Thick, hazy dust churned and rolled across the clearing, swallowing everything in a shroud of killing stillness and chaos.
At the center of that clearing — stained purple-black with poisoned blood — the peak Rank 2 Hundred Beast King appeared to have been utterly consumed by grief, its reason drowned beneath an overwhelming tide of sorrow.
Its massive frame was half-kneeling on the ground, clutching tightly to the small, contorted corpse of a young ape — its most beloved child — whose face was twisted in agony, blood seeping from every orifice.
Its eyes were flooded with bloody tears.
From the corners of its mouth, thin threads of purple-black blood seeped without stopping.
The Rank 2 viper's venom had not been enough to kill it outright, but it had clearly inflicted severe internal damage.
Wuu... wuu...
The Hundred Beast King raised its head and let out a series of mournful, grief-laden cries.
Its entire back was exposed to the swirling dust and wind — completely unguarded.
But within that heavy veil of dust, Lin Mu's dark eyes, hidden in the shadows, did not carry even a trace of pity.
"Good opening."
Lin Mu's thoughts moved like lightning. He seized the gap without hesitation.
In his Aperture, Primeval Essence surged into motion. The Killer Move took shape in the darkness in an instant.
"Go."
A streak of dark, deep gold cut through the air — the Rank 2 Metal Rend Leaf Gu launched like a silent bolt of lightning, aimed with lethal precision at the Hundred Beast King's exposed throat.
At the same moment, beneath the ground where the Hundred Beast King knelt, the Earth Spike Gu activated without a sound.
A spike of rock, thick and sharp as refined steel, drove upward with vicious force toward the Hundred Beast King's groin.
Every strike aimed to kill.
In the split second before both attacks reached their mark —
ROAR——!
The Hundred Beast King, which had been wailing in grief just a heartbeat before, suddenly erupted with a thunderous, earth-shaking bellow.
The sorrow in those blood-weeping eyes vanished without a trace. In its place blazed a cunning, ferocious light.
This beast had been performing.
It had sensed the killing intent lurking in the shadows long ago. It had been waiting for Lin Mu to make his move.
The Hundred Beast King's massive hand — thick as a tree trunk — swept down in a sudden motion, and from beneath the small corpse it had been cradling, it wrenched free a thick, heavy club of dark grey-black wood.
Whoosh——!
The Hundred Beast King's wrist turned. The club became a storm of motion in its grip, spinning into an airtight wall of whirling force.
BOOM!
The thick stone spike that had erupted from the ground was met with a single, perfectly timed, devastatingly powerful strike — and shattered into fragments that scattered in every direction.
The Metal Rend Leaf Gu, moving at speed, managed to slip through the edge of the club's spinning guard — but with the Hundred Beast King already braced and shifting, it only grazed across the beast's broad chest as it passed.
Shhk!
The dark gold leaf tore through the Hundred Beast King's tough hide and left a bone-deep gash that wept blood — but struck nothing vital.
Ten zhang away, hidden within the swirling dust, Lin Mu's pupils contracted to pinpoints. Cold sweat broke across his back in an instant.
"What a cunning beast."
A chill of genuine fear moved through him.
The Hundred Beast King's intelligence was absurdly high — it had known to use its own kin's corpse as cover, to conceal the weapon beneath it, to mask its own awareness entirely.
If Lin Mu had been impatient, had chosen to close the distance for a guaranteed kill strike —
That club, hidden until the last moment, would have caved his skull in like a melon.
The ambush had failed. The Hundred Beast King seemed to abandon all restraint and plunge fully into berserk fury.
ROAR!!!
It swung the heavy club in wide, crashing arcs through the haze, charging in every direction without pattern or target.
Each swing carried the force of a thunderclap. The attack range was enormous.
Ape corpses and solid boulders alike were reduced to sprays of blood and stone fragments wherever the club landed.
The entire clearing became something like the aftermath of a small hurricane.
But faced with this wild, indiscriminate assault, Lin Mu remained completely calm.
He made no reckless moves.
Instead, he pushed the Dust Escape Gu's concealment to its absolute limit, letting his body become like a weightless dead leaf — drifting with the currents of air thrown off by the Hundred Beast King's swings, waging a guerrilla war within the storm of dust and wind.
Time passed.
Gradually, the Hundred Beast King's movements in the haze began to slow. The club swung less frequently.
Its breathing grew ragged and heavy, like a broken bellows. The drain on its strength was becoming visible.
Lin Mu still did not advance.
He conserved his energy, letting the Four-Flavor Liquor Worm's gentle nourishment sustain him from within his Aperture, his own formidable recovery keeping his Primeval Essence locked steadily at around seventy percent — a safe margin he refused to let slip.
Having fought and survived in the ten-thousand mountains, Lin Mu understood this truth clearly.
A peak Rank 2 Hundred Beast King stood at the apex of the food chain. It was a terrifying existence in every sense of the word.
A single moment of carelessness, a single act of overconfidence, could plunge him into a death trap with no way out.
Then — in the moment Lin Mu paused for more than three seconds in one concealed position, watching for a genuine opening —
BOOM!
The Hundred Beast King, which had been performing exhaustion so convincingly, completed a sudden, violent turn that defied all physical logic — without any warning whatsoever.
Every trace of weakness in its eyes vanished. Its blood vitality erupted like a volcano breaking open.
Whoosh——!
With terrifying, monstrous strength, the Hundred Beast King hurled the heavy dark club like a javelin — directly at Lin Mu's position.
The club tore through the air with a piercing, shrieking wail, punching through layer after layer of swirling dust, aimed straight at Lin Mu's face.
This was the real killing blow.
Every display of exhaustion, every wild and clumsy charge — all of it had been a performance, staged deliberately to force Lin Mu into pausing long enough to expose himself.
"Not good!"
In that instant, life and death balanced on a razor's edge.
Every hair on Lin Mu's body stood rigid. The suffocating pressure of oncoming death made his scalp go numb.
"Earth Ring Body — now!"
In a fraction of a second too short for conscious thought, Lin Mu drove his Primeval Essence to its limit in a single explosive burst.
His body lurched sideways as though struck by a hammer — awkward, nearly wrenching — half a foot to the side in a desperate, twisting lurch.
CRASH!
The club screamed past, so close it nearly grazed his scalp. The violent wind pressure it dragged along sliced a shallow red line across his cheek.
The club then slammed into the stone wall behind him and blasted a crater several zhang wide into the solid rock face — debris and dust exploding outward in a cloud.
Hiss...
Lin Mu rolled with the momentum and hit the ground, gasping in deep, ragged breaths. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.
If his reaction had been half a beat slower — if his Primeval Essence had been even slightly insufficient and the burst had fallen short —
Being left half-paralyzed would have been the best possible outcome.
Watching its carefully prepared, long-planned killing throw get dodged, the Hundred Beast King finally lost all patience. It dropped every pretense.
ROAR!
Vicious killing intent churned in its wild eyes.
That massive body, which had been performing clumsiness all this time, suddenly moved with fluid, terrifying agility — not a trace of the earlier feigned sluggishness remaining.
It drove off both legs and launched forward, trailing multiple afterimages through the dust as it bore down on Lin Mu.
Passing the shattered stone wall, it reached out in one smooth motion and wrenched the deeply embedded club free from the rock without breaking stride — moving at a speed that matched Lin Mu's Gu-enhanced movement without any difficulty.
"Want to close the distance? Dream on."
Lin Mu was not rattled. He activated Earth Ring Body and blasted backward through the haze at full speed, turning as he went, two fingers extended like a sword.
Slash — slash — slash!
Several streaks of dark gold from the Metal Rend Leaf Gu cut through the air like meteors, sealing off every angle of the Hundred Beast King's pursuit.
But the Hundred Beast King did not dodge. It gripped the club in both hands and met the attack head-on, the club moving like a coiling dragon.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
A rapid, deafening series of metallic crashes rang out across the clearing. Showers of sparks burst and scattered wildly through the swirling dust.
The dark gold leaves — capable of shearing through metal and splitting jade — struck that seemingly ordinary grey-black club and were deflected away, every single one, by a strange and stubborn combination of toughness and hardness that should not have existed in a simple piece of wood.
One pursuing, one retreating.
Lin Mu watched the terrifying ape behind him — growing more ferocious with every exchange, wielding that club in an airtight, impenetrable defense — and his eyes went completely cold.
"That club is no ordinary weapon."
His mind raced through the calculations.
"The Hundred Beast King already has a thick hide, immense strength, and a body built for punishment. Now with that club deflecting the Metal Rend Leaf Gu's edge on top of it, its offense and defense are both covered. Its combat strength has multiplied."
"If I keep letting it chase me in a straight contest of attrition, the moment my Primeval Essence runs dry, it will grind me to death."
"I need to find a way..."
Lin Mu's figure threaded through the narrow gap between two massive stone formations with a hair's breadth to spare on either side.
"I need to find a way to destroy that club."