Chapter 452: “Battle Spirits Forest (2)”
Qiao Chu did as Jun Wu Xie told him and after applying it, the bottle was passed around and everyone followed suit.
Jun Wu Xie lay down on her branch after that and the little black cat lay just above her head, its furry tail hanging over the branch, swishing back and forth.
“Meow.”
[This forest is rather similar to that place.]
Jun Wu Xie’s eyes narrowed at the memory. She spent the initial ten over years in her past life in that demon’s lair which had been situated in the middle of a dense forest just like this, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by silence.
Refusing to think anymore of the past, Jun Wu Xie slowly closed her eyes.
When the sun first rays broke across the treetops, a scream tore through the air, causing the companions asleep among the higher reaches of the trees to startle awake.
The screaming was coming closer and the leaves on the trees were beginning to rustle.
“Spirit Beast?” Fei Yan sat up suddenly. A earsplitting beastly howl then reverberated in their ears.
Fan Jin was already sitting upright on his branch and his face was creased in a frown. “We are still at the fringes of the forest and there shouldn’t be any Spirit Beasts belonging to the higher grade around here.”
Just as Fan Jin finished his statement, several ragged figures burst through the vegetation. There were seventeen of them in total and they were dressed in uniforms of the Zephyr Academy. At that moment, they had lost all the semblance of magnificence they had portrayed initially from being an esteemed disciple of the revered Zephyr Academy. Their faces were now covered in dirt and their clothes were all tattered. Several of them had wounds on them and their blood had stained their clothes red. But they did not seem to notice their wounds as all of them ran for their lives.
The youths were already panting heavily from their mad dash and they all hid with their backs plastered against the trees, too tired to run another step further.
The next moment, a large pack of jackals appeared, following the scent of blood. A quick count showed that there were at least more than thirty of them in the pack!
Jackals were Spirit Beasts that belonged to the lowest first grade and they were smaller in size than wolves and did not possess strong attack power. Faced with a jackal, as long as one’s ring spirit had awakened, they would be able to manage defeating them without too much difficulty. But jackals were gregarious Spirits Beasts and they always moved together in packs numbering at least three or four and the number can go up into the hundreds in large packs. Each pack was always led by a leader on their hunts for food.
One lone jackal could be easily defeated, but when the numbers in the pack increased, their attack power was multiplied in folds.
The smaller bodies of the jackals meant that they were more nimble of foot. They were innately crafty and they coordinated their attacks when they hunt.
The team that had run here had really been unlucky. They had groped their way blindly through the forest throughout the night and due to the poor visibility, they had lost their way and made a huge detour. They had carelessly stumbled across this pack of jackals when the youths were already exhausted from having trekked such a long distance through treacherous terrain and dense vegetation the whole night. When they found themselves suddenly under the attack of the jackals, many of them panic and ran for their lives. Fortunately for them, they had a few seniors in their group who had better presence of mind, and that had allowed them to run all the way out here.
But those seniors were mostly injured now and the jackals were relentless and still aggressively chasing down their prey.
“Damn it. To think that we would be pushed so hard by a pack of jackals.” A senior whose arm had been bitten by jackal said, as blood flowed down from the four deep punctures which he had hastily tied up with cloth he had torn out from his clothes.
“I….. I can’t run anymore.” One of the youth said, gasping for air, and leaning heavily against a tree.
“Zi Mu! We cannot stop!” A senior who was injured shouted, gritting his teeth against the pain.
Li Zi Mu’s mind was completely blank, and his legs were starting to cramp up from the mad dash where he had given everything he had in fear of his life, and his face was filled with utter despair.