Chapter Ninety-Three: Deadly Pursuit

“Medicine, medicine, the life-saving medicine!”

In the thick curtain of rain, Ji Hao carried the fever-hot Man Man on his back and climbed cautiously through the dense tangle of branches and leaves. A stalk of Life-Tethering Continuity Grass, a vine of Hundred-Jointed Thousand-Gold Vine, three Tiger-Fang Blue Bloom flowers... The rainy season was a tremendous nuisance. Not only did all manner of beasts vanish, even the herbs that could usually be found with relative ease had mysteriously gone missing.

Only beneath trees with extraordinarily dense foliage, where the rain could not penetrate, could one find a few useful herbs with sufficient medicinal power.

A quarter of an hour later, Ji Hao placed the herbs he had gathered into his palm, crushed them hard, and ground them into medicinal juice. Little by little, he fed it into Man Man’s mouth. Man Man swallowed it instinctively. Her body, which had been searing hot, cooled somewhat, and the wound on her back no longer bled. A very faint, transparent membrane formed over it, barely covering the injury.

“Man Man, from now on, you must learn the means to save your own life.” Ji Hao carried her on his back and tied her tightly to himself with a tough, flexible vine, whispering his admonition as he moved, “This is the Southern Wastelands. No matter how powerful your father and mother are, no matter how many older brothers and sisters you have, no matter how many people obey your orders, in the Southern Wastelands, only when your own fists are big enough can you keep yourself alive!”

He crept carefully a few steps along a branch, and his eyes suddenly brightened. Beside a huge bird’s nest, he discovered a star-speckled mushroom shining with a faint silver glow. This kind of mushroom had long absorbed the power of the stars, containing an extremely potent vital energy, and thus possessed formidable medicinal force.

It was excellent material for preparing advanced healing shaman medicine; eaten raw, it could still exert some effect.

Inside the nest, two huge golden-crested turtle doves crouched lazily together. Occasionally, raindrops splashed onto them, making the two great birds tremble slightly, yet their tightly shut eyes did not move in the slightest.

Ji Hao carefully extended his hand, inch by inch reaching toward the star-speckled mushroom. “Like those things your father gave you to save your life—whether shamanic treasures or shaman medicine—you must always carry them on you. You’ve seen it yourself: even Uncle Yingyan cannot protect you at every moment.”

Man Man nodded fiercely, clutching Ji Hao’s shoulder with both hands, watching his every movement in nervous silence.

She did not know what a star-speckled mushroom was. With her background, there was no need for her to learn such things. Whatever shaman medicine she needed, even the legendary lost or secret remedies, there would always be countless shamans eagerly presenting them to her.

But she knew that whatever Ji Hao wanted to pick must be good for her. At the very least, along the way, Ji Hao had fed her more than a dozen kinds of bitter, hard-to-swallow medicinal juices. Those medicines had healed her injuries considerably and made her body much lighter.

Man Man secretly made up her mind: she must remember Ji Hao’s words well, and from now on she would never leave the various life-saving shamanic treasures and shaman medicine her father had specially bestowed upon her lying about carelessly.

This time, when she had been wounded, she could not even find a single life-saving shaman medicine on her person, yet among the medicines her father had granted her, there were countless divine remedies that could raise the dead and restore life. As for shamanic treasures, if she had not minded the trouble and carried a few of those terrifyingly powerful items with her, she could have relied on them to break Di Luo’s Blood Moon Dim Ghost Slaughter Formation with ease.

“I was wrong. I’m useless!” Man Man ground her teeth and muttered softly.

“You’re not wrong. Your father is wrong.” Ji Hao gently patted her head with the back of his hand, while his other hand had already closed around the star-speckled mushroom.

Man Man stared at him with wide eyes as though she had heard something utterly unimaginable—her father was wrong? In the Southern Wastelands, no one had ever dared speak ill of her father. Yet Ji Hao said it so casually, so naturally, and she somehow felt no offense at all.

Her father truly did seem to have been wrong.

If she had had even a little more experience fighting in the forest, if she had possessed even a little more awareness of danger... or even if she had not been pampered and indulged since childhood, but had trained and tempered herself as Ji Hao did, then with her noble bloodline, if she had already awakened her bloodline power, what would the Blood Fang Troop behind her have been worth?

“My father was wrong, and I was wrong too!” Man Man clenched her teeth tightly. The wound on her back suddenly twitched, and a dreadful evil force was spreading through her whole body along the flow of her blood. Fearing that Ji Hao might be distracted and worry about her, she forced herself to endure the agony, the kind that felt as though her organs and entrails were being cut apart by knives.

Holding the star-speckled mushroom, Ji Hao slowly drew his hand back while watching the two great birds in the nest with vigilance.

Golden-crested turtle doves were not especially fierce birds, but their cries were sharp and clear, able to carry far through the dense forest. If they were alarmed, there would be no escaping the Blood Fang Troop, which was frantically searching the mountains and woods everywhere.

But the more one feared something, the more likely it was to happen. One of the golden-crested turtle doves suddenly opened its eyes wide. Ji Hao reacted with lightning speed, his hand striking like a flash. His right hand, still bloodied and mangled, seized the great bird by the neck and with a sharp crack snapped its cervical bones.

But the other golden-crested turtle dove flapped its wings in terror, abruptly opened its eyes, and let out a shrill, piercing scream.

The cry carried hundreds of yards. At the same time, from two hundred and fifty yards to the left of the great tree and one hundred and seventy yards to the right, the urgent splashing of feet through water sounded in unison. In the space of a single breath, eight and twelve dark-skinned slave soldiers of the Blood Fang Troop rushed out from the left and right respectively.

“They’re over there!” Fourteen Blood Fang warriors armed with heavy swords and giant axes strode toward this side. Of the remaining six warriors, five raised powerful crossbows strung with metal wire and loosed thirty bolts in rapid succession from afar at Ji Hao. The last man flicked his wrist and sent a thumb-sized round sphere flying into the sky.

The sphere smashed through a great mass of branches and leaves, rose to an altitude of more than a mile above the ground, and exploded with a boom.

A phantom blood-dripping fang appeared in the air. All around, shrill whistles rose and fell in succession through the surrounding forest, and a large group of Blood Fang warriors rapidly converged on this place.

Ji Hao let out a wild howl, drew his long sword with a backhand motion, and headfirst plunged down from the great tree. The thirty arrows narrowly missed his body and thudded into the trunk behind him.

The force behind those arrows was terrifying. The short three-foot shafts actually pierced straight through a tree trunk so thick it would take seven or eight men with outstretched arms to encircle it, leaving transparent holes the size of a human head in the great tree.

Ji Hao fell headfirst through the air, then twisted his body in a bizarre turn. The sharp sword he had taken from the Blackwater Mystic Serpent Tribe’s great shaman flashed with specks of cold light. Along a strange curved trajectory, it slashed out silently.

With this stroke, Ji Hao infused it with the tiniest trace of the charm contained in the phantom Heaven-Splitting strike.

The sword light, ethereal and profound, tore open the weakest point in the techniques of the fourteen Blood Fang warriors and drove straight through their throats. Sword energy surged like a torrent, and fourteen bloody heads flew skyward. A flash of golden-red fire flickered behind Ji Hao’s back; two wings appeared and vanished in an instant, carrying him swiftly into the vast, dense forest.

Hundreds of Blood Fang warriors surged in from all sides, but Ji Hao’s figure was already nowhere to be found.

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