Chapter 6 – Silent Hills

Chapter 6 – Silent Hills

In a blink of an eye, another month or so had passed by and the Mu Ren Gang challenge was less than a week away.

During this period of time, Ye Chen split his time between his horse stance practice every morning and night, building his physical fitness, and martial art training.

At this point of time, Ye Chen could already lift a three-hundred-pound huge rock over his head with only one hand; and with both hands, he could easily hold thousands of pounds over his head.

Besides all the noticeable improvements in his body, Ye Chen was finally powerful enough to use sword arts more freely and easily in regards of his speed and control. His power had reached a new level, he could slice seven falling leaves, cut through a huge thick tree, and leave four inch gashes on a huge rock, all in just one single move.

It’s time to move on to battle skills. Ye Chen realized he already reached his peak, and improvement is limited if he kept training. Instead of wasting his time and energy, he might as well try to gain some experience fighting and new techniques so that he could reach his full potential.

However, real battle skills were hard to obtain. Ye Chen was still just an outer disciple who could not go out into the world to risk life and death in battles; even if Ye Chen were of the same realm as an inner disciple, he would still lose after two or three moves. That was the difference between having a life and death experience or not.

Thankfully, he did not have to fight with an actual person to experience life and death. There were many demonic beasts in this world for that matter. A demonic beasts could actively or passively train themselves, when the richness of the Demonic Beast Qi inside their body reached a certain level, they would go through a mutation and evolve into the next level.

Since thousands of years ago, the ancient people classified the Demonic Beasts in different ranks. Rank 1 and 2 were comparable to the Mortal Realm; Rank 3 and Rank 4 were comparable to the Condensing Reality Realm; Rank 5 and Rank 6 comparable to Clasping Yuan Realm; the Demonic Beasts of Rank 6 and higher were extremely rare, only would appear in those deep ancient forests up high in the mountains.

Fighting against a Demonic Beast was not as easy as people would expect. On the contrary, Demonic Beasts are more powerful than human beings. If a monster that had hunted countless animals and humans suddenly appeared in front of you, with one look, it would scare and affect you so much that you could reach only five percent of your actual ability.

With that in mind, Ye Chen decided to go train in the Silent Hills area because there were always some low level demonic beasts around.

Putting his great steel sword down, Ye Chen straightened his clothes and walked out of the yard.

Walking down the mountain, he saw a lot of inner and outer apprentices going up and down the path and thought no matter who you are, if you want to live a good life, you would have to have money. The Ye family that he belonged to had a massive fortune, so in theory he was not poor, but sadly that was not the truth. The Ye family had a population of around a thousand people, six or seven hundred of which were businessmen helping the family business, the rest of the four or five hundred people put all their effort into practicing martial arts. However, if you wanted to protect your own property, you would have to hire protection which cost a great amount of money. So even his father, the leader of the Ye family, had only fifty thousand silvers in his personal asset, and as the son of the leader, Ye Chen was given an allowance of one hundred silver per month.

One hundred silvers per month couldn’t do much, only enough to eat well and dress decently. He couldn’t afford to use expensive medical supplements for the training of his body that the core disciples of the family or the school were able to afford.

He climbed down to the bottom of the mountain and after finding the right direction, he sped up.

Around noontime Ye Chen arrived at the entrance of Silent Hills where he started to sight some Rank 1 Demonic Beasts. Normally a Mortal Realm warrior would never dare to come to this kind of dangerous place. Even Ye Chen was quite cautious about his surroundings and kept his hands on his sword at all time, ready to react to any commotion.

Silently stalking forward, the strongest demonic beast Ye Chen had seen was a wounded Rank 2 Scarlet Fire Bird. However, Ye Chen lamented his misfortune that he was unable to hunt flying beasts.

After walking for a while and killing three weak Rank 1 demonic beasts, Ye Chen suddenly stopped and moved all his Qi to his ears to enhance his hearing.

There is a fight over there!

The biggest difference between a normal person and a martial artist was the ability to use Qi. A normal person could have amazing senses but after a point, they will hit a limit. But a martial artist could manipulate their Qi to enhance their senses. Ye Chen, by using his Qi, could faintly hear clashes of a fight about a mile away and knew exactly which direction the sound was coming from.

Following the sound, Ye Chen rushed there quietly. Pushing back the branches, Ye Chen found a forest scene with a human figures and a huge growling demonic beast.

When he was thirty steps away from the battlefield, Ye Chen jumped up onto a big tree to watch the fight from above.

In the woods, there was an emptied grassy field about fifteen meters long. And in that field, there were five teenagers holding weapons in their hands surrounding a huge demonic beast. Its body was about three meters long and looked like a tiger with black shiny hair, panting as its long bloody tongue dripped with purple liquid, its mouth was filled with huge sharp teeth and its claws were sharp and angled, measured about a meter long.

It was a Late Stage Rank 2 Poison Saw-Toothed Tiger, its power was equivalent to a Mortal Realm Rank 10 martial artist. Its teeth carried a deadly poison that, once touched, would cause your skin to fester and can only cured by a single antidote, otherwise once the poison spread to your heart, even a Condensing Reality Realm martial artist would lose their life.

Ye Chen noticed that the group of teenagers all had a golden loop symbol on their sleeves, identifying them as disciples of a low ranking institution.

The Hall of Golden Light was an institution was also a rank 9 school like the Sky Cloud Martial School. The leader of the hall, Li Yi was a Middle Ranked Clasping Yuan Realm martial artist who specialized in using the Deadly Golden Loop weaponry. According to the rumors, he used to be an outer disciple of the Sky Cloud Martial School, before he left to travel to many other countries outside of his native Heavenly Wind Country. Upon returning, he founded the Hall of Golden Light which currently had about five hundred disciples.

The five people attacking the monster were quite lacking, but had great teamwork, a result of spending a lot of time together in many different situations.

A teenage girl in red, holding a skinny sword of the Mortal Realm Stage Level 5 landed several sword attacks on the beast. By her side, there were twin boys with blades who were very bulky and powerful looking. They continuously shouted and ran around the demonic beast in attempt to focus the attacks on themselves.

Although these three people worked very hard, their attacks were not as effective as the other two in their party.

One of them was an extremely fit young man in black, holding a dangerous looking halberd, the “Verdant Dragon Halberd”. The two-meter-long weapon seemed very heavy. Every time the poisonous saw tooth tiger was about to attack the others, it would be beaten back by him and left with a bloody wound.

But the one Ye Chen noticed the most was the teenager in blue, he was about eighteen years old, only had a flute around his waist. Weaponless, his attack were actually the most powerful, every causal punch of his would conjure up a sharp black storm which forced the monster to back down.

If Ye Chen guessed right, the teenager in blue was a Mortal Realm Rank 9 martial artist, and was able to mix his Qi into the air around his palm and forcefully attack people without them noticing. Of course, the power of that attack could not compare to actually pushing Qi outside the body. Otherwise, the demonic beast would be dead already.

The badly wounded monster in front of them was already exhausted, after the poisonous smoke that it futilely blew out was pushed away by black storm from the punch of the teenager in blue, the monster turned around and tried to escape.

“Not a chance!” The teenager in blue moved fast like lightning, without restraint, and hit the side of the monster extremely hard.

Boom!

After one last growl, the monster was thrown like an old cotton bag by that punch. The beast cried pitifully before it died due to all of its organs exploding.

“Very impressive Brother Liu.” the girl in red swiped the sweat off and turned to look at the young man in blue with envy.

The teenager in blue said calmly: “This is not that impressive. In a couple of years you will match this power easily.”

The teenager in black holding the verdant dragon halberd said: “Heh years? I am at the Late Stage Mortal Realm Rank 7, it would only take a couple of months to catch up to you.”

“Mmm.” The man in blue nodded as he didn’t really mind.

The girl in red made a displeased face, as she heard the arrogant statement of the teenager in black.