Slumbering Gatekeeper

I found a suitable space to set down near where the battle had taken place—originally I'd planned to clear out a few of the magical beasts in the area, but I'd confirmed that those nearby were already wary to frightened of me since I'd taken out basically the top predator of the immediate area. That didn't stop them from having a go at me a few times through the night, but thanks to the alert charm I easily thwarted them and wiped them out. All of them combined advanced my Qi about the same as the single Sabrefang Leopard, and dealing with the carcasses so that even more magical beasts wouldn't be attracted was pretty annoying. None of them dropped cores either—the Fourth Earth Realm was the "Core Formation" realm for both cultivators and Magical Beasts, and these were Third Realm, so they didn't yet have cores.

Even after several such interruptions, I felt refreshed by morning. Convenient, though of course it was just a taste of the reduction of physical needs of a cultivator. A Technical Studies lesson on the topic had mentioned that by the time I broke through to the First Spirit Realm, I'd only need to sleep every week or so, and my need to eat and drink would be even less.

I'd need to be a lot more careful from here on. In the Dark Forest, Fourth Realm magical beasts were a lot more common, though there were still those in the Third Realm. Against a single such enemy, I'd been able to evade more or less perfectly, but if I aggroed more than one at once, things would get dangerous. Not that I wouldn't win—I'd taken on more than one Dive MMO mob near or slightly above my level at once plenty of times. The problem was that I'd always gotten through those with an exchange of blows where I got the edge over the enemies with high-damage skills, and recovered my HP with natural out-of-combat regeneration.

Here, I had neither of those yet. Sure, I could recover from genuine injuries faster than a normal human, but at this point it was more like doing so in one week instead of several weeks, at least according to the Academy. And of course, I couldn't learn any "active ability" techniques until the Sixth Realm. If I got hurt more than a little even once, I'd lose even more time than my head start had given me.

So, I crossed the Dark Forest without messing around for an instant. Because of how much care I was taking, that took another day. Beyond was a short plain between the forest and the three further areas, a more barren one where magical beasts were fewer and weaker than before and beyond. Mostly, they were those that couldn't subsist in the Dark Forest or deeper into the reserve and were, according to the lesson covering it, more inclined to leave cultivators alone than in the plain, making this place the closest thing to a safe zone outside the base camp.

I'd planned at first to backtrack to the forest to practice hunting Fourth Realm beasts since they were weaker than the ones in the canyon. I decided to at least take a look at the canyon first though, and quickly saw that the entrance to the canyon itself came with a fitting test of my readiness to enter it. Sleeping right in front of the trail leading down the canyon, there was a large black bear type magical beast. No doubt it had an official name, but I didn't know it.

Still, it showed no signs of stirring as I approached carefully. I got a dangerous feeling from it, which meant it was probably higher than me in cultivation level. Nevertheless, it showed no signs of stirring even a minute after I began to approach. 

Another thing I lacked for the moment that I'd had in Dive Games was a method to see or sense an unknown enemy's level. With that in mind, I decided to err on the side of caution and treat this like an encounter with an un-aggroed ??? Level enemy. In other words, assume it was too strong to actually fight against, and in this case, test if it was possible to sneak around it. Sure enough, even as I passed right by it to the start of the slope down into the canyon, close enough to hear it snore, it didn't so much as twitch. Even when I started backing off back toward the forest, not being as stealthy out of nervousness, it still ignored me completely.

This was no time to try to take on an enemy like that. So, I went back into the forest after all. The magical beasts of the PVE had better senses than Dive MMO enemies, but otherwise they behaved pretty similarly to at least ones in the more realistic ones I'd played. I made a couple of successful kills—Black Boars, the most common enemy type in the Dark Forest—and neither of them died with intact cores.

Only seconds after I'd determined this, I heard a rustling and within seconds, a Speartail Wolf emerged into the small clearing and growled as soon as it spotted me. A second later, it let out a howl, which was answered by two more, one to the left and one to the right ahead of me.

The encounter had caught me flat-footed, unable to retaliate with my bow. Fortunately, climbing trees and moving among treetops may have been a situational skill in Dive Gaming, but it was a situation I'd run into plenty of times. Usually I needed to use one or a series of activated movement skills to get up a tree, but here I more or less managed—though a little clumsily—simply with my enhanced strength and agility.

I'd made sure not to go too deep into the forest, so in just a few minutes I emerged back into the barren interim plain. I could tell the wolves had been following me though, so I had my bow out as I turned back to face the tree line. Sure enough, they chased me outside of their home turf, and I managed a surprise headshot on the lead wolf. 

I tried to make the chase last as long as I could, but eventually they caught up to me and encircled me. By then though, the one which had led the charge was wounded, to the point that it was flagging enough to be the last to catch up. Before they could start a coordinated attack, I switched to my sword and cut deep into the wounded one's neck.

As I'd hoped, the blow proved too much for it. Even so, this was not a good scenario since the other two were a lot fresher than I was right now. Looks like I got a little carried away. I figured I'd rather face them like this than spend a longer time taking potshots at them from a tree branch only for them to escape.

But the canyon floor will be way more dangerous anyway—if I can't handle this, I might as well give up on going there solo!