The forest was silent, save for the wet, gurgling sound of a blade carving through flesh.
Kai knelt over the massive carcass of the Iron-Hide Boar, his black-iron dagger working quickly. The beast's neck was already a ruin of crushed bone and severed arteries, making the work gruesome, but Kai didn't flinch.
'Heart... under the fourth rib plate,' Kai recalled from Su Qing's anatomical notes.
He wedged the dagger into the gap of the rocky hide and twisted. With a wet shlck, he pried the ribcage open just enough to reach in. His hand, coated in warm blood, groped around until his fingers brushed against something hard and warm, pulsating with a faint, rhythmic energy.
He pulled it out.
It was a Beast Core.
It was small, barely the size of a river pebble, and jagged in shape. It glowed with a dim, muddy yellow light—the color of the earth element. It was ugly compared to the refined Spirit Stones in his ring, but to Kai, it was beautiful.
"Rank 2 Earth Core," Kai whispered, wiping it on the boar's fur. "Used for defense pills or stabilizing arrays. Maybe worth five spirit stones."
Five stones. A pittance compared to the wealth Su Qing had bestowed upon him. But this... this was different. He hadn't been given this. He had taken it. It was the first currency he had earned with his own strength.
He looked at his bloody hands.
He expected to feel sick. He expected the nausea that had hit him with the panther. But there was only a faint prickle of goosebumps on his arms, a physiological reaction to the violence, not a psychological rejection.
'I just took a life,' Kai thought, staring at the glassy eyes of the boar. 'And I feel... fine. Cold. Perhaps my body has already accepted that in this place, mercy is a luxury I cannot afford.'
Snap.
A dry twig broke in the distance.
Kai froze. His head snapped up, his ears straining.
Rustle... Rustle...
It was faint, coming from the dense thicket to the south. It wasn't the wind. The wind didn't have a rhythm. This was the sound of paws—many paws—moving over dry leaves.
Kai sniffed the air. The metallic scent of the boar's blood was heavy, hanging in the humid air like a beacon.
"Scavengers," Kai realized, his eyes narrowing. "Or worse. A pack."
The Iron-Hide Boar was a tyrant in this area, but now that the tyrant was dead, the hyenas and wolves would come to feast. If Kai stayed here to butcher the meat, he would become the second course.
"Greed kills," Kai muttered.
He quickly stored the small core in his Spatial Ring. He didn't try to take the tusks or the hide. He stood up, checked the sun's position filtering through the canopy, and turned North-West.
"Run."
He engaged his Explosive Step, blurring away from the carcass just as a low, guttural howl erupted from the trees behind him.
The journey was a blur of green and brown.
For the first hour, Kai followed the water stream, using the noise of the rushing water to mask his footsteps. But as the sun climbed to its zenith, the terrain began to change.
The dense, suffocating trees of the Bone-Eating Forest began to thin out. The humidity dropped slightly, replaced by a dry, dusty heat. The stream he had been following widened, then abruptly fed into a marshland before disappearing underground.
Ahead of him lay the Whispering Grasslands.
It was a sea of waist-high golden grass that rippled in the wind. It looked beautiful, a painter's dream.
Kai knew better.
"The grasslands are a hunting ground for speed-type beasts," Su Qing's notes had warned. "There is no cover. If you are spotted, you must be faster than the hunter."
Kai took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the dry air. His blood, tempered by the earlier battle, was pumping with a slow, powerful rhythm. Thump... Thump.
He stepped into the grass.
He didn't walk; he ran. He kept his body low, almost parallel to the ground, moving like a shadow.
Every mile was a test of focus.
At one point, a shadow passed over him—huge and winged. Kai instantly threw himself flat into a ditch, pressing his face into the mud.
Screeeech!
A Wind-Razor Eagle swooped down, its talons tearing through the grass ten meters to his left, snatching a massive hare that Kai hadn't even seen. The gust from its wings flattened the vegetation for thirty feet.
Kai held his breath, his heart hammering against his ribs, until the eagle ascended back into the blue sky.
"Close," Kai breathed, spitting out dirt. "Too close."
He got up and kept moving.
He ran, he walked, he crawled. When he encountered a herd of Spiked Bison, he detoured two miles around them to avoid triggering a stampede. When he smelled the rot of a swamp, he backtracked.
Hours bled into one another. The sun began its slow descent, painting the sky in hues of bruised purple and bleeding orange.
His legs burned. His lungs felt like they were coated in sandpaper. But he didn't stop.
Finally, as evening approached, the smell of fresh water hit his nose.
Kai pushed through a final line of reeds and stumbled onto a rocky bank.
Before him lay a massive body of water—the sapphire-Scale Lake.
It was vast, stretching for miles, its surface calm and mirror-like. But Kai knew better than to approach the water's edge carelessly.
Splash.
In the center of the lake, a massive fin, easily the size of a boat's sail, broke the surface. It cut through the water with terrifying speed before vanishing again.
"Fierce Aqua Beasts," Kai noted, stepping back from the damp shoreline. "Rank 2 Serrated Crocodiles and maybe even a Rank 3 Deep-Water Serpent. Drinking from there is a gamble with life."
He retreated to a cluster of boulders on higher ground, about a hundred meters from the water. He collapsed against a rock, his chest heaving.
"Hah... hah..."
He wiped the sweat from his eyes. His legs were trembling, the muscles twitching involuntarily.
"I made it," he gasped.
He did a quick mental calculation. Based on the sun and his speed—which had averaged a pace no mortal human could sustain—he had covered a staggering distance.