In the freezing wind and thick snow, Chu Yunsheng could no longer detect directions by his vision anymore. The only thing that prevented him from losing his sense of direction in the wild was the connection between the forth map and the ancient book.
He had acute burning pain in his throat, and his ear canal. He felt as if he opened his mouth, he could spit out thick smoke.
On the way towards the location of the fourth map, Chu Yunsheng did not know how many snowballs he had swallowed, but it just couldn’t reduce the heat in his body.
He did not know the cause of the heat, but he was sure that it was not caused by the fire elemental energy, because he didn’t feel any signs of energy fluctuation. However, he didn’t know if it would get worse not.
After the Monster Seal Talisman was reversed and when he returned to his body, he almost couldn’t adapt to the feelings of hunger and sleepiness that had been taken away from him for a very long time.
After the body was fully recovered, it didn’t break through the barrier of Yuan Tian Stage Two as he had expected it would have. Instead, it reached the peak of Yuan Tian stage two.
The senior practitioner was right. There were no shortcuts in the journey of cultivation. Even after he used such a dangerous method to try to increase his own power, he still couldn’t improve much.
In fact, he didn’t really care about which level he was at, at the moment, just like he didn’t really care that he didn’t have any food with him. He began to feel emotionally numb.
He used to store many things in this storage talisman, but in the end, he lost them all.
This was what he learned from the woman who asked him to help her to move a dead body.
Don’t try to fight fate. Because you will never win.
You want to decide your own destiny? That is just a joke. Since ancient times, even the mother Earth could not decide its own destiny, who do you think you are?
Just follow the route that has been planned for you, and do not resist. It may sound pessimistic, but it is also a way of living.
Chu Yunsheng felt like he still had a lot to learn. At least, he needed to learn to be like that woman who was able to smile next to her brother’s dead body. He felt like, if he was able to become like her one day, he would not feel pain anymore, he would not feel sad anymore, he would…
He curled up his body and slowly fell asleep in a cave while thinking how to completely feel numb…
Darkness once again covered Earth like a big thick curtain. A strange wolf-like beast slowly crawled out of its nest and began to look for its prey.
Looking closely, its head was slightly flat, its eyes were glowing the bloodthirsty red luster. A pair of sharp sabertooths were extended all the way down to its bottom jaw outside its mouth. It was sniffing the ground while moving cautiously towards a cave in the mountain nearby.
Over there, it detected the smells of a human being. It seemed like it had already forgotten about the past that it was raised by a human boy. It just wanted to feed its stomach and its two kids, and human beings were the easiest targets that it knew of.
The air was filled with dangerous smells. However, it had no other choices. It hadn’t had any food in the past few days. It urgently needed food energy to produce heat in its body. Otherwise, it didn’t know if both it and its kids would survive this snow or not.
Despite feeling hungry, it was cautiously and slowly sneaking in the dark. It had learned that patience was very important during a hunt since the beginning of the apocalypse.
In the darkness, it used its nose and ears to discern the movements around it. If it was powerful enough, it could even see faint shadows on the ground.
It had been searching the smell for some time already, and finally, it located the place where the prey was.
But it didn’t attack immediately. Instead, it moved around the place while using its nose to detect if there were any other monsters nearby.
Only after it was sure that the place was safe, did it begin to run and charge into the cave.
The prey was in the cave and it was very close to it. This time, it would definitely be able to get the food to feed its babies.
Everything seemed to be so perfect, its mouth began to open and drip saliva, it felt like it could even taste the meat at that moment.
However, it was at that moment, a bright light dot appeared in the sky and it was coming toward it fast. The light was surrounded by the violent energy that was several times more powerful than the monster’s energy.
“Woosh!”
The bright object flew past it, and then stopped above the cave. It instantly lit up the entire area.
It was startled. But it didn’t run away immediately. Instead, it lowered its front body and growled while slowly moving backward.
The bright light didn’t attack it. It seemed like it didn’t come here for the monster. It was just quiet spinning above the cave.
After the monster retreated far away did it finally begin to turn around and run away.
*****
Chu Yunsheng woke up feeling acute burning pain in his throat again. When he noticed the bright light outside the cave, he didn’t panic.
He wrapped himself up tightly with the cotton coat that had several holes in it and swallowed very hard. He slowly sat up and casually picked up a pile of snow, then stuffed it into his mouth as if it could reduce the burning pain in his throat.
“Cough! Cough!”
When the cold snow touched the areas that had a burning pain, it instantly caused itchy sensations making Chu Yunsheng coughing constantly.
After a few seconds, he finally stopped coughing. He then reached out his hand and began to draw something on the ground. The energy quickly flew out of his finger and followed the lines he drew.
Talisman complete.
Then he quietly controlled the talisman to fly out of the cave to store the bright object outside the cave.
The talisman then returned to his body, and the area outside the cave returned to darkness once again, as if nothing had happened.
He tightened his clothes and laid down again. Since the woman died, the bow had been following him. He had also attempted to bury it three times already.
In the last time, he even tried to store it in a storage talisman and bury the talisman under the ground. However, he didn’t expect that the bow would be able to ignore the talisman’s restraint like the book. It broke out the talisman and caught up with him again.
From the ancient book’s response, Chu Yunsheng was pretty sure that it was the bow that the senior practitioner left behind. However, he wasn’t interested in the bow. In fact, he hated the bow.
The bow had a strange and powerful magical ability to trigger his negative desires. If he was slightly careless, the power of the bow would easily make him lose his mind.
Chu Yunsheng hated the feeling of being controlled, despite feeling that he had no control over his own fate. He could try to learn how to feel numb towards his fate, However, he still had a choice when facing the bow that killed Old Purple and other insects.
Not only that, but because of its attack, he still could not speak, and because it was able to influence the user’s mind, he couldn’t personally kill that woman.
He didn’t have time or energy to find out whether it was the bow’s fault or it was the user’s fault. He was not that smart and philosophical to think about this problem. He couldn’t even understand why the book wanted to suppress his insect’s body.
To him, just like what the senior practitioner said, the bow could be abandoned.
In the beginning, he thought that what the senior practitioner meant was that if the bow was lost, there was no need to spend time to find it. However, he just realized that what the senior practitioner really meant was that the bow was not a good thing. When it was necessary, the bow could be abandoned.
Chu Yunsheng felt annoyed by the bow constantly following him. Since he couldn’t get rid of it and he still didn’t want to see it, he simply stored it in a talisman, sealed it onto this body and ignored it.
He just wanted to sleep at that moment. The long-lost sleep made him feel very comfortable. Only in the dream, he could forget everything…
He, who had lost the insect’s detection ability, didn’t even realize that if it wasn’t for the appearance of the bow, he would have been attacked by the strange monster already. Maybe he was in deep sleep earlier, or perhaps, his mind had not adapted to his human body just yet.
When it got to the second day, he was once again woken up by the acute pain in his throat. The snow had already stopped outside the cave and the hazy shimmer also appeared in the sky.
The sensation of hunger began to appear in his body, the stomach sac began to move inside his body making the hungry noises.
The cold and tasteless snowballs could no longer satisfy his stomach anymore, however, he didn’t have any mood to look for food. All he did was to stand up slowly and begin to walk towards the direction of the fourth map again.
The sky was forever dim, and the journey seemed to never end. He didn’t know how long he had walked. He felt like his beard was very very long. He had eaten mice, also strange plants that grew in the snow, but luckily, he had not starved to death.
The pain in his throat didn’t reduce any, instead, it was getting more than more painful as his insect’s body slowly recovered.
If it was just that, he could just use snowballs to ease his burning pain, but when the force of bow went into his body, it instantly made the fight between the force of the book and the force of his insect’s body become even worse.
The energy he cultivated was either sucked by the bow or sucked by his insect’s body. Both of them were trying to suppress each other, although they couldn’t do anything to each other.
Chu Yunsheng had tried to get rid of his insect’s body. However, he discovered that he couldn’t unseal the monster seal talisman and take it out from his body anymore.
He also could not throw away the book, and he could not even throw away the bow. All he could do was to helplessly watch three forces fight each other constantly inside his body.
But eventually, he was irritated by them and decided to stop cultivating energy. After all, all the energy he cultivated would be sucked by them. So there was no point to cultivate it.
All three forces instantly stopped fighting each other after the energy supply was cut off.
However, without the energy supply, he himself also could not walk very far.
A few days later, he finally passed out on a ruined highway.
When he woke up again, he noticed that he was on a trailer that carried many dead bodies, and there were noises around him.
“Drag all the bodies to feed flowers, those who are still alive, arrange them to do some work!”
Chu Yunsheng glanced around. What he saw next made his numb heart instantly start to jump again.
What he saw was a plant that had a long stem, but on the top of the stem, there was a human head!
Human? Plant?
