Chapter 134: The Eerie Black Tree and Crimson Blossoms
At that moment, Li Mu was flying swiftly through the wilderness.
Today, he had flown even farther.
However, the area he had searched over the past few days was already enormous, and throughout such a vast range, he still had not found any trace of the Divine Elephant Nation.
That meant the safety of Tiger Roar Camp had improved somewhat.
So Li Mu actually slowed down instead, focusing primarily on killing monsters to earn Triumph Points, with aerial scouting as a secondary priority.
In a single morning, Li Mu had already raised his Triumph Points to 10,198.
But sometimes, the things one was not looking for came of their own accord.
Not long after Li Mu took to the air again, he spotted an enormous object moving rapidly across the wilderness in the distance.
At first, Li Mu assumed it was some large monster.
After all, the strongest monster he had encountered so far was already at the Seventh Grade.
The farther one moved away from the Vacuum Zone and deeper into the Abyss, the stronger the monsters became.
But once he flew closer, Li Mu immediately grew excited.
It was actually a running elephant, and on its back was a massive wooden frame.
Seated atop that wooden frame were at least thirteen or fourteen people.
It looked like some kind of acrobatic performance, yet it had somehow achieved a strange sort of balance.
At last, he had found them!
Li Mu quickly flew nearer and circled overhead for a moment to observe.
He absolutely could not kill these little darlings.
Where these Divine Elephant Nation people were going, and where they had come from, he would have to rely on them to find out.
Although the giant elephant was massive, it was not slow at all when it ran. It was even somewhat faster than an ordinary warhorse.
But after following it for a while, Li Mu began to feel puzzled.
Huaxia’s troops used a five-man squad system. If more than five people gathered together, the aura they gave off would attract monsters.
Yet there were more than ten people on this single elephant.
Why had it not attracted any monsters?
The occasional monsters they encountered were simply ones already on their route, not monsters drawn in by their presence.
By now, some of the people below had already looked up into the sky at him.
An eagle circling overhead the whole time was bound to draw attention.
Although the ceiling of the Abyss had the surface world above it, the Abyss seemed to possess a strange Restriction, one involving stretched space.
For example, from the entrance of the Abyss, one only needed to descend a thousand or two thousand meters by the Abyss Elevator to reach the ground below.
But once one left the Vacuum Zone and traveled deeper into the Abyss, then flew upward, it might take six or seven thousand meters of ascent just to reach the ceiling.
The deeper one went into the Abyss, the more immeasurable the height became. There were even places where it might be ten thousand meters or several tens of thousands of meters high.
And if one thought drilling upward through the ceiling could lead back to the surface?
The strength of that ceiling was such that even Earth Rank experts could not damage it in the slightest.
If one descended through the Abyss entrance in Ironhand City, one could clearly see that the thickness between the horizon and the Abyss ceiling was four hundred and sixty meters.
Theoretically, that meant if one dug downward from the ground of Ironhand City for four hundred and sixty meters, one ought to reach the Abyss ceiling.
But the deepest well humanity had ever drilled downward at present was thirteen thousand meters.
And even then, they still had not reached the Abyss ceiling...Mysterious, distorted, and unshakable!
That was the sense of helplessness the Abyss and its many Restrictions imposed upon humanity.
It was as though the Abyss did not exist on the same spatial layer as Blue Star.
It was as though only the Abyss entrance, that breach which had appeared on its own, served as the link connecting these two planes.
Whether it was the sunlight entering the Abyss and being infinitely stretched until it blanketed the entire realm, or this distortion and extension of space, humanity was still studying it all to this day.
Li Mu immediately sped up a little.
He flew ahead to a high point, transformed into a mosquito, and quickly descended, successfully landing atop the elephant’s head.
Once he landed on the elephant, Li Mu seemed to understand why these people could gather together without attracting monsters.
It was because this elephant carried a kind of energy, similar to the energy given off by his own cloak.
It could conceal the energy aura emitted by human Martial Artists.
After transforming into a mosquito, and with the elephant running at full speed, the wind became much stronger, so Li Mu wedged himself into the folds of the elephant’s skin.
There he remained, bathed in the stench of curry and dung.
The smell nearly drove Li Mu mad. He almost wanted to cancel the transformation and slaughter every one of them on the spot.
He followed the elephant for a full hour.
At last, something changed ahead.
There were also more and more monsters in the surrounding area.
Li Mu immediately flew up, transformed into a bird with a soft pop, and rose into the air to look down.
Ahead of him stood a gigantic black ancient tree. It was so black that it looked as though it had been charred by lightning.
Yet its branches were dense and luxuriant.
And on those branches, brilliantly red blossoms were actually blooming one after another!
That was right.
Flowers growing directly from the branches!
And on the ground centered around that black ancient tree was a black swamp.
The swamp had a radius of roughly seventy or eighty meters.
Around the edge of the swamp stood about a hundred soldiers of the Divine Elephant Nation. Armed with all sorts of weapons, they were working together to slaughter the monsters drawn there.
They were clearly using the method of exposing their aura to attract monsters as well.
As long as their people spread out and moved the elephant off to one side, the gathered people would continuously attract monsters.
Once a monster was killed, several men would drag its heavy corpse over to the edge of the swamp and throw it in.
That was the fate of every monster drawn there. They were killed together, then tossed into the swamp.
Those blood-streaked grooves all over the ground were the drag marks left behind over time.
After a monster corpse slid into the swamp, it sank almost at once.
After a few bubbles of pus rose to the surface with gurgling sounds, a burst of foul white vapor erupted, as though the swamp were some sort of corpse-dissolving fluid.
And not long after each monster corpse was thrown into the swamp, something would happen on the branches of the black ancient tree.
Either a new flowering branch would sprout, or one of the existing flowering branches would slowly grow larger.
Li Mu observed for dozens of minutes before finally noticing this pattern.
Meanwhile, two people from the Divine Elephant Nation sat on the branches of the black ancient tree, chatting and laughing.
At the same time, they watched to see which red flowers on the tree had fully bloomed.
Once one had, they would step forward, pluck it, and store it inside a Storage Ring.
Whenever one of them had gathered enough, he would take out a Flying Carpet and sit on it.
The Flying Carpet would slowly drift over the swamp, carrying him to the edge.
Then another person would take his place, riding the Flying Carpet back onto the tree.
As for the one who had finished gathering flowers, he would sit together with several others on the back of one of the elephants.
Then the whole group would chant some strange Incantation toward the elephant.
Soon afterward, a glow would gradually burst forth from the elephant’s body.
Then, with a whoosh, both elephant and riders vanished from the spot.
Li Mu stared in astonishment.
So after all that, the elephant itself was their method of teleportation.
Every nation had a different level of research into spiritual energy.
But when it came to things like storage and teleportation, each nation had developed its own methods.
The Divine Elephant Nation, it seemed, did not need Return Stones. Instead, it used elephants to teleport.
But the problem was this.
If the elephants could teleport, why had those people just spent hours riding one here at a run?
There was a very high chance that these elephants could only teleport one way.
They could only return, not depart?
Li Mu did not think the matter could be that simple.
What exactly these flowers were for, and how the Divine Elephant Nation’s elephants teleported—he had to find out all of it.
And if he wanted to understand those things, then he would have to follow them back to their base.
Li Mu flew into the distance, transformed into a mosquito again, and landed.
Then he opened the system.
These ten thousand Triumph Points had been saved precisely for a moment like this.
What kind of Divine Ability could help him slip into their camp?
Once again, Li Mu turned his attention to the Seventy-Two Transformations.