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Chapter 126 Hunting PartVII

  That attack was quick.

  First, feel.

  I triggered the array and that sent an explosion of light throughout the whole of the forest.

  Light pierced through the shadow and the beasts squirmed away.

  The array had been a bomb of sorts. It would be a waste if I didn’t execute it right. You might think that light would cut down the darkness and give me an advantage of sorts.

  But it wouldn’t. The darkness here wasn’t because of the nature of the beasts but the nature of this part of the part of the forest. The trees, the rocks, the earth, all contained darkness within them, and regardless of how big the explosion was, it would only last a matter of seconds before it was devoured by the darkness around it.

  It was like setting off a bomb in the ocean.

  It’d burn, yes, but only for an instant. And most of the beasts had enough sense to stay far enough away from the array so as to not get involved.

  My mind whirled. It was surreal.

  The beasts were so so far away. From a mortal’s mind, they would look bigger than a universe. The space between us didn’t exist. There was just a difference in where I was and where they were, but we were in two different places entirely.

  It was… incomprehensible. Laws made manifest, trees so big they could hold an infinite number of earths. The earth beneath my feet was so real, so solid that it would make Mount Everest look like a horrid imitation.

  When I saw it that way, it was easy to understand why I would be called a god and why immortals view mortals as something less than ants.

  And yet, regardless of the differences, here I was hunting and being hunted. A man in the forest, no different from a mortal in the woods.

  I snapped back into the moment.

  The beast was a raven, thirteenth-rank ninth-step. The illusion was good, but one of these beasts were bound to see through it eventually. I couldn’t rely on my skills to deceive, so instead I used the moment as bait.

  Array masters had a tough time in an unprepared battle, but if we planned for it, then in the best case it wouldn’t be a battle, it would be a trap.

  The light blinded the raven, but it flew still, aiming its beak directly at my chest.

  Fights were complicated. When you plan to fight, you should have more methods of escape than more methods of combat. That was how Dane thought, and I agreed.

  Fights grew increasingly complex with martial arts. What moves would the opponent use? How would they strike you next? How should you dodge and redirect?

  But with power, they somehow grew easier. The raven had a few methods of attack, but the first one would have been a surprise to me because it would assume that I was not expecting it. It would also assume that I had some kind of protection, which was the exploding array.

  So it would raise its defenses and take me down with one quick swoop as any smart beast would.

  It probably expected the explosion of light. Using something with a light law would be the best-opposing nature to use on something with a dark law after all.

  But the raven forgot one thing. It was not alone.

  Just as the raven attacked, so did a snake from below, and badger from beneath, and a leopard from the side. They had all expected the light attack and the defense and had lowered their senses and pounced on me with full force because of it.

  And I stepped away as they did so. The rest of the beasts had turned away at the explosion and I created another illusion in an instant.

  The central point of the plan depended on inciting all four beasts at once. And that had been easy enough.

  I had made my hiding spot with purposefully faults. If I did the best I could, they would have just searched harder and found me eventually, but if I purposefully created an illusion of lower quality, I could entice them bit by bit.

  They had heard my conversation with Forn. They weren’t deaf or stupid. I had all but told them how to break through my illusion. It was controlled via outputs from me. There was no qi connection, but rather minute fluctuations in the environment surrounding my real body that the illusory array would read and respond to. I was the broadcast station and the array was the radio tower. If it weren’t for Forn’s curiosity, it might have taken the beasts far longer to see through this plan. I could have been here for days, but thankfully, I wasn’t.

  So all the beasts had to do was look for the source of those fluctuations and they would find me. But the signals they had found were a red haring. I’d doubled every transmission with false meaningless singles that were far more obvious than my real ones.

  I had sent out the transmissions in an untraceable method so far, setting up small arrays that transmitted the signals for me before dissipating. These beasts must have been trailing after those signals for a good minute now, pouncing at every transmission thinking they barely missed me.

  Another point of failure was their doubling up on a false signal. If two or three of them attacked at one false transmission, then they might have kept cautious of each other, remembering what had happened earlier when I entered the forest. This was the same strategy after all, just far more complicated.

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  So each false signal transmitted a different set of false transmissions. I had about five different sets of false signals, each transmitting whenever the illusory puppet moved and of the five four had been discovered. I kept up the transmissions and eventually each beast believed they had cracked the pattern and then, eventually I transmitted all of that one point and they had attacked.

  It was also possible one of the beasts could have seen through me earlier, but even then I could hide via the explosion.

  I barely stepped away as all four creatures clashed.

  I spat out a shielding array once again and while the explosion blinded all other creatures, four dark beasts clashed.

  The snake lost a fang, the badger lost a few claws, the panther lost his ears, and the crow lost its life.

  I grabbed them as they fell and ran. I had to get out quickly before any of their senses started prickling at the scene of the battle. The explosion helped offset the attention but I wasn’t about to wait for all the other creatures to turn their eyes towards me.

  The crow weighed me down a bit. It was more than me, relatively speaking. It had died but its corpse was fresh and its nature was strong. I felt like I carried the whole of the night on my back.

  Thankfully, it was the same rank as I was and that meant that’s quality was a similar level to mine. It couldn’t overpower me or shape me with its mere presence.

  And if it was a whole rank above me it’d have absolutely no reason to hunt me. I would provide it with nothing useful for its effort.

  I ran through the barrier and back out into the Grove of Life’s territory. The barrier allowed me to drag the crow’s corpse out but held back all the other beasts who had arrived at the sight of me.

  I sighed and quickly put the corpse in my strongest sealing containers. Forn came out from the dark forest completely unharmed and wide-eyed.

  “Wow,” she mumbled. “I’ve never seen anything so…”

  “Don’t hold back,” I pushed.

  “Cowerdly.”

  I chuckled.

  “It works,” I said.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I suppose it does. But what if it hadn’t?”

  “I had other plans of escape. Most would have forced me to abandon gathering any spoils but I would have made it out.”

  “And you would have done so with no cost to yourself? With no risk? Was that even a real fight?”

  I smiled.

  “Yes, it was. I already lost the light array and the material it took to make that. The same can be said for all the other materials I used to set up the fight. And no matter how well you plan things out there’s always a risk.”

  “But you wouldn’t have died?” She asked.

  “I could have.”

  “You didn’t even fight. You didn’t attack a single thing you only used their own forces against them.”

  She sounded sad, almost disappointed. I suppose this was the point when the rich kid broke open the fancy new toy, figured out how it worked, and felt sad because the magic was nothing like they had imagined.

  I think she wanted me to be stronger, something more than a trickster. She was waiting for me to reveal myself as a person worth her interest.

  “And you didn’t even hide,” I replied.

  “That’s different. They weren’t after me.”

  “And why do you think that is? It's your blood that gives you talent and your grove that they fear. I understand it wasn’t a battle for the ages, but this wasn’t one opponent and this wasn’t a fair fight. I’m sorry if that disappointed you, but I have to make do with what I have, and what I have are my little schemes and traps.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. Dane wouldn’t have. Dane wouldn’t have talked to this girl if he could help it.

  “I am my own,” she muttered.

  “And I mine.”

  There was a tense moment between us before she slowly sighed.

  “I…apologize, again. I do not know if I could have fought the same enemies and survived myself. It’s just that the method of battle seems rather strange to me.”

  “You were hoping to see something dazzling?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  Again, I couldn’t help but think of her age. There were cultivators below the immortal rank older than she was. For all her age, she was still a sheltered child. I had shown up out of the blue like a magician at a birthday party and now the birthday girl was sad that I couldn’t throw out a fireball.

  She was decent, but she was also spoiled.

  She had brought that dragon to me instead of running to her Grove, if for nothing than her own pride. She had followed and prodded me while I was hunting and even though she was easy to talk to, she was still spoiled.

  And now that she saw that I didn’t have what she wanted, she was irritated.

  “Well, I am sorry to disappoint.”

  “It… it isn’t you. It's my father and the Grove, I wish to venture into the deeper parts of it and they won’t let me. Ever since I could remember I’ve always been growing, increasing my strength bit by bit, but lately… I feel stagnant. I’ve been meaning to go deeper into the forest to search for stronger opponents, but my father won’t let me. I suppose I was hoping you’d be able to provide something.”

  I smiled enviously. She was stagnant? Not growing? Was she experiencing her first-ever bottleneck at the thirteenth rank? Had she never had to struggle to reach beyond her limitations before?

  I tried to imagine it, being born to such a sect and strolling your way to this level of power.

  “Why the forest?” I asked.

  “The stronger the danger the stronger my growth. I need to push myself and strike out, to be tempered underneath the fire of the forest. If I were to leave our territory and its adjacent neighbors, I’d be able to find true adversaries, enemies that wouldn’t avoid me for my blood.”

  “You’d die.”

  “It would be a risk but-”

  “No, Forn, you would die.”

  “I could hold my own,” she spoke indignantly.

  “Maybe, but not for long. Your blood would entice any beast with a decent nose. You have a bloodline that comes from a God-King. Many beasts and men would jump at the chance to eat you.”

  “Not if I had a bloodline hiding technique. I could do it. I could take all the proper precautions and head out into the forest.”

  It took all I had to not yell at her stupidity. Everything I did to stay safe, from the way I traveled to the way I fought, was developed out of fear of the world and all the dangers that it held. She had that safety, that security I sought so strongly, and yet she was so eager to be free from it.

  “Why the forest? Why not a city or a tournament? Why not sharpen your abilities through other means?”

  “I am wild, the forest is where I belong.”

  “If you want to strengthen your dao, shouldn’t you test it? Explore it? Understand civilization and people instead of throwing them away?”

  “I am wild,” she replied.

  “I think you’re just scared,” I said. “Scared of the word outside your forest.”

  “I am not afraid of death,” She scoffed.

  “Yes, but you are afraid of control, rules, limitations, and any other set of boundaries. You’re so afraid of losing your wild dao that you refuse to test it. You’re stagnant not because you’re not risking your life, but because your life is all you’re willing to risk. You refuse to change and grow through opposing ideals.”

  “I- I am- who are you to speak such things?” She yelled.

  “Just an old man,” I answered. “Talking to a young girl and telling her to avoid making the mistakes he made. Growth is inevitable. To try and stay the same is to fight a losing battle.”

  She listened and nodded.

  “I will think upon your words,” She finally replied.

  I smiled and bowed, and started to quickly make my way out of the forest.

  Forn just stood there and thought.

  is 26 chapters ahead but will be getting a three chapter update today.

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