"Salty Fish, don't let Zhong Wuliang's corpse go to waste. Sell it to me. I'll give you three thousand merit points for it."
Yu Xian picked up his phone, unlocked the screen, and was greeted by this bizarre text from Bat. What did he mean, *don't let the corpse go to waste*? That sounded downright creepy.
Frowning slightly, he quickly replied with a voice message: "What do you want Zhong Wuliang's corpse for?"
Moments after sending it, Bat replied, "Research. Zhong Wuliang was the sole disciple of Tower City's Eight Treasures Sect. The *Eight Treasures Elephant-Suppressing Art* he practiced is one of Huaxia's finest body-refining arts. But it's passed down orally from generation to generation without a single written record. I want to study his corpse and see if I can reverse-engineer it."
Yu Xian had to admit that Zhong Wuliang's defense had indeed been terrifying. More than five hundred bombs hadn't managed to kill him, and Yu Xian had wasted several hundred more before finally finishing him off.
The kicker was that Zhong Wuliang was only Wolf rank. If he had been Tiger rank, Yu Xian might not have been able to scratch him even after running out of bombs.
"If you manage to deduce it, remember to cut me in on a copy," Yu Xian replied immediately.
Codename Bat: "No problem."
With a thought, Yu Xian steered his spatial bubble to turn around and fly back.
Fortunately, thanks to the dense gunpowder smoke lingering from the explosions, no wild animals had dared approach Zhong Wuliang's corpse in the span of just a few minutes. Yu Xian emptied the ring that had been used to store meat, then stuffed Zhong Wuliang's corpse inside.
"One of his arms was blown off. Do you need that retrieved too?" Yu Xian remembered the severed arm lying somewhere in the crater and asked over the phone.
Codename Bat replied almost instantly, "Yes! A body-refining martial artist's flesh is bound to carry traces of his cultivation. Missing an arm means whatever technique I deduce might end up incomplete!"
"Alright, I'll go get it," Yu Xian replied.
He swiftly flew back toward the giant crater. He remembered the severed arm had landed on a boulder, splashing a copious amount of blood.
Yet when he located that very boulder, only a pool of blood remained. The arm had vanished into thin air.
*Where's the arm?*
Yu Xian looked all around, dumbfounded.
He scanned his surroundings and found no animal tracks. Enhancing his sense of smell, he sniffed the air carefully. A faint scent of blood trailed straight up into the sky. Evidently, a raptor like an eagle or hawk had snatched it away.
If he had known Bat wanted the corpse, he would have secured the severed arm right away to avoid any complications.
Yu Xian sighed, then steered the spatial bubble to follow the trail of blood.
Fearing the arm might get eaten by the beast, he pushed his flight speed to the absolute limit the spatial bubble could withstand—Mach 20, twenty times the speed of sound.
After about half a minute, he spotted a massive black bird resembling a vulture flying ahead with Zhong Wuliang's arm clutched in its talons.
The vulture-like bird noticed Yu Xian behind it at the same moment. It immediately kicked into high gear, diving steeply in an attempt to shake off its pursuer.
What followed was a midair dogfight between man and bird.
The creature was unquestionably a transcendent creature. Flying at full throttle, it was actually a fraction faster than Yu Xian. Moreover, because Yu Xian was the one giving chase, the bird was leading him by the nose.
Every time the bird banked or changed direction, it pulled away a considerable distance, keeping Yu Xian from closing the gap.
Yu Xian extended his hand, and a thick spray of silver threads shot from his fingertips. Sensing danger, the giant bird beat its wings even faster, performing a midair roll and veering sharply to the left. By the time Yu Xian managed to turn after it, the bird was already several hundred meters away.
*Damn, this thing is tapping into its latent potential.*
Yu Xian gritted his teeth and tried to fold the surrounding space. But the bird was moving too fast; before he could lock onto a set of coordinates, the creature had already zipped past the reach of his spatial distortion.
In the end, he simply gave up on fancy tricks and interception maneuvers, focusing solely on not losing sight of it.
When it came to boundless stamina, he feared no one. Once the bird flew itself to exhaustion, it would naturally have to stop. He refused to believe it had infinite energy.
Sure enough, after several more minutes of relentless pursuit, the giant bird's stamina began to falter. Decisively, it released Zhong Wuliang's arm to shed weight.
Yu Xian immediately swooped down, snaring the severed arm with his silver threads.
*Finally got it back.*
Breathing a slight sigh of relief, Yu Xian stowed the arm into his storage ring. He glanced around at his environment and quickly pulled out his phone to check his GPS location.
He had been so focused on chasing the bird wherever it flew that he seemed to have completely lost his bearings.
When he opened the map app, the entire screen flashed crimson, plastered with stark warning banners.
*Holy crap, a forbidden zone?!*
Yu Xian's face fell. He hadn't expected to chase the bird right into a forbidden zone.
He really couldn't blame himself for this; after all, he had just been tailing the bird, and to a wild bird, such human concepts as forbidden zones didn't exist.
Just as he prepared to teleport away in the next instant, a blue silhouette flashed through a massive lake not far off. Then, a colossal blue dragon breached the surface, its eyes locking dead onto Yu Xian.
The dragon's head alone was as massive as the ancient Bird's Nest stadium in Yanjing. Its eyes radiated an overwhelming, terrifying draconic pressure. Under its gaze, Yu Xian felt as if his entire body had been frozen solid.
*Gulp!*
The Pangu's heart inside Yu Xian thudded violently. His nearly paralyzed mind regained a sliver of clarity, and he swallowed hard on pure instinct.
On an inexplicable whim, he cast Appraisal on the blue dragon, then instantly triggered his teleportation to flee.
The dragon, which had merely been staring at Yu Xian, flashed with fury the moment the Appraisal skill took effect. The gemstone embedded in its forehead fired a thick beam of azure light.
The beam swept across the sky, annihilating the bubble Yu Xian left behind on the spot. It even sheared straight into the cloud layers far above, carving out an enormous, gaping trench.
***
Meanwhile, Yu Xian reappeared inside one of his previously anchored bubbles elsewhere, letting out a massive breath.
That dragon was terrifying. The wilderness was truly fraught with peril at every turn.
His attention shifted to the status window he had just scanned, only to be struck dumb once again:
——————
Name: Extreme Dragon
Codename: None
Race: Dragon
Gender: None
Age: ???
Lifespan: ???
Rank: ???
Faction: ???
Abilities:
[???]
[Summary: ???]
——————
This was the very first time Yu Xian had appraised a target and received nothing but question marks across the board.
His immediate suspicion was that his Appraisal level wasn't high enough to read the Extreme Dragon's attributes.
Since his Appraisal was only Dragon-rank, in theory, it could only inspect creatures ranked below Dragon rank.
*Could that giant dragon have surpassed Dragon rank and reached the legendary God rank?*
At this moment, his awe of forbidden zones deepened once more. While a forbidden zone might house friendly transcendent creatures like the Dragon King Golden Toad, it could also harbor monstrously powerful, not-so-friendly entities like the Extreme Dragon.
Thank goodness he excelled at running away if nothing else. Wandering into a forbidden zone by accident was way too dangerous.
Then, a daring idea suddenly popped into his head.
He had once entertained the thought of leaving a bubble at Qilin headquarters so that if he ran into an enemy he couldn't defeat, he could teleport them straight to headquarters for the big shots to gang up on them.
Obviously, that plan was completely unfeasible.
*But what if I left a bubble near the Extreme Dragon?*
The moment Yu Xian pictured an enemy being teleported right in front of the Extreme Dragon, the urge in his chest grew almost impossible to resist.
Chapter 88