Chapter 56: Qiongqi

Luo Qi walked slowly through the woods, choosing the opposite direction every time a clamor sounded in his ears. He did not know how long he had been walking; whether from cold or fatigue, his legs had stiffened, and he moved mechanically, not daring to stop. The Qiong Forest was filled with sounds everywhere, as if thousands of people had suddenly crowded into the woods. They were noisy, talking incessantly, not minding in the slightest that they might be overheard.

Most Mages were of the silent type, and Luo Qi was one of the rare, garrulous ones among them. Yet, the current clamor made even Luo Qi feel astonished, as if a human tour group had just been dropped off here.

But Luo Qi also suspected that he had gone mad; in reality, the Qiong Forest remained silent, and everything he heard came from his own hallucinations. Even the things he had experienced in the sunless underground, he dared not say were true. The longer he walked alone in the woods, the more blurred that experience became.

For a time, he remembered having killed someone; a middle-aged Mage had stood trembling before him, tracing a faint energy circle in his hand, the Shield fragile and vulnerable. He did not know where he had found such immense power, but he had shattered that Shield with a single blow and then taken the Mage's life.

He trembled in fear, the sensation of having killed still lingering on his hands. After trembling and convulsing like an epileptic for a while, he regained his composure, sobered up a bit, and was able to convince himself that it had all been a hallucination. It was impossible for him to have the ability to kill a Mage capable of creating a Shield, nor did he have the intent to kill; he was just an ordinary person.

Yet, after a while, he suddenly found himself incessantly reciting profound Magic theories. He recited the formula for traversal, then went on at length reciting the synthesis method for Energy Crystals, unable to stop even if he wanted to. Once he was able to stop, he found that he did not understand the things he had recited at all, so perhaps these things were merely his own delusions, not real theories.

But thinking this way, these were all hallucinations, and the situation in his memory where Zhao Zhiyan had gripped his throat must also have been a hallucination. Soon, that experience underground became vague, and he began to believe that none of it had ever happened.

But he still avoided the clamor in his ears; those people really talked too much, complaining about the cold, complaining about the idiot who had assigned them to the forest. And there was fear; someone was incessantly talking about why the Qiong Forest's defenses had been turned off, who could turn off the defenses, and perhaps the end of the world was coming soon. At the very least, this continent was about to be finished.

Luo Qi could not distinguish truth from falsehood, nor did he want to listen to these words. Moreover, he would occasionally hear someone say that if they found a stranger in this forest, they would definitely slaughter the bastard first! Because the reason they had been brought to such a cold place, wandering around the forest like an idiot, was all because of this dead man.

Regardless of whether this was true, it was enough to make Luo Qi jumpy. He ran hurriedly, like a driven animal, avoiding these sounds.

Besides this, there was another terrifying reason tormenting him, only he had been unwilling to admit it. If he admitted this, either he was mad, or this world was no longer his world. This truth he was unwilling to admit was that he only heard the sound of voices, yet he had not seen a single shadow of a person.

Heavy clouds pressed down on the highest treetops of the forest; there was not even a breath of wind in the forest, only a strange message mixed into the slightly warm air: a blizzard was coming. In the white forest, countless ghostly shadows seemed to drift; they screamed, they clamored, they whispered, they were in twos and threes, they were everywhere.

Luo Qi felt a trace of pain; it was the loneliness and panic of being expelled from the world of living things, a pain that even surpassed the cold and his physical exhaustion. He walked aimlessly, moving further and further away from the human voices, and the forest grew sparser around him.

He crawled on his hands and knees, squeezing through the thickets growing between the trees, when suddenly the view opened up before him; he felt as if he had walked through a forest gate. Before him was still a world of ice and snow, but between the woods of the distant mountains, a frozen great river shone under the dim sky.

Luo Qi stared blankly at the river surface, not knowing for a moment where to go. He remembered that the Qiong Forest was bounded by the great river. The forest inside the river bend was the Mages' Qiong Forest, while the mountains and woods beyond the great river were pure nature. There were no human voices here, his mind cleared a little, and he could vaguely begin to ponder problems.

He vaguely remembered that the Qiong Forest had defenses. Without permission, no one could step in, nor could they walk out. As he thought this, he did not know which memory it triggered; it automatically verified his memory and even made him recall additional details. The Qiong Forest was dense with the Devil's Words, which would activate by chasing a Mage's energy, so no one could escape the prison; once a prisoner walked into the Qiong Forest, they would be identified.

Luo Qi clutched his temples; he did not know when he had begun to know these things, nor did he know why no one had come to hunt him down yet. If there was one thing he could be certain of, it was that he had now broken out of prison.

Moreover, he had luckily walked to the edge of the Qiong Forest. As long as he crossed the river... but there would surely be a defensive barrier on the river, and perhaps traps as well.

If by luck he could successfully cross the frozen river, where could he escape to? He looked groggily at the silent mountains and forests on the other side; he did not know if it was psychological, but the mountains and forests on the other side looked even more savage. If he walked in, he would be walking into a wild world. There were neither Mages nor humans. That was not a range his physical strength could walk out of, and he could not discern the direction; he could escape the Qiong Forest, but in the end, he would still die silently in the primeval forest.

Things having reached this point, he was no longer very afraid of death; he just could not reconcile himself to dying so ridiculously.

Just as he was hesitating whether to take a step onto the river, he suddenly heard another sound, and Luo Qi could not help but tremble. That sound was more indistinct than a human voice, as if it were speaking another language, some strange signals of varying lengths, mixed with anxious intent and a trace of cruel, bloodthirsty pleasure.

Luo Qi did not know what exactly he was sensing, but he turned his head back abruptly.

Behind him, at the edge of the forest, stood a beast with dull-colored fur.

Luo Qi's first reaction was that he saw a tiger; given its height, it might even be a Siberian tiger, but then he realized this was not a tiger. Its skeleton and height might be very similar to a tiger, but it lacked the elegant lines of a mammal; its structure was rougher, its form more primitive, and its exterior was covered in something that looked like fur but was shorter and sharper, a harder substance between fur and scales.

The shape of its skull was strange, its forehead unusually large, with flat and wide ridges that looked like failed double horns at first glance. Its eyes were ginger-yellow, and its teeth protruded from its mouth like a saber-toothed tiger's but were jagged and uneven, not even following the universal phenomenon of biological symmetry. And on its shoulder blades hung two black, withered, fleshy wings, somewhat like the atrophied, unsuccessful wings of a bat.

This thing was, in every sense, a biological failure.