Its face was hidden behind a helmet, but from the gaps seeped an unfathomable darkness. Grease-like shadows, like a cat's whiskers or an octopus's tentacles, reached out from inside the helmet, as if searching for something.
But before it could find anything of value, a shrill whistle rang out in the air around it.
"The target has appeared!"
"The demon reveals itself!"
Centered on Suspended Fate Valley, the great numbers of wary Red Armored Guards patrolling the area immediately converged on the region where the split demon had shown itself.
They shouted their slogans, and the flame patterns formed of tiny characters across their armor flowed and burned, faintly linking together into a massive battle formation that cast the surrounding mountains and forests in a deep red glow.
And from the former Suspended Fate Manor, now the Red Armored Guards' camp, beams of Daoist art radiance lit up all the more, making everything within ten li as bright as day and laying bare every evil spirit and phantom.
The mighty, sweeping Red Armored Guards and the demon-revealing light forced the demon person to abandon its investigation and once again conceal its form in the shadows.
As a split demon of the great heavenly demon 'Xuming,' it was proficient in the techniques of the Blood Qi and vitality lineage and could have located An Jing's aura at the very first moment.
But An Jing had suddenly vanished for three days, forcing it to lurk around Suspended Fate Valley, where it was surrounded by the Great Chen soldiers who had come afterward to purge the Extramundane Demon's lingering taint.
Even though it had a devoured human body as a 'shell' to mask its demonic qi, the Demon-Observing Formation was enough to restrict its movements. Just like now—even if it found some small clue, it had no time to follow it any further.
The demon person and the Great Chen soldiers continued their game of hide-and-seek.
Meanwhile, the true target everyone sought, An Jing, had already crossed three mountains and reached an unnamed stream valley two hundred li away.
A martial artist's mobility was simply terrifying.
Especially since An Jing had been born in the borderlands and had the experience of a refugee, and later at Suspended Fate Manor he had often trained by walking through the mountains—his leg strength was so formidable he could be called a human thousand-li horse.
"Let's rest a bit, replenish some water and energy, then keep running. After a day and a night of running, we should be more or less out of the deep mountains."
Unlike Another World, the Huaixu Realm had no acid rain, and the river water was very clean and fresh.
An Jing bent down at one side of the stream valley and drank deeply of the clear stream water in great gulps, then took out the smoked, dried boar leg, bit off a piece forcefully and chewed, replenishing his strength as quickly as possible.
He had an excellent memory and roughly recalled that, back when the Demon Sect's carriage entered the mountains, it had traveled another five or six days before reaching Suspended Fate Manor.
The carriage hadn't been fast—at least not faster than his full-out run—and it especially had to rest at night. If he ran at full speed for a day and a night, he should more or less reach the vicinity of the mountain villages and towns along the northwest frontier of Great Chen.
As the saying went—the dragon enters the sea, the tiger returns to the mountain—so long as he found the right chance to slip into a city, he would have completely escaped the Demon Sect and returned to being a free man!
After replenishing his water and strength, An Jing came to the highest hilltop nearby and surveyed the surrounding terrain to decide his next route.
Under the bright moon lay dense, wild, boundless mountain forests. Towering trees that several people couldn't wrap their arms around were everywhere, and the sky-piercing ancient trees, dozens or even hundreds of meters tall, along with their branches and leaves, could completely block out the moonlight, leaving the forest interior unseen by daylight for a hundred years.
However, though there was no sunlight, the northwest ancient forest was not without sources of light.
On those towering trees, many fungus vines gave off a faint, cold glow, rather like the luminescent vines deep in the caves of Another World, nurturing all sorts of strangely shaped flowers and plants and various insects and crawling things.
Under that faint blue glow, countless branches, trunks, and roots intertwined like roads, forming a strange and complex labyrinthine ecosystem.
In so primeval a forest, one couldn't even rely on the stars and moon to tell east from west or north from south, which was why An Jing had to come to the mountain peak to decide his next direction.
"A little off, but it's no big deal—the general direction is right."
Standing atop the crown of a giant tree, midway through his climb An Jing even spotted an abandoned bird's nest. The nest was enormous—the eggshell fragments inside were half a person tall, meaning the adult bird was at the very least a giant ferocious beast seven or eight meters long.
"What kind of monster is that? Better keep my distance."
This put An Jing on his guard, and he made up his mind to leave the deep mountains as fast as possible.
After correcting his direction again, An Jing continued running at full speed.
Along the way, he did indeed encounter some ferocious beasts and fierce birds that could see through his Mysterious Step and Abyssal Qi Nourishment.
But these fierce beasts weren't stupid either. An Jing was clearly a tough opponent, and he was obviously in a hurry, racing along—there was no point in provoking such a powerful enemy for no reason.
Apart from trailing him for a while whenever An Jing passed through their territory, most of these ferocious beasts simply watched from a distance.
Still, some of the ferocious beasts weren't about to let him off so easily.
For instance, there was one that looked like a fusion of a gecko and a chameleon, which normally lurked on a giant tree and ambushed passing beasts.
Seizing the moment when An Jing's mind was fixed on the road ahead, it shot out from the side a long tongue as swift as a flying sword, intending to sweep the whole of An Jing into its belly.
Had it been an ordinary merchant caravan or mountain foragers who met such a ferocious beast, several of them would surely have been swept away—impossible to find, impossible to strike back at. At the slightest disturbance, the creature would slip away into the dense maze of the forest sea.
The only options were to speed up and leave its territory, or to wait until the ferocious beast had eaten its fill before things quieted down.
But An Jing was different.
He had a gun!
Without needing the Sword Spirit's warning, An Jing—who had already awakened his Spirit Root, his perception keener than an ordinary martial artist's—sensed something was wrong before the gecko beast even shot out its tongue. He easily dodged the beast's long tongue with a sidestep, then turned, drew his gun, and fired.
The gunshot cracked like thunder. The gecko beast's tongue was nimble, but its body was rather sluggish; it took seven or eight bullets on the spot, let out an extremely shrill wail, and fell back, then immediately fled into the maze of the forest sea at top speed.
Naturally, An Jing had no time to chase it down, so he continued on his way.
Perhaps precisely because the gecko beast had suffered so badly and let out those hissing cries, warning the other ferocious beasts, An Jing never again met any other ferocious beast bold enough to attack him during the rest of his journey.
"After my Spirit Root awakened, my perception became extremely keen."
After avoiding a spiderweb trap woven by a spider beast thanks to his high perception, An Jing—resting to replenish his strength for the third time—sank into thought while sitting in meditation and regulating his breath: "Although the Spirit Root didn't come with any divine ability, the keen perception and the improved control over my Inner Breath that it brought aren't weak either."
"Why does no one in the Huaixu Realm continue 'Spirit Root Qi Refining'?"
The Sword Spirit, who had been silently observing An Jing's actions all along, now spoke up as well. "It is strange indeed. I'd been wanting to have you try some Qi Refining in the Huaixu Realm, but time was too tight and I never found the chance."
It clearly couldn't quite make sense of this either, so it offered a suggestion. "Now, we've already run several hundred li. Neither side can easily catch up to us anymore... We do have a bit of leeway."
"True. We can give it a try." An Jing nodded slightly. He found a hidden spot on a tree trunk, sat down cross-legged, closed his eyes, and focused his mind.
Chapter 64