutated creatures.

One or two comparatively strong monkeys could be explained by an abundance of food or stronger genes.

But the four here, together with the two that had been shot dead, made six monkey guards, which was somewhat unusual. The other ordinary monkeys' hands and feet were also more nimble than those of the monkeys he had seen in zoos before.

Perhaps the feng shui aura here can slowly improve the physical constitution of the creatures living here, Wang An thought.

For now, though, the most pressing matter was to kill the monkey king and obtain those Class Change Stones.

The Avatar instructed Mo Yuemei, "If any monkeys attack us, shoot back."

Happy to have a task of her own, she raised the compound bow in her hand, indicating that the captain could leave it to her without worry.

The Avatar took out his compound bow, nocked an arrow, and aimed. He activated the skill [Precision], and the instinct it granted him guided him into the position best suited to the target amid the air currents rushing out of the sinkhole. Once in position, he pressed the release aid.

The arrow flew without a sound.

It struck the monkey king squarely in the forehead, killing him on the spot.

The other monkeys were still somewhat puzzled by what had happened, until one of them spotted the Avatar shooting from the opposite side.

Remembering the monkeys that had been killed, they looked terrified and fled deeper into the cave. In less than two minutes, not a monkey was left in sight.

Beside him, Mo Yuemei had yet to recover from her shock.

They were on the opposite side of the cave, with a sinkhole between them. The air currents created by the hollow severely disrupted arrows. Even standing where they were, they could feel the fierce currents surging up from the bottom of the sinkhole.

Yet amid such severe interference, the captain had shot the monkey king directly in the head with a single arrow from forty or fifty meters away. At that distance, with that precision and that ability to calculate the interference, calling him a divine archer would be no exaggeration.

While she was still stunned, the Avatar had already made his way to the other side. He secured a rope and descended into the cave. A glance around showed him that the place was a mess. The smell of monkey excrement and urine hung in the air, mixed with a faint scent of blood.

He walked over to the stone bed and pushed the monkey king's corpse aside. He found four Class Change Stones in all, three of them unused.

The Avatar was a little surprised that the monkey had collected so many. He quickly stowed them in his backpack, then transferred them from the backpack into his space.

Mo Yuemei remembered her task and looked around again, but she couldn't see a single monkey. A little disappointed, she searched everywhere for any that had slipped through the net or were bold enough to show themselves.

After putting the meteorite stones away, the Avatar used his Qi Observation talent to survey the entire sinkhole and the changes in the qi of heaven and earth within the cave.

At the bottom of the pit, gray earth-vein qi mingled with transparent water qi and surged out of the sinkhole. For some reason, the clear qi from the surroundings was drawn in, pouring into the sinkhole along with the yang qi from high above.

The cave, however, was like a place where a river circled back on itself. The two kinds of qi gathered inside it, gradually giving rise to a wisp of azure yang qi.

The Avatar discovered that this qi was very compatible with the human body-or perhaps not just the human body, but living creatures in general. Those unusual monkeys might have grown stronger through constant exposure to it.

Behind a large rock, he used the [Qi Gathering] skill to draw that wisp of azure yang qi into his body.

Once the wisp of azure yang qi entered his dantian, it slowly sank beneath his true qi and settled above the lake of essence qi, like a rising sun.

It had both the nourishing moisture of clear qi and the warmth of yang qi.

After gathering the qi, the Avatar began recording the geographical information of the entire sinkhole one detail at a time, including its various landforms and the cave's location, size, and shape. He provided it to his original body for feng shui research.

After climbing up the cliff, Mo Yuemei looked at the bow and arrows in the captain's hands and recalled the archery that had killed with a single shot. Her gaze gradually grew resolute, and her grip on her compound bow tightened again and again without her realizing it.

The Avatar glanced at Mo Yuemei and said only one thing.

"Let's go."

Back at camp, Mo Yuemei excitedly shared what she had seen and heard.

Hearing her account, Hu Jun and Li Guohua shook their heads repeatedly, saying it was impossible.

Chen Zhenhua was half convinced and half doubtful as he looked at the arrow in the captain's quiver, still marked with spots of blood.

He had seen how quickly Wang An's original body learned, and he also thought the captain was Wang An's junior apprentice brother. It really was possible that he possessed such godlike archery.

Mo Yuemei said to Liu Tingquan with some regret, "It's a shame we didn't bring your camera to capture that moment."

Hearing could be false; seeing was believing.