章 47: The dream moth
Bai Yun and the rest of the group reached the beast den soon enough. Once there, the group split up into smaller groups. Bai Yun and Zhang Zi split up to move alone, while the rest of them were moving in teams of two. They surrounded the mountain and moved independently from different directions.
Bai Yun chose a different cave from the two he had entered and left from before. The cave that he had chosen to enter was one he had observed before. This was one of the caves that was used by many different races.
Bai Yun moved about stealthily, not wanting to alarm the insects. He took out the tracker and walked in the direction it was pointing towards. He quickly saw more than one insect on his way, and quickly dispatched them to the afterlife.
But after a while, Bai Yun found himself walking in the opposite direction from the one the tracker was pointing towards. The changing directions and the meandering tunnels had completely disoriented him.
Bai Yun decided to ignore the tracker and only focus on the intuition provided by his god sense.
Usually, intuition is used by making use of the five senses, perception and experience. It makes use of the subconscious to rely on things that are missed by the six senses and make judgments based on that. Thus intuition becomes very useless when the target is outside of the senses of a person.
But the god sense works by tying itself to the heavenly dao itself. It was something that went against reason. It could even be considered as a god's right. Since it was fundamentally different from perception, Bai Yun could use them both independently. It had many terrifying powers. Only, Bai Yun was unable to use any of them with his current strength. He could not even trigger its intuition and was placing its bets on it triggering passively.
Bai Yun walked through the maze, going through it only by relying on his god sense. Soon Bai Yun noticed that he had reached a place where the walls were thicker than before. Bai Yun smiled, thinking that he had made some progress towards the flag.
Soon after that, Bai Yun ran into a ladybug. Realizing that he had finally left the region of the ants, Bai Yun cut the ladybug into two with his sword. A moment after than he frowned as he felt the resistance of the beast. It offered much greater resistance than the other beasts of the same level. It seemed as if it was a defense-oriented beast.
Bai Yun was especially weak against these types of enemies. He used his experience and disruption of rhythm to fight. He simply did not have enough strength to break the defenses of such beasts.
After complaining to his god sense for leading him down the wrong path, Bai Yun stuck with it anyway.
Bai Yun stared at the cave walls and he walked forward carefully. He knew that he was in the region of the beetles, and it could become dangerous if he was surrounded by them.
He walked carefully, taking care to make as little noise as possible. At the same time, he deployed the Assassin God's techniques to hide his presence completely.
Bai Yun sneaked through the tunnels, quickly killing any beast that he came into contact with. The number of beasts in the den was a far cry from when he entered earlier.
Bai Yun walked through the tunnels in a relaxed manner. Suddenly he realized that the tunnel he was in had branched out into a cave. As he looked around, he realized that the cave was empty, but it was obvious that there were beasts living here. He realized that he had reached the living quarters of the beetles.
Bai Yun walked through the tunnels once again. But this time the difficulty had gone up by a notch. There were a lot more beetles around, and even with his ability, he was wounded a few times. Bai Yun fought through the beetles, and then soon reached a large cave in the tunnel. After spending a moment to pause and take hold of his bearing, Bai Yun entered the cave.
When he entered the cave, Bai Yun saw a large beetle sitting in the middle of the room. It was surrounded by three other smaller beetles, who were still larger than the ones he ran into before, in the middle. He stared at the beetle in the middle for a moment, before deciding to leave. There was no way he could penetrate the defenses of the beetle and kill it. So Bai Yun decided to leave and find a different place to break through to the central cave.
But just as he was about to leave, a flash caught the corner of his eye. He saw a large silvery rock behind the beetles. Bai Yun narrowed his eyes and stared at the rock for a few moments while he went through his memories trying to identify it. It took him a while to recognize the object: flowing silver.
Flowing silver was a raw material that could be made to use weapons. It was very light but not too strong. Thus it was perfect to make weapons. He already had a great sword made of even better materials, but he was lacking in a pair of daggers. The brittle nature of flowing silver meant that it was not great for weapons like swords, but it would be great for assassination weapons like daggers or flying knives.
As he stared at the flowing silver, he knew that he had no chance of defeating the beetles. His only chance was to steal the flowing silver and run away. He could not approach the beetles while hiding as there was nothing to hide behind. If he wanted to get his hands on the flowing silver, this would end up as a competition of speed. If that was the case then he would be fine. The beasts had to lose their speeds in exchange for their great defense.
Bai Yun cast wind motion, approaching the beetles at full speed. The beetles noticed him the moment he entered their cave. They turned to him and screeched, rushing at him. Bai Yun took out his sword and swung at the first beetle. It did not hurt the beetle at all, so he used the force to push himself off course, getting out of the beetle's way. In the blink of an eye, he had passed the four beetles and reached the flowing silver.
Bai Yun had long since wrapped the flowing silver in his soul tendrils. The moment he reached the flowing silver, he reached out to it and put it into the storage ring. But the momentary pause had allowed the beetles to caught up by then. In an instant, Bai Yun cast wind motion and ran away.
He heard the screech of the beetles as they chased after him. Bai Yun entered another one of the tunnels and ran away. As he did so he could hear the second circle beetles entering the tunnel to chase after him. The tunnel was too narrow for the third circle beast to enter.
As he ran, the other beetles moved to block him. Bai Yun was nearly surrounded a few times, but he managed to slip past them. He did not have any time to kill most of the beetles that were after him, so he just tried to outrun them.
Bai Yun changed the direction of his movement a few times and managed to throw some of the beetles away. But he would be found by more soon after. Suddenly he saw a crack in the side of the tunnels. He entered the crack without hesitation.
He stood panting after he entered the cave. He had spent a lot of qi in the chase. After he looked around, he saw that he was in a small cave and that there was a small crack from where he could see a second cave. With a start, Bai Yun realized that he was inside the guardian cave. The setup was identical to what was described in the book of Gong Ming.
He could not believe that he had reached the guardian caves so easily. Considering the size of the caves, he had to have walked almost straight forward to have reached it so quickly. He barely deviated from his path and had reached the guardian in record time, the only delay being the detour he took to get the flowing silver.
Bai Yun walked inside the second cave quickly. He had no time to waste. The beetles could not enter that cave so it was better to simply enter the cave and deal with the creature inside.
The moment he did so, he caught sight of the beast that was in the cave. Bai Yun was stunned for a moment as he did not know to cry or laugh. A four feet tall moth was floating in the middle of the room. It was the dream moth.
There were many different beasts that could be the guardian as well as the boss monster. Among them, Bai Yun was desperately hoping that the boss monster would be the dream moth, even though the possibility was low.
This was because the dream moth was a beast that attacked using soul methods.
In the insect world, the guardian was usually a beast at the peak of the third circle and the boss would be a half step into the fourth circle. And these wouldn't be average beasts either. They would either be beasts of great pedigree or variants. And the dream moth was a beast that would often appear. It was even noted in the book that Gong Ming gave. It would use its soul power to pull the enemy into a dream-like state to incapacitate them and then kill them. Only a soul cultivator could escape their pull.
But it would be extremely difficult for a soul cultivator to make it all the way here. But Bai Yun had. Not only that, he was at the peak of the third circle and using one of the most powerful soul cultivation techniques. On top of it, he also had the god sense and thirty thousand years of battle experience. It would be very difficult for the poor dream moth to pull him into an illusion.
Bai Yun was rather hoping that the dream moth would be the final boss because that way he would be able to easily defeat it. But having the dream moth as a guardian was fine too. At least he would be able to avoid a battle and conserve his energy.
The dream moth noticed Bai Yun the moment he walked into the cave. Its wings started to flap, and shone with a bright light. A blank look appeared in Bai Yun's eyes as he stared at the moth. It slowly drifted over to him.
When it neared him, a cold look flashed in Bai Yun's eyes. His sword lit up, and he thrust it at the moth while casting a ray of moonlight. The moth panicked upon seeing the attack, but it was too late to do anything by then. The sword pierced right through the moth's head, killing it in the process.
Bai Yun sighed in relief. It would have been difficult to kill the dream moth if he had not caught it by surprise, even if it was a beast focusing on the soul path.
Bai Yun swung his sword and put away the blood on it. He then started to walk towards the final cave. Once he reached the end, he slowly peeked around the corner.
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