“I’m back!”
Hua Jian bounced into the cave, glancing toward the campfire. Seeing the Saintess calmly sitting cross-legged on the meditation cushion, her expression relaxed slightly.
She took off the veil covering her face and took a deep breath of fresh air, letting out a comfortable hum.
Breathing with the veil on was still a bit uncomfortable; she didn’t like that feeling.
Linglong, who had her eyes closed in meditation, opened them and looked toward Hua Jian. “Did you run into any trouble?”
Hua Jian came back much later than yesterday.
Even the firewood in the cave had been collected by Linglong along the way, or else they might not have had a campfire to warm themselves tonight.
Knowing Hua Jian well, Linglong was sure this girl never wasted time without reason. If she was delayed for so long, it had to be something significant.
“There wasn’t any trouble. I just watched a little show. That Spirit Beast is very sensitive about its territory…” Hua Jian recounted her findings to Linglong in detail.
This discovery was not good news. It meant Hua Jian would have a much harder time keeping the Spirit Beast distracted in the future.
She needed to keep the Spirit Beast’s hatred focused on her to buy Linglong enough time to act.
Otherwise, there was no way she could stop a single-minded Lingwang-class Spirit Beast returning home.
Hua Jian was like a bullfighter, waving a red cloth and engaging with a mad bull. As long as the bull’s attention was on her, she could drag things out.
But if the bull suddenly charged off in another direction, Hua Jian was helpless— there was no way she could pull that beast back.
“Or… should we come up with a way to take the Spirit Beast out first?” Hua Jian scratched her head.
If distracting the Spirit Beast was impossible, then maybe they could try killing it outright.
“We can’t kill it. None of the Spirit Techniques I have can finish it off in one hit.” Linglong immediately rejected the idea.
Even as a Saintess, facing a higher-tier Spirit Beast made it impossible to deal enough damage.
“You’re a Saintess and can’t even challenge a lower-level Spirit Beast?”
Hua Jian thought the Saintess was useless. Normally, someone of her status should be able to surpass levels like drinking water. This was just an ordinary Lingwang-class Spirit Beast, nothing special.
And she couldn’t beat it? Impossible. This Saintess just wasn’t up to the task.
Linglong was speechless. She didn’t even know what kind of image the Saint Sect held in Hua Jian’s mind.
Level-skipping challenges were incredibly difficult. It was even more so when the opponent was a tough Spirit Beast with thick skin.
Without powerful enough Spirit Techniques or weapons, it was impossible to harm it.
Of course, Linglong did possess such Spirit Techniques and weapons, but using them required her to go all out.
After releasing them, she would probably have almost no combat strength left.
Whether she could kill the Spirit Beast or not was another matter, but she was certain she would be defenseless afterward.
The commotion caused by Thunder Magic was huge. Even just the sound alone attracted scheming cultivators, enough for the already weak Linglong to finish off many.
So, confronting the Spirit Beast head-on was out of the question. It was pure suicide.
“Then… I’ll think of a way to lock the hatred onto it.”
……
Hua Jian thought she would be stuck on the problem for a long time, but by the next day, she had found a solution.
When she saw the Spirit Beast, attracted by Linglong’s thunder, ignore Linglong and instead attack a bystander cultivator with a blast of purple fire, Hua Jian immediately understood.
Ah, the Spirit Beast holds grudges. Any cultivator who enters its territory is remembered and won’t be spared until they’re driven out of the Secret Realm.
Though unclear how the Spirit Beast identified its enemies, at least Hua Jian now had a reliable way to draw its hatred.
“Ah!”
The unprepared cultivator was immediately expelled from the Secret Realm by a Space Stone, and his terrified scream as he left sent chills through the others.
This Spirit Beast was terrifying. That cultivator hadn’t even taken a single Spirit Item out of the territory before being utterly destroyed.
If any of them had entered the area like that cultivator did, they might be the ones under attack now.
“I don’t want to deal with this Spirit Beast territory anymore.”
Half of the cultivators, frightened by what they witnessed, chose to leave immediately, unwilling to stir up trouble. Most of the rest also began to consider retreating.
The Spirit Beast was too ferocious, and the risk of entering its territory was far too high. Better to gather some ordinary Lingcao and Spirit Items elsewhere to fill their Storage Pouches.
No one wanted to risk a hundred Spirit Stones and walk away empty-handed only to be taken out by the Spirit Beast boss. It would be too embarrassing to admit.
Hua Jian scanned the wavering cultivators before quietly slipping away.
She planned to scout the edge of the Spirit Beast territory to find out why the Spirit Beast held grudges like this.
She had read in reference books that Lingwang-level Spirit Beasts didn’t have high intelligence— they were still basically beasts.
At this level of intellect, they couldn’t develop consciousness or divine awareness, so their grudges had to be based on some identifiable feature.
Maybe it was facial features, or perhaps their aura…
Whatever it was, Hua Jian was determined to find it.
Stealthily using a Retreat Technique, she flew to the edge of the Spirit Beast territory and cautiously began to probe deeper into the territory.
Where exactly the boundary of the territory began was a question only Linglong Pavilion could answer.
The cultivators expelled by the Spirit Beast were hardly likely to reveal where exactly they were defeated.
The boundary of the territory had always been vague.
Besides the recognized Forbidden Zones, there was a large ambiguous area that no one knew for sure whether it counted as part of the Spirit Beast territory.
Hua Jian was now risking entering this uncertain area.
“The scent here is normal. If I cover my smell with some pollen powder, it should eliminate the scent’s effect…” Hua Jian summoned a few Green Vines and sprayed a lot of pale yellow pollen onto herself.
The strong floral scent completely masked her own smell, so pungent that even Hua Jian had to pinch her nose.
As for her appearance, she naturally had a way to test that too.
She hid her face and figure completely under a pitch-black robe, so there was no worry about being recognized.
Once everything was ready, Hua Jian had become a super strange figure: shrouded from head to toe in a black robe, her entire face wrapped in a black hood, with only a pair of eyes exposed.
Not only was her appearance odd, but her scent was bizarrely strong and pungent, enough to make anyone— or any Spirit Beast— that identified targets by smell think she reeked.
All set. It was time to test the depths of this Spirit Beast territory!