Yin Qi was everywhere.  Not just from my pendant or the thick radiance of Thoth… Death, corpses and Darkness permeated that forest.

I’ve mentioned before, quite a few times, how Karma would always even the score.  Well, the massacre that was occurring on the beaches obviously wasn’t the first genocide that occurred on that mysterious island.

Ghosts were everywhere we went.  Everything from ethereal tigers, to giant ape-like men and women.  There were also spectral elves and serpents.  However, they totally ignored us and headed straight towards the beach.

I could hear them roaring in anger, but also cackling madly as they whispered creepy shit like: “Mmmm~, so many babies~!”, “Vessel!  Mine!  My vessel!”, or “So much meat~!  Time to eat~!”

Of course, there were also tons of Beasts lurking in the jungle as well.  After walking for a few minutes, we made it to the base of the mountain we needed to climb.  Although it seemed super-steep from the distance, up close, it was more like walking up an endless hill.

“Shit, look out!” As Johan shouted, I could hear a loud whistling noise and grabbed Mei.  She didn’t seem to understand what was happening, so I had to yanker her away, while dashing to my left as quickly as physically possible.

Then there was a loud explosion up above the trees, before fragments of wood and metal rained down around us.  “Agh~!  Damn it!” Granny Arin struggled to pull a sharpened ironwood branch out of her left calf, while standing a few dozen meters away from us.  Liara and the ginger giant seemed to escape any bodily harm though.

I grumbled “Fucking A~, I figured that we’d have to worry more about Beasts than anything else, but looks like the bigger problem is friendly fire!”

Johan quickly nocked an arrow on his massive bow and yelled “Careful!  We’ve got incoming!” He didn’t channel any mana into his weapon and simply fired off the projectile as it was; even so, the amount of force that he was able to produce was outrageous.

There was a loud *Bang!* and a whimper, but then, three tiger-sized silver-furred wolves emerged from the darkness around us.  Mei gasped, asking “Don’t they look like Lunar Direwolves?  What are they doing here?”

As Granny Arin ripped the branch out of her leg, she took out a golden potion from her ED pouch and swiftly drank it.  That nasty wound healed almost instantaneously.  Then she snickered, “Nah, they’re only Rank-F Silver Wolves.  They look domesticated though… Otherwise they wouldn’t risk their lives to try and kill us.”

Under normal circumstances, animals are pretty cautious.  Beasts are even more wary of dangerous enemies.  However, if they’re tamed or enslaved, then they would lose their self-preservation tendencies and follow their training or the orders of their master.

Those Silver Wolves had blue eyes at first, but as they growled at us, they turned bright-red.  I pulled out my revolver, however, the fight was over almost instantaneously.  Liara shot the one that was next to me and Mei in the face; the arrow pierced straight into its open snout and its entire head exploded shortly afterwards.  

Meanwhile, Granny Arin charged forward and easily used her gigantic shark-tooth mallet like a baseball bat.  The poor doggy was sent flying into the air and smashed into the closest tree, snapping its spine.  It didn’t die instantly, so she ‘mercifully’ used her bare left heel to smash its skull into a gory mess.

The last one managed to close-in on the giant ginger Archer dude, but he was so big and beefy, that he didn’t really ‘need’ a weapon to kill the Beast.  All he did was grab it by the throat with his enormous right hand and squeeze tightly, snapping its neck.

“Ugh, it’s a shame we’re on a mission… I haven’t had wolf steaks in years.  We don’t even have time to dig out their Dantians, so don’t bother trying to convince me.  Come on, we gotta get the hell outta here before-” As the old giantess was ordering us to keep moving, a deafening explosion made her decide to give up trying to talk.  It wasn’t close enough to hurt us, but my ears were still ringing.

Those fucking cannonballs were definitely made by Azrael, because he was probably the only person who had the ‘expertise’ to make them.  Some seemed to be filled with gunpowder, while others had Enchantments to do all kinds of weird shit.  I was really starting to get worried when I saw the green clouds floating around some of the other mountains.  There was also pink smog and I honestly didn’t want to find out what kind of effects they had on people.  If I had to guess, I would say that he found a way to create napalm-filled cannonballs, or something similar… Because one of those mountains was totally engulfed in a terrible forest fire.  It’s really hard to burn down a lush rainforest.

As we continued trekking uphill in the middle of the night, through the thick jungle, we did occasionally encounter a few more small Silver Wolf Packs.  Most of the time it was only three or four of them, so Mei and I didn’t actually need to interfere.  Well, it was more like we couldn’t do anything.  The enemies were dead before we had the chance.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but at that time, I had literally never killed an animal before.  Okay, maybe if you count cockroaches, ants, gnats, mosquitoes and flies… Oh yeah, those three random guys too.  

Whether it was Humans or Beasts though, I didn’t really have any qualms about ‘defending myself’.  If it was hunting for food, I also didn’t mind, but I had no experience.  However, it’s not like I had never seen gore and death before, so even as Liara, Arin and Johan slaughtered the animals, I didn’t freak out or anything like that.

Although, I did occasionally praise “Nice shot!” or “Holy fucking shitballs, that was so badass!”  The three of them were definitely overpowered compared to a handful of Rank-F Silver Wolves, but I noticed that their weapons didn’t seem to be that impressive.  Also, compared to their body sizes, they weren’t actually that strong.

The rules of cultivation seemed to indicate that the bigger a person was, the better suited they would be towards strength training.  Unfortunately, the truth was that while they had an easier time in the first four Stages, it became excessively difficult to make it to Master or beyond.  Not to mention that their power was relatively low compared to someone who was at the same Stage, but smaller in stature.  Sure, they had the advantage of reach and leverage, but their muscles, bones and skin weren’t nearly as dense or durable.  Well, I guess that isn’t really accurate.  They just don’t have to put forth as much effort in order to train their bodies; there were obviously plenty of people who abused their massive size and were far more powerful than their tiny contemporaries.

***

After two hours of slowly hiking up the mountain, we finally reached the point where it was starting to get difficult.  We did manage to avoid getting wrecked by cannonballs on the way, but all of us were starting to get a little tired.

The Yin Qi was super-heavy and since none of us could directly adsorb or condense it, we needed to be careful with our mana consumption.  Refining Yin into Nature Qi wasn’t something easy, even with my overpowered Innate Talent, so the other four obviously had a much more difficult time.

Mei swallowed a bright-blue vitamin every thirty minutes, but was still panting and out of breath.  Not only that, but there were several times when she started leaning on me or hugging me randomly.  Her face was flushed and well, it wasn’t hard for me to tell that she was suffering from ‘withdrawl’.  Hell, even I was having trouble controlling my occasional boners.

However, the two of us managed to control ourselves due to the constantly threats that surrounded us.  Our lust was kept under control our survival instincts.  Otherwise, she probably would have pounced on top of me and began grinding her pussy against my dick… or something like that?

“Awoo~!” From farther up the mountain, there was a really fucking loud howl, followed by a cacophony of at least hundreds of others.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Granny Arin grumbled as she turned towards the rest of us and growled “Most of those were Silver Wolves but that first one… It really was a Lunar Direwolf!”

Liara asked “What the hell is a Lunar Direwolf anyway?”

Mei had a serious expression on her adorable face, as she muttered “A Rank-C Beast… Do you think we can avoid it?”

Granny Arin complained “This was supposed to be an easy fucking mission!  Shit, avoid it?  It already knows where we are!  As long as that bastard decides to attack, it could probably exterminate all of us!  What I don’t understand is… Why hasn’t it acted yet?  With a pack that size, it could probably repel our whole fleet!”

I snickered, “Ain’t it kind of obvious already?  Their ‘master’ doesn’t want them to for whatever reason.  They’re guarding this mountain specifically… Ugh, can’t we like, not go up there please?”