Chapter – 96 - Shadow Creatures of Visionless Path

Beibei lifted her hand and sprinkled a fine, sand-like powder on the mist before her. Instead of falling down, the sand clung to the mist, before exploding into a thin stream of silver smoke, dissolving the mist wherever the silver smoke touched its layers. Patches of visibility opened up through the thick gray fog, allowing the three to gauge the area around them.

Surprisingly, it was not as pitch black as they had expected. The gray mist itself had some strange luminescent property, and gave off a hazy glimmer, which was actually quite a bit of light for their new set of eyes.

These new set of eyes worked in a very different way. They were called Insect Eyes. Each pupil could focus on a different part of the surrounding, and had the capacity of zooming in and out of the area, concentrating on the minutest details, gauging the depth, distance, mass and other attributes of all parts of the area....and it could do all of this in a very short time.

Initially the three of them were having difficulty. Even Beibei found it unnerving to focus on so many details at the same time. Finally Nanate came up with the idea of mapping down everything they could see. Though this would slow down their progress considerably, it would provide them with a detailed map for any future reference.

Moreover the visibility remained only for a short interval, before the mist seeping out though the cracks in the ground and mountain walls replaced the cleared patches. They needed to take it slow so they would not fall victim to the mutated beasts hidden within the shadows.

Beibei kept her senses spread out. The mist did not seem to affect her sharp sensory perceptions. She could feel the light fluctuations in the air and ground as the hidden beasts moved around them. both sides seemed to be warily observing each other. She and Kunwa walked flanking on both sides of Nanate, giving him the cover needed to continue focusing on the sensory map.

For the sake of safety, they had left the bigger beasts in Gladibus Valley. Only the two pigs clung to the shoulders of the two men. Kunwa and Beibei were sprinkling the dust into the mist in succession.

All of them were wearing a thick belt with a small jade box attached to it. This was a specially made contraption used by alchemists. The box was a space storage box. The inside was divided into separate compartments, and could hold up to three hundred different powders, pills and potions. There were tiny bottles, specially made to fit into the compartments, which could hold potions and elixirs. Right now, half the box was filled with all kinds of powders, potions and poisons needed for this trip.

They couldn't use elemental attacks in this passage. Well, Beibei could, since her elemental attack could absorb all other powers, but it required too much mental strength, so she saved it as their trump card. Instead they focused on the strange martial methods they had been self-cultivating since the past five years.

Actually, it was Beibei who had started practicing these weird steps, which she had learnt from who knows where. She felt an inexplicable familiarity with the techniques, yet had no idea where she had learnt it. It was nothing like the techniques used by the sword fighters in the sect.

But after practicing for a few months, she suddenly roped in Kunwa and Nanate, and forcefully made them follow the grind every day, non-stop. Initially they felt they had entered the fourth layer of hell. Why else would they wake up every day feeling they had been beaten up and broken down in their sleep!

Even though sword fighters were physically much stronger, with more flexibility and agility than the cultivators who learned mental cultivation techniques, ultimately even for them, their main focus was on elemental attacks and defense.

These varied sets of techniques and exercises challenged even the arrogant Nanate, who was very confident about his physical capacity. Within four days he felt his entire body had been broken, battered, and was being hammered and remolded into an entirely different creation!

But Beibei would not let them go. Not when Kunwa cried and fainted from exhaustion, not when even the arrogant Nanate could no longer pick himself up from the dust, not even when Lunaeri herself came to reason with her after being irritated by the mentors of the various departments for a consecutive ten days. Instead she bargained with the Head of the Sect to grant her a time period of six months. If within this time, she didn't turn the bodies of both the men into enhanced bodies without spiritual enhancement, then the mentors and Heads were free to deal with her as they pleased.

Of course, all of this was a story for a different time. Currently, each of them had an exceptional control over their speed and precision, and the agility and flexibility of their bodies had grown beyond what had previously been considered possible. And all of this without the use of a single string of elemental power. And that is what was coming in so handy today.

"These creatures are very strange. They don't seem to have a proper body form. It is difficult to find out which part to attack to get a one strike kill."

"Hmmm.....I think some of there are not just mutated beasts.....but also mutated plants."

"Mutated plants which can move about on their own?! How is that possible? Can plants too have spiritual consciousness?"

"Well, plants have life, and they also have intelligence. So there is nothing strange if they can form spiritual consciousness. Though, I think they might take a much longer time to be able to absorb enough Qi to evolve. But here there is no Qi....only this strange gray mist. Then this mist must have something which is supplementing the lack of Qi which is helping them in developing their own consciousness."

Kunwa gulped, staring at the strange shadow floating some way ahead. It did indeed look like a tree.....a dead tree, with fine hair like growth all over its trunk and broken branches. Covered by the layers of mist fast replacing the small gaps in the fog, it looked spooky, like a wailing ghost, hanging itself in the dark nothingness.

Glancing to his side, he once more struck speechless at the nonchalance with which Beibei took out a few empty jade bottles and started moving it about through the mist.

"Ummm.....are you trying to collect the mist?"

"Hmmm.....it has some very interesting properties. I will need to study them in more detail once we return to our base."

Beibei waved about the bottles for a while till she was finally satisfied with the amount of mist collected in them. Then she plugged them back and kept them in her ring space. Oh.....yeah....she found out that the strange ring attached to the rusty chain, hanging around her neck, was actually a storage space. Or rather Lunaeri had identified it for her, and then showed her how to open it using her spiritual energy.

It was filled with all kinds o plants, herbs, leaves, flowers, fruits, potions, meat, which had never seen in the desert. She had used them for various experimentation over the years, and created amazing products and by-products. Moreover, there were piles of some strange stones. Finding them to have similar spiritual properties as the Balaik Runic Stones, she had used them to experiment with a variety of different arrays and inscriptions.

Beibei silently gestured to Kunwa, then sped off towards the ghost tree, throwing a large amount of sand into the surrounding mist. The tree had already sensed her approaching, and all the hairs on the body stood out into the air, floating about like snakes. Beibei realized that this fight was not going to be easy and instantly changed her tactic. She threw another handful of sand into the mist, then her entire body disappeared.

This was one of her hidden skills, and very few in the academy knew she could teleport. For this fell under Passive Void Techniques, and though it was an elemental attribute, it was also considered a non-elemental technique, because it not use any elemental fluctuation, instead warped the space in front, and moved from one point to another before removing the warp. Automatically, the distance covered changed.

The tree suddenly lost its target and became distraught. The floating hair straightened out, looking like sharp knives cutting through the air, and it let out a very high pitched and shrill scream. Nanate lost his focus and stumbled, almost tripping over his own legs. Kunwa reached out to catch him, before holding his hands and placing them over his ears. Then he rushed to block his own ears.

But blocking their ears could hardly block out the terrifying shrieking, and both started feeling dizzy from the continuous hits on their ears.

"Stupid. Block your senses."

Nanate gave Kunwa a sharp nudge to remind him of the sensory blocking techniques they had learned at the academy. Still covering their ears, they started rotating their inner Qi, slowly allowing a thick layer to form over their inner ear. After a while both sighed in relief, and once more concentrated on the tree in front.

Beibei had teleported to the backside of the tree. Even as she moved at high speed, she slit her finger with the blade in her hand, and stuck it to the golden armlet wrapped around the upper part of her left arm. The little golden dragon's moth sucked at her cut finger like a parched demon, then finally having had its fill, it turned slightly red and transparent. Immediately the aura around her body disappeared.

She was using a three edged long dagger. Each edge was coated with a different potent poison. These were all recipes which she had found in the archives where different researches done through the ages on the various creatures of the Visionless Path were kept.

Through that, she knew that ghost tree like thing was called a Screeching Canhou Spirit...Canhou literally meant dead tree. It could absorb all kinds of elemental attacks, and was exceptionally strong. However, it was also extremely sensitive to poison. So the best technique was a covert attack using poison.

Using the momentum of her speed, she jumped into the air, and slashed at the back of the tree with her blade. The blade was made with Starmite Metal, and was very sharp and strong. As her body twisted, and she fell back towards the ground, the blade passed through the dense mist covering the body of the tree, digging deep into its trunk, then sliding down in a smooth motion.

Each edge of the blade was covered in numerous fine holes, and each hole had liquid poison pellets inside it. Beibei flicked on the tiny knob at the side of her dagger handle, and these poison pellets released into the body of the tree simultaneously, exploding on contact with the extremely low temperature of the creature.

Before her feet touched the ground, she had already teleported out of the reach of the tree, returning safely back to the other two still huddling on the ground. Raising an eyebrow, she glanced at the other two, who looked back at her, then all three turned back simultaneously as the tree started twisting and thrashing about in the air, going crazy with pain. The poison had exploded and spread to the innermost parts of the body, burning and melting every cell from inside out.

Even as they looked on, the hair-like appendages started shriveling and falling off one by one. Then the body started shriveling, the poison eating away the inner essence of the large trunk, and large chunks of wrinkled, decayed wood fell off the air, degenerating and turning to black dust even before they could hit the ground. Within minutes, the large creature which had looked indestructible, had turned to a fine black powder which now floated about in the mist or lay heavily on the black soil below.