Chapter 3663 — Deliberate Sabotage
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
New to this place and preferring to play it safe, Wei Zhao had no intention of wasting true qi on this black ape. He turned at once, meaning to shake it off with his Butterfly Microstep; even if this was the creature's home ground, Wei Zhao remained absolutely confident in his speed.
Yet to his surprise, for all his forbearance, the black ape kept doggedly on his heels, looking very much like it would never give up until one of them was dead. That left Wei Zhao somewhat puzzled—what exactly had he done to provoke the thing? Surely he hadn't accidentally blundered into its den?
In the blink of an eye, man and ape had already burst several hundred zhang through the dense canopy, and only then did the black ape finally slow down, as though it meant to give up.
Wei Zhao breathed an inward sigh of relief. This bore out his earlier guess—it seemed he really had strayed unwittingly into the other's territory. For jungle spirit beasts with fiercely territorial instincts, an outsider like Wei Zhao breaking into their lair was indeed cause for a fight to the death.
Yet just as the black ape seemed about to give up, a massive dark shape abruptly materialized above its head without the slightest warning. Before the ape could react, a bloody maw swallowed it whole, then went whistling back into the dense canopy, too fast for anyone to make out its true form.
Hisss! Having witnessed the entire scene from beginning to end, Wei Zhao could not help drawing a sharp breath. Before that behemoth set its eyes on him, he hurriedly fled the spot.
Only after cautiously putting nearly a hundred zhang between himself and the place did Wei Zhao finally slow down. His heart still racing, the corners of his mouth nonetheless curved upward of their own accord: this back mountain had indeed given him a proper welcome, a real show of force to put him in his place.
He was, after all, a skilled hand at the early Foundation Establishment stage. Terrifying as that spectacle had been, enough to make one's scalp crawl, Wei Zhao had still managed to take in plenty of information in his haste.
That colossal thing was a great mottled python. The stretch of serpent body it revealed in that instant was easily as thick as a water barrel, and though it kept its head hidden and its tail concealed, impossible to see in full, Wei Zhao could infer that it was at least ten zhang long—over thirty meters, in other words—which made it an out-and-out behemoth.
More to the point, the fact that this mottled python could swallow a mid-Heaven stage black ape in a single gulp meant its strength had to be at least at the peak of the Heaven stage, and quite possibly it was a powerful spirit beast at the Foundation Establishment stage.
In this deep mountain forest, facing such a ferocious, hideous Foundation Establishment spirit beast, Wei Zhao had not the slightest confidence of escaping unscathed; it was not at all impossible that one slip would cost him his life here. Thank goodness the python's prey had been that black ape—had it been him instead, he truly might not have dodged that strike just now.
Recalling then the warning his long-suffering senior brother had given him before departure, Wei Zhao instantly felt the man had been absolutely right: his enemies were not only the other newcomers—the back mountain itself was the most dangerous source of all.
From the moment he had stepped off the flying spirit beast until now, only a few short minutes had passed, and already he had encountered two powerful spirit beasts in succession, one of which might even be at the Foundation Establishment stage. Such a thing was simply unimaginable out in the wider world.