When he was still a good distance from the Pond of Life, Qianye felt the air around him heat up. It wasn’t just the environment, but his entire body was also starting to burn up. His blood core began to beat faster as his instinctive urges grew stronger.
This feeling was fairly similar to the high-gravity region, but also somewhat different. The environment in the core area itself had served to increase Qianye’s urges back then. For every grass and tree, every animal big and small, reproduction became their number one priority, so much so that food became second.
Near the Pond of Life, however, his urges were woken up by a certain formless calling. It was as though a voice was whispering into his ears, urging his desires forward.
Qianye looked about and observed all the living creatures within sight. His desires erupted dozens of times during this process, assailing him repeatedly like the tides and urging him to procreate.
The target of his desires included two-armed warriors, four-armed warriors, and some strange beasts as well.
“What’s going on? Could it be…” Qianye looked about suspiciously and saw that there were hundreds if not thousands of species here, most of which he had never seen before. However, Qianye was only attracted to a dozen or so of them.
With his reasoning still intact, he naturally became quite suspicious. If he could have desires for the handful of beasts and bipeds, why did he not feel anything for the remaining hundreds of species?
Qianye sensed everything again carefully and found that his desire was still targeted at that small selection. There was neither an increase nor a decrease in them.
At this moment, some of the things he had learned in Yellow Springs resurfaced once more, lectures about the various species of the Evernight world. In addition to humans, there were thousands of peculiar species among the dark races. It was even difficult to tell some of them apart from beasts. For instance, the relationship between werewolves and wargs, as well as the arachne and servspiders was fairly complicated. A batch of arachne eggs could give rise to a couple of baby arachne and a large number of servspiders.
Back then, the instructor’s explanation was that species with closer bloodlines could produce offspring, while those further apart couldn’t. As for the bloodlines and the distances between them, the instructor had no answer for that, either. In any case, that wasn’t the most important part of the lecture, which was actually expounding on the anatomy of the dark races’ bodies. This knowledge would allow them to kill enemies with greater efficiency.
The contents of the lessons he had learned appeared clearly in his mind. A certain idea popped up in his head—could it be that the species he was attracted to were the ones he could produce offspring with?
If that was really the case, then this Pond of Life was too terrifying. This wasn’t a blind suppression—the pond had actually screened his bloodline compatibility in the blink of an eye and would force him to succumb to desires without even time to think.
A two-armed lady nearby had just finished rolling about with a wild beast. The creature lay panting on the ground, fairly close to death. The naked woman wasn’t quite satisfied, however, and immediately pounced toward Qianye.
At this moment, Qianye’s desires awoke once more, and he actually didn’t feel any disgust toward her twisted expression and dirty body. His willpower was still quite clear, however. He reached out to grab the woman’s arm and tossed her toward the six-armed giant behind him.
The six-armed giant didn’t even bother to block the incoming human projectile. He merely sent her flying from the collision as he chased after Qianye.
Qianye randomly picked up a four-armed warrior, tossing him and the beast below him toward the six-armed giant.
With his momentum broken, the six-armed giant was finally angry. His six limbs danced like the wind as he smashed one fierce beast after another into smithereens. He also paid little attention to where his feet landed, stomping several beasts-in-heat to death in just a few steps.
The closer he was to the pond, the clearer and stronger the calling became. However, the current influence was far from being a threat to Qianye. He simply channeled his Venus Dawn, igniting a wisp of scarlet gold origin flame and dispelling all undesired urges.
He glanced back at the relentless pursuer with a serious expression. Both parties had already reached the middle section of the procreation region, where the greatest density of wild beasts could be seen. However, that six-armed giant seemed to have no intention of giving up on the chase. He didn’t even look at the beasts scattered across the ground. It would seem he was also quite resistant to the mysterious calling.
Perhaps because he had gotten tired of Qianye’s disruptions, the six-armed giant suddenly picked up a couple of beasts and tossed them at Qianye!
Qianye flipped away, narrowly dodging a beast cannonball. Those fierce beasts smashed into the nearby ground and actually exploded, sending Qianye flying from the impact. Several more beasts whistled through the air and crashed into him mid-air.
Qianye had nowhere to exert force for movement at this point. Just as he was about to get struck, his silhouette blurred and vanished.
The six-armed giant turned toward a point several hundred meters away, where Qianye happened to appear. Without even thinking, the monster swung more beasts at him.
Qianye moved sideways for dozens of meters but was, once again, destabilized by the explosion. He had to fish out East Peak and used its weight to steady himself. The beasts closest to him had long since been flung into the sky.
These creatures possessed extremely strong bodies since quite a few of them had run over from the high-gravity regions. They were more like pieces of alloy steel. With the six-armed giant pitching them, the force behind each of them was greater than that of a main cannon. There was no way Qianye would dare to block them. Even brushing against them was enough to injure him.
Fortunately, the number of arrows on the giant was rather limited, and he had exhausted them during the chase. Otherwise, Qianye would have more to be distressed about.
The decadent crowd on the beach was now in utter disarray. Under the threat of death, most fierce beasts stopped their procreation and glanced over with restless cries. Most of the creatures ran in the opposite direction after seeing the six-armed giant.
However, there were also some powerful beasts that didn’t escape. They crouched low on the ground and let out threatening growls.
This was an unexpected discovery for Qianye. He had thought that the six-armed giant was at the top of the food chain in the Great Maelstrom. He would’ve never imagined that these relatively smaller creatures even wanted to challenge him.
With its prestige at stake, the livid six-armed giant stopped focusing on Qianye and swung its weapon at the nearest lizard-like beast. The creature was over ten meters long and its body was as powerful as a small warship, but it was so much smaller compared to the giant. The latter’s weapon descended with the fury of a tempest, opening up a mangled wound on its target.
The lizard possessed extremely powerful vitality. With a pained roar, it actually dragged its smashed lower-body and charged toward the six-armed giant, biting down on its calf.
The giant became even more furious. It bent down to grab the lizard and pried open the beast’s mouth. Then, its six arms exerted force at the same time, tearing the lizard into many pieces.
After killing the giant lizard, the six-armed giant bent down to pick up its weapon and roared loudly at its surroundings. This display of might caused the unconvinced creatures to gradually back away and flee.
Only then did the six-armed giant look about in search of Qianye, mysterious runes appearing in its eye. It had found Qianye’s hiding place in mere moments.
At this moment, Qianye was standing behind a couple of beasts.
He was no idiot. After seeing that the beasts had no power to even retaliate, he immediately decided to avoid trouble by hiding.
The six-armed giant didn’t care about all that. It walked over in large strides, roaring furiously while waving its weapon.
Qianye’s eyes lit up in delight.
Fierce beasts were territorial, and even more so for stronger ones. Even in the land of procreation, the area around the stronger ones would usually be empty. Although the empty strips were merely ten meters or so, they were quite evident amidst the crowds.
Qianye had retracted his aura, so those fierce beasts did not see him as a threat. They considered him food, and one that they might or might not like. Hence, the creatures didn’t react when he hid behind them, only keeping their eyes on the six-armed giant and maintaining an attack posture. As they saw it, the latter was their greatest foe.
Qianye had finished observing the situation. Holding East Peak, he maintained a distance of ten meters from the fierce beasts at all times. This distance was sufficient to prevent agitating them, but he was also still within their territory.
The six-armed giant flew into a rage after seeing that his threat was ineffective. It quickly scooped up several smaller beasts and hurled them over.
Qianye was standing behind a giant ape-looking beast. It was almost ten meters tall, with patches of scale under its fur and bony spikes along its back. One could immediately tell that this was no easy opponent. In the Empire’s records, this primate was called a berserk ape, a top-ranking fierce beast only second to a void colossus. Just like its strength, the ape’s temper was also one of the worst. Seeing that the six-armed giant was attacking, the ape swung its fist about and swatted away the incoming fierce beasts.
However, comparing body sizes, this berserk ape was only a bit taller than the giant’s knee, not so different from a small pet. After swatting away three rounds of fierce beast projectiles, one of its arms dropped down. Then, the next beast bullet sent it somersaulting backward and falling a hundred or so meters away.
With the berserk ape beaten half to death in the blink of an eye, the others who knew they were inferior immediately tucked their tails between their legs and fled.
Qianye smiled wryly, feeling quite helpless at the moment. He had no idea whether this six-armed monster had received some sort of kill order, or if Qianye’s shot back then had hurt too much.
The field of procreation here was now devoid of beasts in heat. All of them had shrunk to a different corner, staring at the furious six-armed giant. The fierce beasts in other areas had also sensed the restlessness.
Qianye looked through the corner of his eyes and found that the beasts around the berserk ape were relatively big. Even though they all looked fairly different from one another, their common quality was that they were comparable to the ape.
Meanwhile, a massive entity like the six-armed giant was mostly unique, with few even reaching the height of its knee. No wonder it couldn’t feel the call to reproduce.
Qianye suddenly turned back and gazed at the Pond of Life. Everyone knew that the marine creatures here were much bigger than the land creatures, and that the six-armed giant’s potential enemy would most likely appear from the water.
