Another half-shichen passed. The sea of trees grew quiet; no one fired more fireworks to signal.
The forest finally regained its peace.
"Looks like it's over." Whether the humans or the White Bear King had won, the encirclement battle seemed to have reached its conclusion. He Lingchuan stretched lazily. "Back to sleep!"
The rest of the night passed as usual, and even the evening breeze died down.
Sleeping at this height, the group could hardly hear the chirping of insects on the ground, with only the monkeys in the branches occasionally bickering.
In the blink of an eye, the end of the Chou hour arrived; daybreak was only another shichen away. He Lingchuan opened his eyes and quietly slipped down the tree.
Nature called, after all—he was no fasting, grain-abstaining immortal.
Once he took care of business, he strolled toward the stream to fetch a pot of fresh water.
At this hour, the moon was bright and the stars were sparse. Moonlight bathed the forest and the stream in a pale blue aura.
Just as He Lingchuan was about to reach the water's edge, he suddenly heard a few low barks!
He immediately ducked behind a tree and peered out through the tall grass.
He had not made a sound walking over the gravel on the ground, so the visitors in the clearing by the stream had not noticed his presence.
On the rocky shoal stood a pack of giant wolves, numbering around twenty. Their leader was a black wolf the size of a male lion, its fangs as long as short daggers, its vicious nature on full display.
Looking at them, He Lingchuan found them rather familiar.
Then he looked at their opponent—a white bear!
It was not purely white, either. The bear was covered in wounds from head to toe. Its left eye was reduced to a bloody socket, several broken arrow shafts stuck out of its body, and there was a palm-sized bloody hole in its lower back, blood pouring from it incessantly.
One of its forepaws had also been severed, unable to touch the ground.
Crouched in a rocky hollow, the bear panted like a working bellows. The moment He Lingchuan heard it, he knew its internal injuries were severe—its lungs and internal organs had suffered heavy trauma, and the blood pooling beneath it was nearly forming a small pond.
The wolf pack fanned out, surrounding it completely.
The white bear glared at the black wolf leader and growled, "What do you want?!"
The black wolf shook its fur. "Hand over the heart scale, and I'll let you leave."
*The heart scale?* He Lingchuan narrowed his eyes. Could his luck really be this good?
"Traitor!" the white bear growled in a low roar. "The humans won't spare you either!"
"It's all because you stubbornly insisted on descending the mountain for revenge, bringing endless disaster upon the mountain folk!" the black wolf said coldly. "Dozens of my offspring were killed. Taking your heart scale as compensation is only fair!"
With that, it let out a low bark.
Two wolves circling behind the bear immediately darted in, attempting to bite at its hind legs and the wound in its lower back.
The white bear turned to attack, and the wolves in front joined the fray.
Wolf-pack tactics were all about coordinated assault, designed to keep prey overwhelmed from every direction.
Fighting as it spoke, the white bear warned, "You still cannot defeat me. If you know what's good for you, leave at once."
"You always loved coming here. Are you trying to hide in the cave abode behind the waterfall?" The black wolf patiently directed the pack's assault, watching for the ideal opening. "You won't get the chance."
*A cave abode?* He Lingchuan pricked up his ears.
The black wolf added, "I didn't understand before why you had us steal zircon from human towns. Only later did I realize you wanted to bribe the spirit of metal guarding the cave abode!"
The white bear sneered. Suddenly whipping its paw out, it grabbed the smallest wolf, slammed it down onto a rock, opened its bloody maw, clamped down on the wolf's neck, and twisted hard!
A crisp crack echoed like a firecracker, clearly audible even to He Lingchuan.
Before the wolf could even yelp, its head was ripped clean off!
Yet when the white bear twisted to strike, He Lingchuan finally got a clear look at its chest: there was a patch of pitch black right over its heart.
It was not clotted blood, for it caught the moonlight with a glossy sheen.
A hard mass growing on its chest—yes, that truly was the White Bear King's unique hallmark.
So the Julu Kingdom had mobilized nearly all its elites, pursuing and cornering the beast for days on end, yet this great demon had still managed to escape?
Having slaughtered that wolf, the White Bear King roared, "Courting death! Not one of you will get away!"
Now that the black wolf knew its secret, it could leave none of them alive.
From listening to the exchange between bear and wolf, He Lingchuan knew this was an internal squabble within a demon lair.
When the White Bear King was at its peak, this pack of wolf demons had served as its vanguard;
now that the White Bear King was wounded and brought low, the pack wanted to squeeze some spoils from their former master.
Was the so-called "heart scale" referring to that black, hardened mass?
The White Bear King had dispatched an opponent with chilling swiftness.
To think that despite being grievously wounded, its strikes remained so swift, precise, and ruthless—He Lingchuan could hardly fathom the heavy price the Julu Kingdom's army and demon-hunting teams must have paid to corner this monster.
Demons had little patience for idle chatter; a single disagreement was enough to trigger bloodshed.
The rocky shoal instantly turned into a gruesome battlefield.
The giant wolves' fangs were sharper than ordinary blades, yet they could not slice through the White Bear King's outer hide. The sheer toughness of the bear's pelt was impossible to gauge from sight alone.
Failing several attempts, they could only target its wounds.
Under the alpha wolf's command, several wolves recklessly surged forward as decoys, while others circled behind to tear at the bloody cavity in the bear's lower back.
The alpha wolf also tried to unsettle the White Bear King's mind, shouting, "I've already cleaned out your stores in the cave abode! Going in won't do you any good!"
The White Bear King's ferocity erupted. It swung its paw and swatted away two foes, but howled in agony as well—clamped between the jaws of one swatted-away wolf was a massive chunk of freshly torn flesh!
Two more wolf demons bounded up, spitting wind blades toward the White Bear King's eyes.
The White Bear King instinctively ducked its head, and a heavy weight slammed onto the back of its neck—
The black wolf had finally seized its opening, lunging directly at the bear's throat and nape.
Its fangs were longer than those of ordinary wolf demons, keen as cleavers, capable of effortlessly puncturing even the thick hide of a giant rhino demon.
It was targeting the White Bear King's carotid artery; by rights, four punctured holes should have gushed geysers of blood.
What was more, a giant wolf that sank its teeth into prey would violently shake its head, tearing the wound as wide as possible.
Yet the heart scale on the White Bear King's chest seemed to flash with a faint glimmer. To the black wolf, it felt like biting into an inflated leather ball—the bear's hide was abnormally slippery, and its teeth skidded right off!
At such a critical moment, it missed its enemy's vitals entirely.
The White Bear King hooked a claw around, and the black wolf leapt back instantly.
The battle on the rocky shoal raged for the time it took to drink a cup of tea, splashing blood everywhere as earthshaking roars rang out.
The White Bear King appeared to have one foot in the grave, yet in combat its lingering might was terrifying; dragging its broken body, it managed to kill six wolves in succession.
The rest of the pack dared not advance, merely circling it and launching occasional ambushes.
Seeing this, the alpha wolf began to have second thoughts.
When two more wolves died gruesome deaths under the bear's paw, the black wolf finally gave up. Letting out a long howl, it turned to lead the pack away.
A heart scale was precious, but one needed to be alive to enjoy it.
The White Bear King had not yet reached complete exhaustion; it had struck too early.
Little did it expect that the White Bear King had been waiting for the exact moment it turned away. Malice glinted in the bear's solitary remaining eye. It threw back its head in a silent roar, then charged forward!
He Lingchuan could not help raising an eyebrow.
This divine ability was far too similar to the Bailong people's "Shadow Follows Form"—spanning several zhang in the blink of an eye, sticking to an enemy's back before they could react!
The moment the White Bear King pinned the black wolf down, it unleashed all its power, savagely tearing into the wolf's neck and back.
The two colossal beasts instantly tangled in a brutal grapple, fur flying and blood splattering across a horrifying scene.
The White Bear King had only one forepaw left, but its five curved claws were each three inches long, sinking deep into the black wolf's flesh while its jaws tore at the wolf's artery.
Half a cup of tea earlier, the black wolf had tried to do this to the bear; half a cup of tea later, the White Bear King paid it back in kind.
The black wolf did not possess hide as tough as the bear's. The White Bear King's desperate, all-out mauling was forceful enough to shatter giant boulders—how could mere flesh and blood withstand it?
He Lingchuan watched as blood gushed from its neck, staining the pebbles on the ground crimson.
The remaining pack members rushed forward to save their leader, sinking their teeth into the White Bear King. But the bear ignored them completely, keeping its jaws locked onto the black wolf.
Soon, the black wolf let out whimpering yelps like an ordinary dog.
The wolves swarmed over the White Bear King until, from He Lingchuan's perspective, not a trace of white fur was visible.
Yet the bear still refused to let go of the black wolf.
After another incense stick of time, the black wolf was finally pinned to the ground for good.
Once down, it never rose again.
Only when the black wolf stopped moving entirely did the White Bear King release its jaws and snap at the other wolf demons.
Seeing their leader dead, the wolves lost all will to fight; letting out a few whines, they tucked their tails and scurried into the forest.
Only the White Bear King remained, slumping onto the ground and panting like a bellows punctured on all sides.
Indeed, it was riddled with wounds and drenched in blood, its original fur color completely obscured.
Its old injuries had already been severe, and this battle against the wolves had inflicted fresh horrors. He Lingchuan had seen with his own eyes a wolf demon reach into the bloody cavity on the bear's back, rip out a bloody kidney, and wolf it down in a few bites!
The vitals at the back of its abdomen had been shredded into a mangled mess.
At the time, the White Bear King had been consumed with killing the black wolf, completely unable to spare attention for the pack, forced to endure their bites passively.
As it sat slumped like a human, He Lingchuan noticed that the heart scale on its chest was now half-skewed. Some clever wolf in the pack must have taken advantage of the chaos to dig at this treasure.
Pity it hadn't managed to pry it off.
After the battle, the rocky stream bank was littered with wolf carcasses, the stones and leaves soaked in blood. The White Bear King had won a pyrrhic victory; though still alive, it hardly looked like a victor.
It sat wheezing on the ground for quite a while before barely pulling itself up, stepping into the stream, and staggering upstream.
A bear normally so round and bulky was swaying as it walked, looking as though it could collapse at any second.
He Lingchuan recalled what the black wolf had said earlier: the White Bear King frequently visited this area.
The stream was shallow, the water reaching only mid-calf on a man. The White Bear King had been pursued to the end of its rope by the Julu Kingdom, yet it insisted on coming here. Perhaps it was heading for the "cave abode" the black wolf had mentioned.
He trailed the White Bear King for half a quarter-hour as the sound of rushing water grew louder. Rounding a cluster of giant boulders, he saw white silk cascading from green rock, broken beads of spray splashing into a deep pool.
There was indeed a waterfall.
He Lingchuan had glimpsed this waterfall earlier from atop the giant fir tree. Seeing it up close now, with its isolated pool, deep ravine, and pine waves echoing through the gorge, it was an extraordinarily tranquil and wondrous sight.
Yet the giant bear walked straight into the waterfall. Buffeted and swaying under the pounding current, it stubbornly pressed inside.
The stream water was instantly stained red.
What was behind the waterfall?
Waiting only a few breaths, He Lingchuan leapt into the plunge pool and headed through the waterfall as well.
The bear was already on its last legs; even if it turned around to ambush him, it was no match for him.
In this season, the waterfall carried a heavy volume of water, striking the body with stinging force. But He Lingchuan was skilled in Wave Slash and had weathered colossal ocean waves; why would he care about a waterfall cascading into a plunge pool?
Chapter 1125