Reaper of the Martial World

Book 8: Chapter 181: Bronzed (4)

The crunch of shattering rocks reverberated through the cave. After defeating the fish-frog, much like Dyon had done previously, he entered its lair.

Like the bull-bird’s underground cave, the fish-frog chose to build its home underground as well. Though, the term ‘build’ might be too heavy handed. From Dyon’s understanding, the sturdiness of objects in this world was far too high. Digging into the ground was nigh impossible.

Dyon’s divine sense solved the mystery as to why this was the first time he entered. Every inch of the soil beneath their feet was saturated with energy stones of all kinds. This evolved even the trees that bore their roots into the ground to inconceivable levels.

The underground caves were sporadic and Dyon had reason to believe that they were naturally occurring.

If he had to give a reason, it was likely because having a land be too rigid wasn’t a good thing. It was the same reason why building a tower entirely of stone was foolish. The slightest quake could break everything. The caves acted as points of flexibility.

This wasn’t all either, the caves also acted as a way to vent the pent up energy within the ground below their feet. Just from a cursory guess, Dyon believed that this land likely suffered from eruptions of geyser-like energy due to this built up pressure. These eruptions were what formed the underground caves.

Of course, these were all guesses. Until Dyon witnessed it for himself, it would remain this way.

The bronzed dug their sharp claws into the energy stone filled walls. Underground caves were some of the rare instances where it was actually possible to dig these energy sources out. It seemed the four of them loved to munch on these stones as much as they loved to eat the meat of their fallen enemies.

Though, from what Dyon could tell, they could no longer evolve from eating these essence grade energy stones. It seemed he had one more reason to find a source of saint grade energy stones. Not only did he need to heal his arm, he had to find these four a path toward further evolution.

After clawing out the easily accessible energy stones, Dyon stopped the bronzed from going any further. There was no point. They could claw away from days more and not retrieve a single more stone, the walls were too sturdy. There was only a thin layer of accessible stone within these underground caves.

Dyon carried out a few dozen after allowing them to eat a few. He used a creation array to form a makeshift wagon he attached to Ace’s back before moving on to the next target his divine sense locked on to.

If Ace had any real intelligence, he’d probably be dissatisfied that he was being used as a mule despite being the strongest of his siblings. But, he seemed happy to fulfill all of Dyon’s tasks because he got food without having to risk his life. They still were quite simple-minded despite being smarter than their mother.

This process continued onward for several days as they battled all sorts of creatures. Under Dyon’s guidance, Ace wasn’t forced to act even once, but Dyon also couldn’t find any suitable creatures to add to his hoard either.

Dyon was incredibly selective with his targets. He chose territories far from human settlements so they would be less likely to notice a change. In addition, he stopped bothering with weaker targets after their flesh stopped being as effective for him. During the first few dozen, Dyon was receiving several thousand to tens of thousands of jin per meal, but that took a significant downturn after a while.

As of now, opponents like the fish-frog might give Dyon an extra 10 jin if he was lucky.

It was only later that Dyon realized that it wasn’t necessarily the caliber of opponent, but the type of opponent he was facing as well as the kind of meat he was eating.

Dyon noticed that eating fish-frog eyes actually helped temper his eyes, while eating its legs made his legs stronger, and its tough outer skin added durability to his skin. But, similar to lifting weights, repeating the same action had little effect in the long run, so switching to different beasts gave better results.

On top of this, Dyon realized that if he honed the blood circulation techniques he had picked up from the bronzed into specific target areas, the results were even better.

His methods were quite crude for now, but in just a few days he had already added 2 million jin to his total maximum weight. If he continued at this pace, he felt that he could reach the 500 000 000 jin mark he was looking for within a year.

Finally, about a week in, Dyon came across a creature that piqued his interest.

As one might expect, it was grotesque. It had a large pink belly that seemed completely out of place. Its arms were incredibly long and bulky in comparison to its shorter hind legs, giving it the gait of a gorilla, not to mention the wrinkled face of one – though, much like it’s belly, its face wasn’t black, but pink. And, lastly, it had a long, rattling tail, a slithering forked tongue, and slit yellow eyes.

It seemed the creatures here only grew weirder. But, this would be the first battle where Ace couldn’t hang back any longer.