Chương 6: Lost in the Green — Part 3

The battle between the two beasts began as sound before it became sight. On the morning of his third day, Wei Chen was three hours into his trek when the first roar split the air—a bass vibration that rattled leaves and sent birds exploding from the canopy. He froze mid-step, his qi cycling into defensive readiness, and listened. A second roar answered the first. Higher pitched, more vicious. Then the crashing began. Trees snapped. Underbrush flattened.

Two massive bodies collided with enough force to send shockwaves through the ground. He moved toward the sound. Not recklessly—his training warned against charging into unknown combat. But strategically, circling wide through thicker undergrowth where his smaller frame gave him advantage, approaching from downwind. The combatants came into view through a screen of hanging vines. The first was a Jungle Tyrant —he recognized it from the legacy's bestiary, though the description had not prepared him for the reality.

It stood eight feet at the shoulder, its body covered in overlapping scales the color of dried blood, its head crowned with a crest of bone. Qi radiated from it in visible waves, distorting the air. This was not a mid-grade spirit beast. This was apex. The second combatant was stranger. The bestiary contained no entry for it. It moved on four legs like the Tyrant, but its body was longer, lower to the ground, covered in fur rather than scales. Its head was narrow, almost reptilian, with too many teeth.

And most disturbingly, it seemed to flicker—phasing in and out of visibility, leaving afterimages that persisted for fractions of a second. Not in the repository, Wei Chen thought. Extinct species? Evolved form? Something new? The Tyrant struck first, its massive forelimb descending like a hammer. The fur-covered beast phased sideways, the blow passing through empty air, and retaliated—claws that left trails of violet light, carving grooves in the Tyrant's scales that smoked and hissed. They were evenly matched.

The Tyrant had raw power, crushing strength, scale armor that could deflect most attacks. The phasing beast had speed, unpredictability, and those violet claws that seemed to bypass physical defense entirely. Wei Chen watched from concealment, his breathing slowed, his heart rate held steady by the Primordial Breath Cycle. He cataloged their movements, their weaknesses, their tells. The Tyrant was faster turning left than right.

The phasing beast could only maintain its intangible state for two seconds before needing to solidify. Both accumulated damage—the Tyrant's scales cracked in three places, the phasing beast's left foreleg dragging slightly. They fought for twenty minutes. The jungle around them was devastated—trees shattered, earth torn, the ambient qi so disturbed it felt like standing at a storm's edge. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. The end came suddenly.

The Tyrant feinted left, forcing the phasing beast to dodge right—into the path of a waiting tail strike. The impact crushed the beast's ribs with an audible crack. It phased one final time, trying to escape, but the damage was too severe. It materialized five feet away, staggered, and collapsed. The Tyrant did not hesitate. It closed the distance and bit down on the phasing beast's throat, shaking its head once, twice, then releasing. The body went limp. But the victory was costly.

The Tyrant's wounds—those violet-grooved cuts—were not healing. The smoke rising from them had turned black, and the beast's movements were slowing, its qi circulation visibly disrupted. Wei Chen understood. The phasing beast's claws had carried some form of corruption, a spiritual poison that attacked from within. The Tyrant had won the battle but was losing the war. He waited. The Tyrant limped in a circle around its kill, scent-marking, defending its prize. But with each circuit, its steps grew heavier.

Its breathing grew labored. The black smoke thickened. An hour passed. The Tyrant collapsed beside its kill, tried to rise, failed. Its eyes, which had glowed with predatory fire, dimmed to embers. Wei Chen emerged from concealment. The Tyrant saw him. Its lip curled in a final threat display, but it lacked the strength to follow through. Wei Chen approached slowly, openly, making no aggressive movements. The beast's qi was fading, its life force bleeding out through wounds that would not close.

He ended it quickly—a single strike to the skull, compassionate in its speed. The Tyrant's body relaxed into death. Two apex predators. Two beast cores. And the phasing beast's body, which represented something the legacy could not explain. Wei Chen worked for three hours. The Tyrant's core was massive—a fist-sized crystal of deep crimson, so saturated with qi that it pulsed like a heartbeat in his palm. This was wealth. A single core of this quality could fund a year of comfortable living.

The scales would make armor worth a merchant's annual profits. The bones were dense with mineral deposits that alchemists prized. The phasing beast's core was smaller but stranger—translucent, shifting colors as he turned it, from violet to silver to something his eyes refused to focus on properly. He had never read of anything like it in the legacy. Not under any name. Not in any era. The legacy describes Crimson Flame Apes inhabiting this region, he thought. It describes Ironback Drakes and Serpent Vine clusters.

But the Crimson Flame Apes were supposed to be five feet tall, social, relatively harmless. I have seen no sign of them. What he had seen instead were Jungle Stalkers and Thornhide Boars and Jungle Tyrants and phasing beasts that did not exist in any taxonomy he possessed. The ancient ecologies had shifted. Species had vanished. Others had evolved into forms unrecognizable from their ancestors. The knowledge in his mind was a snapshot from ten thousand years ago. The world had not stood still.

He gathered what he could carry. The Tyrant's core. Its most intact scales. The phasing beast's core and a sample of its fur. He left the rest for the scavengers already gathering at the edge of his senses. By the time he finished, dusk had painted the jungle in deep purple and gold. He made camp in a tree, too far from the kill site to attract attention, and spent the evening cataloging his discoveries. The mental dictionary he was building grew more complex. Azure Soulroot might be Widow's Lace in local markets.

The Tyrant's scales were called Bloodscale Plates by modern armorers, though the legacy called them Crimson Wyvern Scutes. The phasing beast had no name at all—not in his knowledge, not in any approximation he could find. He fell asleep running through possibilities, and his dreams were filled with creatures that existed between known categories.