Chapter 130 — The Sinister Forest

The spilled blood, under the faint glow of the phosphorescence, slowly seeped into the earth and darkened to a deep hue.

Before Jin Pingyue could touch down, the darkness ahead suddenly erupted with countless beast-roars. In an instant the former stillness was shattered, as if a hundred beasts howled at the heavens, rising and falling in the dark. Within moments, behind those flickering lights of phosphorescence, pairs upon pairs of eyes—some large, some small, all glinting with savage light—emerged one by one, shining in the darkness.

Jin Pingyue drew a deep breath, and her face seemed to pale a little.

With one long howl, they came suddenly like a great river thundering down; a rush of pounding feet pierced the silence of the dark, roaring toward her, spreading ever wider, closing Jin Pingyue in the middle.

"Roar..."

In that instant, countless monsters burst from the darkness and hurled themselves at that slender figure.

Jin Pingyue's form drifted and darted, dodging and weaving through the flood of beasts that blotted out sky and earth, while purple gleams flashed in her hands; at every sweep, monsters howled and died. But the beasts that had come so suddenly were far too many, and in moments they packed that patch of ground so tightly there was scarcely room to set a foot. At the last she was leaping and wheeling across the backs of the strange creatures.

In a short while more than twenty monsters had died beneath the Purple Edge, but the legs of Jin Pingyue's trousers had been torn in several places. And in the darkness beyond, an endless horde of beasts still seemed to be pouring out—where in this dark forest could so many monsters possibly come from?

Jin Pingyue pressed her lips together, knowing she must not be entangled with these savage creatures. She stretched her right foot down and touched it to the back of a tiger-headed, leopard-bodied monster, and her whole body soared upward into the air.

At first, following Jin Pingyue's wishes, she was unwilling to fly out over the Black Forest. For one thing, doing so would inevitably expose their position, and there seemed to be poisonous miasma above the forest as well; for another—and more importantly—once they left the Black Forest, tracking the Necromancer ahead would become far more difficult.

But at a time like this, there was no room to worry about such things. Her body shot straight upward. The monsters on the ground below were savage, but none of them seemed able to fly; countless beasts packed the earth, roaring and bellowing, hideous beyond description, truly terrifying.

Just as Jin Pingyue was about to reach the tops of the towering trees, a strange noise rang out. The black trees that had been tangled together in dense thickets suddenly seemed to come alive, and amid the shifting shadows countless black shapes swooped down from above, mingled with a heavy stench—there was likely deadly poison among them as well.

Jin Pingyue was startled but did not lose her head. Her body halted abruptly in midair, and where a violet gleam flashed, a ring of purple light appeared above her head. A moment later the black shadows struck down through the air; meeting that violet radiance, they burst apart with a ceaseless crackling, and in an instant more than a dozen dark shapes shattered and flew scattering in all directions. Seen from afar, they were black branches—only what sprayed through the air along with them was a foul black sap.

Though Jin Pingyue had blocked that one wave of monstrous trees falling from the sky, her body was still driven downward. The countless beasts on the ground grew excited at once, roaring and howling in chorus, and many leaped up with all their strength, lunging at her falling body.

Jin Pingyue's face was pale. Her white hands swept again and again, and the violet radiance blazed brighter, shifting in an instant from above her head to beneath her body. Before she touched the ground, that blood-chilling "thuck-thuck" sound had already begun to ring out without pause. Within the range of the violet light, more than a dozen monster bodies burst apart with a thunderous crash, blood spraying everywhere, until even Jin Pingyue's own body was stained red over a great portion.

But that reek of blood seemed only to inflame the monsters around her further, and in the blink of an eye countless others came lunging up again. Sweat had already appeared on Jin Pingyue's brow. Without the slightest hesitation, she swung the Violet Radiance Blade to hold off one wave of beasts, forced her body upward, and threw all her strength into charging forward.

At this moment Jin Pingyue's situation was perilous in the extreme: below her countless savage beasts gave chase, above her endless monstrous trees blocked the way. She could go neither up nor down, and could only fly forward with all her might through the midst of the forest.

By now the Black Forest was filled everywhere with the shrieking of monsters, echoing far and wide; the black wind howled, and the whole place was a hell on earth.

Dodging the sharp claws of a beast that leaped at her in midair, Jin Pingyue cut a whole black tree that blocked her path clean in two with a single stroke and flew through the gap. Yet what appeared ahead was only more monsters and endless black trees that seemed like demons and fiends...

Fighting and fleeing forward in this way, she knew not how long it lasted, until at the very moment when Jin Pingyue felt her strength beginning to fail her, a thread of light suddenly showed through the dimness ahead.

Jin Pingyue was overjoyed, her spirits surging. The Violet Radiance Blade flared brilliantly; with one stroke she cut down a huge grey wolf that had lunged up from the ground, and threw her whole body toward that light.

Shadows danced like roaring demons; countless black trees pressed down from above. Wrapped in the violet radiance, Jin Pingyue cut down every beast she met and felled every tree in her path, slaughtering her way through until flesh and blood flew everywhere and ghosts seemed to weep and wolves to howl—forcing a passage clean through that uncanny, unfathomable Black Forest. Behind her lay broken branches and beast carcasses, blood and black sap spattering across the sky.

When she burst out of that Black Forest, this woman who had once been so charming and alluring was covered from head to toe in blood and filth, like a figure of blood, hideous and dreadful beyond words.

Yet when she made out the surroundings, her breath still coming in gasps, her face changed once more. She was standing on what was unmistakably a cliff—merely a huge rock left bare by the Black Forest. Beneath the rock drifted cloud and mist, and where the light of the sky passed through, strange colored radiance seemed to flow.

One glance was enough for Jin Pingyue to know that those colored clouds and mists were the deadliest miasma, fatal to any who touched them. And now, from the Black Forest behind her, the roaring of countless monsters rose again—right at her back.

Jin Pingyue clenched her teeth, gripped the Violet Radiance Blade tighter still, and whirled around—only to feel a roaring buzz in her head that nearly brought her to her knees, her body swaying several times. These past days she had scarcely rested properly at all, and today she had faced countless savage beasts and demon trees besides; even a body of iron would have been strained to exhaustion.