Qianye didn’t leave immediately after letting Su Shi go. He instead brought out a paper and drew a map according to the man’s description, frowning as he fell into deep thought.
The Attawa were only at a basic level of civilization. Their mathematics and cartography skills were only at the elementary level. Their understanding of space and geography came from their superior perception and strength.
Hence, there were a lot of conflicts in the locations and lay of the land that Su Shi had described. It wasn’t that obvious when Qianye was simply listening, but things weren’t quite right when he put them on paper. The world was so vast that a bit of deviation would end up with hundreds of kilometers in error.
Qianye finished drawing the map, but it wasn’t useful beyond simple reference.
This produced even more confusion. Why were the Attawa, such a strong people, so undeveloped as a civilization? Any other race would see a qualitative upgrade when their strength had reached a certain level. Just like how the void colossi had always been more intelligent than the humans. That being said, civilization was the culmination of countless years of collective experience. The void colossi were small in number and loners by nature, so they couldn’t form anything even close.
The thirteen Attawa tribes put together would number close to a hundred thousand, and that was enough to form the foundations of civilization. There was no reason for them to be so backward.
This was probably a deep-seated issue, so it wasn’t surprising that Su Shi couldn’t give Qianye an answer. There would be opportunities later to find an answer.
Qianye pushed his questions to the side for now. He sat down in the cave, tore open the void with his fingers, and began cultivating. He had acc.u.mulated vast amounts of essence blood just from the prey he had killed in passing. The Evernight side of his cultivation had reached its limit more or less.
Although he had the Book of Darkness that could convert both sides of his cultivation to chaos origin power, Qianye was still used to striking a balance between the two.
The daybreak origin power in this world was beyond thin. Fortunately, he could still slice through the void and absorb the void origin power there. The Profound Combatant Formula was incomparably tyrannical in that it could produce daybreak origin power from void origin power. Hence, there was no need to worry about the energy supply for now.
This cultivation took an entire night. Qianye felt better only when his daybreak origin power was full to the brim. Next up would be for the Book of Darkness to slowly convert this energy. The Mystery and Glory chapters also served to accelerate the refinement process.
Now that he had finished cultivating, Qianye’s thoughts went back to his mission in the inner world.
What exactly was the darkness origins? What were the dark races doing with it? Qianye knew nothing. Why would Anwen tell him all of this?
Ignoring Anwen’s intentions for now, Qianye made ready to head back to where the demonkin were building their tower. Even the Masefield Clan Lord would be gravely injured if Qianye could launch a successful sneak attack. One had to know that Progia was already injured and likely not fully recovered yet. If he were to suffer another wound and an Imperial heavenly monarch was to take this opportunity to attack, it was very likely that he would fall in the inner world.
The more he thought about it, the more Qianye felt that the plan was feasible. Even if he couldn’t land the hit, it would still serve to spook the demonkin clan lord and slow down their operations.
After making up his mind, Qianye spent yet another half a day making preparations. The preparations weren’t anything too complicated—it was to instill three powerful bullets with origin power. Two of them with chaos origin power and one with Venus Dawn.
Not a lot of materials could withstand Qianye’s origin power at this point. Qianye had spent all of his savings before entering the inner world but only managed to gather enough materials for two and a half bullets. The third bullet could withstand chaos origin power, but it would not be able to accommodate a power-up from the Wings of Inception, so Qianye decided to substitute it with Venus Dawn instead.
Fortunately, the power of Venus Dawn was at the extreme of yang and served to restrain the dark races.
With these three bullets formed, Qianye inspected his equipment and left for the tower.
He didn’t move all that fast, taking his time to inspect traces of dark race movement along the way. He wanted to see if there were small squads in the vicinity that he could eliminate, plucking some feathers off of the demonkins’ wings.
On the way out, Qianye had chased the Attawa warrior with all his might and gone all out to cover thousands of kilometers. The journey back was like a cautious stroll that would take several days.
The trees of the inner world were as tough as steel, and it would take great strength to topple one over. Qianye’s pupils shrank as he scanned the surroundings. First, he searched for signs of movement before moving to the fallen tree to search for clues.
There were two different parts to the cut edges—one was clean and smooth, while the other was somewhat shaggy. It was likely that the tree had been sliced through with a blade first and then slammed with great force.
Qianye ran his fingers along the cut surface and saw some darkness origin power stuck to his hand. This darkness origin power wasn’t the type active in the inner world but the one used by Evernight experts. It was so pure that traces remained even after it had been eroded by the living origin power of the inner world.
Only the source origin power remained so Qianye couldn’t tell which race it belonged to. All he could ascertain was that it belonged to a dark race expert.
The Evernight experts had reached this place with their exploration?
Qianye got up and explored the surrounding areas and soon found traces of combat everywhere. The remnant energy in the environment proved just how fierce the battle was.
Qianye followed these tracks through the woods and soon began to see bloodstains. He looked up to see an Attawa body. The person was dead, nailed to a tree with a wooden spear.
The spear was the Attawa’s own weapon at first, yet it had been used to kill him.
Continuing forward, there was a large patch of forest that had been leveled. All the ancient trees within a hundred meters had collapsed toward the periphery in a radial pattern, almost as though a hurricane had erupted therein.
Qianye walked toward the center of this storm and noticed a small shrub still standing therein. The leaves moved with his hand as he reached out to touch them.
There was nothing special about this bush. It had only survived the tempest because it happened to be right at the center. However, Qianye did find a drop of coagulated blood on one of the leaves. This wasn’t the faint fluorescent green blood belonging to the Attawa but rather the blood of an Evernight expert.
Qianye could sense that this blood belonged to a demonkin.
He knelt down and sniffed the dried blood, then looked up to find similar traces of blood on a nearby tree.
Qianye appeared over there in a flash. After a brief observation, he confirmed the direction in which the demonkin had left and followed suit at great speed.
He saw yet another battlefield before long, or rather, a massacre.
Dozens of Attawa warriors had fallen here, many of them disfigured beyond recognition. What attracted Qianye’s attention the most was the giant that had collapsed on the ground.
One of his hands had sunk deep into the ground. The man’s body had been frozen in his final battle posture, and even his pained expression was clear to see.
Qianye circled around the giant’s corpse like a spirit.
The weakness of the Attawa’s freely mobile joints became clear—their durability.
The giant was valiant in battle, but he had ultimately fallen to a group attack by dark race experts.
In truth, Qianye had fought the giant to a draw a while ago only because it was a contest of brute strength. He hadn’t even used any combat techniques.
If Qianye had used everything in his arsenal like the Wings of Inception, Dragonsgrave, and chaos origin bullets, a single shot would’ve taken the giant’s life. One should not forget that he also had the Red Spider Lily.
Qianye could take down several of those giants if it were a life-or-death situation. These giants possessed constitutions comparable to grand dukes, but their technology was simply too primitive. They had no equipment to speak of, which reduced their fighting power by half compared to experts of the same rank.
With such a difference, an Evernight grand duke could easily take down a couple of giants on his own.
From how this giant had died, Qianye could tell that he had been surrounded and attacked by a number of powerful experts. His death was inevitable.
Qianye found yet another fierce battle nearby where an arachne glorious marquis lay frozen on one knee. His eyes were wide open in shock, but there was no longer any spirit in his gaze.
The lethal blow was a half-spear through the back of his head. Apart from that, there were over a dozen broken spears of varying lengths in other parts of his body.
Yet even the biggest spear among them had barely managed to pierce the shield. The others were only stuck on the surface. Several spears lay on the ground before the marquis, their tips distorted after failing to go through the shield.
The same went for the injuries on the marquis’ body. There were several dozen stuck in his body, but most of them had only managed to inflict flesh wounds after going through the armor. This kind of injury was nothing to the arachne.
Qianye picked up one of the spears and put it back after a brief observation.
The Attawa spears were crudely made. Even the metallic ones were at a very basic level of blacksmithing, inferior to the humans’ craftsmanship before their awakening as intelligent beings.
The arachne marquis wasn’t that much stronger than the Attawa warriors, perhaps one rank higher than people like Su Shi, yet they were incomparable in terms of gear.
The number of native warrior corpses around the marquis numbered close to a hundred.
