THE MARTIAL KING, VOLUME 8 - Season 19 Episode 15

Complete silence enveloped the whole stone forest.

Zen could only hear his own quiet breathing as he entered the forest, his senses on high alert.

The place did not belong to the universe, so Zen couldn’t use the power transfer skill. In addition, the aboriginals of the Divine Refinement Forbidden Land and the martial artists from the divine land were also there.

In this forest, all the plants including trees and weeds were all stones.

When Zen stepped on the forest ground, the weeds under his feet broke occasionally.

Nevertheless, he kept moving. After four hours, Zen estimated that he had traveled about five hundred miles. If he had traveled by air, he would’ve covered the same distance in just seconds.

However, it would be dangerous to expose himself in the air when he was unfamiliar with the place.

The sky got darker, and Zen saw that the starlight which hung from the cave’s dome-like ceiling began to dim. Clearly, night and day also existed in the Divine Refinement Forbidden Land.

However, the night had come too quickly. Within the time of a few seconds, the bright day had completely been replaced by darkness. There was no transitional process at all.

This darkness was unable to affect Zen’s perception. A green light flashed in his eyes, and the blurry world of darkness gradually became clear again…

“Keep moving.”

At that moment, Zen wanted nothing more than to meet a martial arts practitioner to gain more knowledge and information about the world he was in.

Just at the moment the darkness fell, Zen felt the earth suddenly tremble.

“Boom, boom, boom…”

Huge feet stomped heavily on the ground and formed many craters.

Not far from Zen was a ‘mountain, ‘ which moved rather slowly. It turned out to be a huge monster’s body that was about over ten thousand feet tall, but its head was surprisingly small.

After the gigantic being had walked for a while, it stopped and stretched out its tiny head towards the stone forest. It opened its mouth and began to chew on the branches and leaves.

‘But those are stones–it even eats stones!’ Zen thought. He was only about fifty feet away from the creature, and he was shocked to see it eat stones.

What he didn’t know was that the stones contained life energy. Zen saw the stones as nothing different from the hard and brittle common stones, but they were natural food for the creatures in the Divine Refinement Forbidden Land.

Perhaps such a creature’s intelligence did not evolve in its evolutionary process. It had an enormous body, but not a predatory behavior. In fact, it had a rather mild nature.

Then again, in the world of nature, mild creatures were destined to become food for others.

A high pitched scream that came from the darkness suddenly disturbed the quietness. The entire forest became lively, followed by strange voices. Zen didn’t understand anything at all, but he was certain that the creatures in the darkness were intelligent!

While the mountain-like beast was simple-minded, it wasn’t stupid. Its huge body turned around once it heard the noise.

Its huge build enabled it to cross a wide span in one step. It wasn’t slow either when it ran at full speed–but as it slowly adjusted its direction, the shadows in the stone forest got closer and closer. At the same time, they frantically jumped towards the mountain-like beast’s body!
Meanwhile, Zen had completely hidden his aura in the darkness. However, he could also clearly see what the shadows were. They looked like monkeys that were less than half a meter tall.

These monkeys were slightly different from the monkeys Zen had seen before. At the very least, their mouths didn’t stick out and they didn’t have a chin like an ape’s.

Many of them simply leapt and passed Zen. They had a clear division of labor between them–the strong ones attempted to chase away the huge beast, while the fast ones climbed onto its huge body and moved towards its neck.

It wasn’t long before Zen heard the huge beast howl, before it finally fell to the side with an earth-shattering thud.

To the shorter creatures, such a gigantic beast seemed like a huge mountain of meat. The said creatures then dug open the beast’s thick skin and began to divide the fat beneath it in an orderly fashion.

On the other hand, Zen watched hidden for a while before preparing to leave.

The creatures were all aboriginals from the Divine Refinement Forbidden Land and spoke a different language from Zen, so it would be hard to communicate with them. In any case, Zen aimed to find humanoid creatures like the Demon Night, ogres, or even Giants.

Overall, this Divine Refinement Forbidden Land was not as dangerous as he had imagined.

Soon enough, he disappeared into the stone forest in a flash. He planned to advance and continue to explore.

Just as Zen had gone deeper into the stone forest, he heard a faint sound.

Although the sound was gentle, the thing moved extremely fast.

The sound had caught Zen’s attention at once.

His body moved once more, then he agilely traversed through the forest. He chose a tree trunk, then suddenly stopped on top of it.

“Swoosh. Swoosh…”

He heard two extremely soft sounds once again!

Zen’s eyebrows twitched and his long sword slightly trembled. A beam of sword light slashed out and formed an arc, which spread out quickly.

At that moment, the stones within a thirty-mile radius around Zen shattered!

“Whoosh whoosh whoosh…”

The things that had followed Zen no longer had any place to hide. Thus, they spread their wings and flew into the sky!

‘Huge bats?’ Zen was stunned.

The creatures had jet-black bodies and a pair of obsidian fleshy wings. They were like spies who moved secretly in the night.

When their wings were fully spread, they could stretch as long as about seventy or eighty feet.

Apart from the monkey-like creatures that Zen had seen before, it seemed that the creatures that lurked within the stone forest were especially large in build.

Could this be the world outside the fairy palace?

There were creatures of enormous builds that lived in the huge forest outside the fairy palace. However, the trees in the world outside the fairy palace were unimaginably tall, so Zen quickly dismissed such a possibility.

If Zen’s speculations were correct, the world outside the fairy palace was located somewhere in the divine land, and this place wasn’t the divine land.

“Whoosh whoosh whoosh…”

The bats flew across the sky, but Zen only saw black shadows suddenly flash and then disappear from his sight. Then, they moved around him quite swiftly.

Although they flew extremely fast, they couldn’t escape the range of Zen’s watch. He gripped the long sword even tighter. If the giant bats dared to attack him, he would kill them immediately.

However, the giant bats seemed to be quite intelligent. They looked like they dreaded Zen’s long sword and didn’t dare come closer.

Zen didn’t bother to deal with them anymore after a long standoff. Instead, he sped up in the darkness and continued to move forward.

As he moved forward, the giant bats continued to trail closely behind him. They didn’t get too close to him nor retreated. Instead, the bats kept a safe distance from him.

‘I wonder why they keep following me, ‘ Zen thought. Suddenly, he felt very strange.

After Zen had advanced about four hundred miles, he finally reached the end of the stone forest. The bats stopped as well. They still wanted to follow Zen, but they seemed afraid of something ahead and kept hovering above Zen’s head.

‘What kind of powerful existence is there ahead of us?’ Zen wondered.

The concept of fierce beasts came from the universe. Therefore, Zen knew that the creatures in the Divine Refinement Forbidden Land couldn’t just be classified under fierce beasts.

These creatures were also extremely territorial and refused to move forward. The land ahead of them must belong to other creatures.

Zen didn’t hesitate too much before he continued to advance alone. Overall, the creatures he had encountered in the Divine Refinement Forbidden Land weren’t that powerful; or at least, there was nothing that could threaten Zen’s life at the moment.

But as soon as Zen thought of it, he quickly dismissed the idea.

After he had passed through the stone forest, the next forest ahead seemed to be a normal one. It still looked lush and verdant despite its strange trees and flowers. It looked a lot better than the stone forest.

The moment Zen stepped into the forest, he heard the clatter of a horse’s hooves.
Along the forest path galloped a small, handsome white horse with a sharp horn on its head.

‘A unicorn?’ Zen froze.

He no longer looked as calm as before, because the horse carried a woman on its back, and her cultivation level was at the peak of the Spirit Transformation Realm.

Aside from the woman, warriors with high cultivation levels and even some world lords followed behind her.