They chased each other from night until sunrise.
Chen Jiazhang was really at his limit. His body, weakened by alcohol, could no longer keep going, and he could only apologize repeatedly with a straight face.
Da Yu sneered, "If you dare to laugh again, I'll kill you all!"
“We’re not laughing anymore,” Qingchen and Zard said, shaking their heads.
The pent-up anger of the Chen family painters was something they simply couldn't withstand...
Da Yu asked coldly, "Is there anything else I should know?"
"That's all," Qingchen said. "You can do whatever we say. If anyone's going to make a fool of themselves, it'll be us first."
"Heh," Da Yu said menacingly, "If I ever discover something like this again, we'll all die together."
“Okay, okay,” Qingchen then looked around and said, “Hey, I recognize these plants.”
These plants appeared in the plant information that Li Shutong gave him. They are called Feili fruit, which flowers and bears fruit in three years and can slightly improve one's talent for cultivation.
This stuff is extremely rare. There's no record of how many a person can eat at most, because it's so scarce that eating even one is considered a stroke of luck.
So-called talent refers to the degree of openness of the meridians in the human body.
If your body's meridians are like dirt roads in the countryside, then your spiritual practice will naturally be slower.
If your body's meridians were highways, or even high-temperature superconducting magnetic levitation, then your cultivation would be like Li Tongyun's, achieving twice the results with half the effort.
The purpose of this fruit is probably "road construction".
"Quickly, quickly, dig up these three by the roots," Qingchen instructed Zard. "We're incredibly lucky. Thanks to Dayu, if he hadn't chased us for over two hundred miles, we wouldn't have encountered anything like this."
The Forbidden Land No. 008 is too vast; it's very rare to encounter something like this.
Just like ginseng gatherers in the mountains, there are actually many ginsengs in the mountains, but whether you can find them is another matter.
Forbidden Lands are full of unclaimed items; finding them is a stroke of luck.
Qingchen thought for a moment and made arrangements: "These three Feili fruits need to be watered with dew, and someone needs to guard them and water them with a drop every day at dawn. These three fruits... can be given to Dayu first, so that Dayu can see how many fruits he can eat before reaching his limit."
Da Yu was stunned for a moment: "Give it to me? You're so kind! Is this some kind of poisonous stuff?"
“Go take a look at issue 394 of the Hu Clan’s intelligence agency. It has a detailed record of the Feli Fruit,” Qing Chen said. “We… are friends now. Not only will we give you the Feli Fruit, but we’ll also give you the Purple Orchid Star to help you with your cultivation.”
Da Yu felt a pang of unease: "A ghost is your friend."
Qing Chen continued, "It's best to feed one person the entire amount of the Fei Li Fruit. One cultivation genius is stronger than a hundred cultivation failures. With Zi Lan Xing's assistance, the growth is exponential. After Da Yu finishes, the next one will be Nan Geng Chen, followed by Liu De Zhu, Xiao San, Xiao Qi, Xiao Wu, and Nangong Yuan Yu..."
As Qing Chen made his plans, Chen Jiazhang, who was standing to the side, heard him rattle off a long list of names while Zard was diligently taking notes. He asked in bewilderment, "We've grown this big by now?"
Da Yu sneered from the side: "Now we have to use 'nest' to describe knights, one nest after another, faster than a sow giving birth."
"Ah, this," Chen Jiazhang said, taken aback, "Have times changed? How many knights are there now?"
Qing Chen humbly replied, "I have over a hundred disciples, right? By the way, how many disciples do you have, Uncle-Master?"
Chen Jiazhang: "..."
“Let’s go. We’re too far from Chen’s troops to keep track of their movements,” Qingchen said, leading the way back.
...
...
Eight hours later.
A group of over a hundred people slowly emerged from the woods, each carrying a bamboo basket for gathering herbs, looking just like ginseng gatherers from the mountains.
The elder said with great enthusiasm, “When I found Fei Liguo, I was about your age. At that time, the elder of the Fire Pit was ‘Jiangchu Luobu’. He said I was a person favored by heaven, so he began to train me as the elder. When I was 21 years old, I became the second elder of our Fire Pit, and I was very prestigious.”
Qin Yiyi asked, "Are the Felicis fruit useful to us Fire Pit people too?"
“Of course it will be useful,” the elder chuckled. “We, the native people of Huotang, select three of the most talented children every three years, appointed by the gods, and then feed them the Feli fruit. This way, when they complete the horn-cutting ceremony and receive the baptism of the gods, they will gain more power. Yi Yi, after we finish picking the Feli fruit, you can lead us to wander around the forbidden land and see how lucky you are. We’ll walk for three days and three nights, and whatever we encounter, we’ll pick.”
There are specific rules for gathering herbs in forbidden areas near the fire pit. For the first three types, they set specific targets to collect, such as the Feli fruit, which they go straight for and collect until they've finished.
After collecting the first three types, you must choose a divine child or goddess to gamble on luck. You can collect whatever you encounter, or just leave it at that.
Even if you know the location of rare herbs, you can't go there anymore.
This is a long-standing custom associated with the hearth, signifying respect for nature, restraint of human greed, avoiding overexploitation, and giving nature a chance to recover.
This method may be a bit pretentious, but the fire pit has maintained this habit for many years without ever breaking it.
However, just as the Grand Elder arrived beside the Philigo tree, he looked at the three empty sapling pits on the ground...
"Who?! Who?!" the elder roared, "Who dug up my Phili Fruit, huh?!"
Harvesting the Filipino fruit every three years has become a regular routine at the hearth. Now, the Filipino fruit has been dug up by the roots!
That's going too far! Picking the fruit is one thing, but digging it up by the roots is another!
At this moment, the divine prince Gyatso bent down, picked up a bit of soil, and tasted it carefully: "Elder, this pit has been dug for at most eight hours. The other party should not have gone far. We can catch up."
"Chase them!" the Grand Elder roared. "If I find out who stole them, I'll kill them!"
The group mounted their tall horses and galloped off in the direction Qingchen and the others had gone. A middle-aged man from the Fire Pit led the way, running barefoot. He was the Fire Pit's best hunter and the most skilled at finding prey tracks.
Qin Yiyi asked curiously, "Who would know the location of the Felicity Fruit? Isn't it said that no one dares to come to Forbidden Land No. 008?"
The elder hesitated for a moment before saying, "It might be a knight!"
"Hmm?" Qin Yiyi asked疑惑地, "What makes you say that?"
“I don’t have any evidence, but they like to do this kind of despicable thing—they eat the meat themselves but don’t let others have a sip of the soup—and they’re so cruel,” the elder said. “I think it was the knights who did it; no one else is as wicked as them… What bad luck!”
However, at this point, the Grand Elder noticed that Qin Yiyi's eyes lit up, and she was clearly pleased.
He said irritably, "Little darling, they've dug up all the treasures from our hearth, what are you so happy about?"
Qin Yiyi said, "Perhaps it's not them? After all, there are tens of thousands of explorers every year, and over a hundred thousand wilderness hunters in the entire Federation alone. They might not necessarily be knights. I actually hope it is a knight..."
Upon hearing this, the men around the fire pit became indignant. They all wanted to find the person who stole the Phili Fruit as soon as possible and see if he was really a knight.
If it really is that Qing Chen, they can go toe-to-toe with him and let Qin Yiyi see whether the knight's successor is more powerful or their Huotang men are more powerful!
The man from Huotang rode his horse for several hours, but lost track of the trail at a stream.
The middle-aged hunter said, "They may have waded across; we need to go to the other side to continue looking for clues."
"Chase them! Kill them!" the elder ordered.
More than ten minutes later.
Beneath the mud beside the stream, in the underground fortress Zard had created using his awakened abilities, Qingchen and the others awoke.
Previously, Da Yu had been chasing everyone from night until morning, keeping everyone awake all night. Now everyone was catching up on sleep.
The underground fortress is more than ten square meters inside, with only a few holes on the top left to simulate cicadas crawling out of the ground to breathe.
Da Yu asked, "Who is it? Riding a horse in a forbidden area?"
Qing Chen calmly analyzed, "It's not the Chen family's troops. They're heading in the wrong direction, and the Chen family's troops don't have any horses."
Chen Jiazhang suddenly said, "It's the fire pit. I followed them before, trying to see what secrets were hidden in this forbidden place number 008, but they found out."
Qing Chen: "..."
It's understandable that people don't like you because you're so interested in their hearth.
He patiently advised, "Don't keep trying to take advantage of the fire pit. The people there are all very nice. We knights should get along well with them."
Chen Jiazhang said irritably, "You have no manners, don't try to lecture your senior uncle."
At this moment, Qingchen said, "Zard, open the bunker. I need to catch up with them. If they keep going like this, they'll definitely run into Chen's troops. I have to stop them."
“Okay,” Zard said, opening the ground.
Da Yu said irritably, "You guys go ahead, I want to sleep a little longer..."
As he spoke, he realized that he was the only one left in the bunker.
Da Yu hesitated for two minutes, but finally jumped out of the bunker while cursing.
...
...
The group of over a hundred people galloped swiftly along the fire pit. It must be said that in this kind of place, horses are far more useful than mechanized troops.
At this moment, the elder seemed to have heard something and whispered, "Dismount! Yiyi, watch over the horses; they mustn't be harmed!"
But then he drew a black knife from his waist, crouched low, and crept forward, his hunched back level with the dense bushes.
He quietly parted the bushes and peered ahead, only to see Chen's troops slowly advancing, with the engineers still using tools to survey maps.
At this moment, a soldier from the Chen clan whispered something to his comrade and then quickly ran into the depths of the woods.
He loosened his belt, leaped up, grabbed a tree branch, and looked down at the more than one hundred people lying in the bushes by the fire pit. The soldiers were dumbfounded, even forgetting to spread their legs, and just hung there on the tree, stared at by more than one hundred people.
He was bewildered in the wind.
He was completely bewildered: What was this soldier doing? Had he spotted us? But if he had spotted us, why was he doing this?
Is this a provocation?
It's no wonder the Grand Elder was taken aback; the scene before him was simply too unbelievable.
Thank goodness Xiao Yi didn't come along! Otherwise, her eyes would have gotten dirty!
The next second, Chen's soldiers roared: "Enemy attack! Fire pit!"
The elder drew his sword and cleaved him in two, then hurriedly retreated: "Get on your horses and retreat! This is the Chen family's army!"
Upon hearing the shouts, Chen's soldiers swarmed forward, and gunfire erupted in the forbidden area, as fierce as firecrackers on New Year's Eve or thunder in spring.
The men from Huotang also took out automatic rifles to return fire, but they numbered only a little over a hundred, while Chen's advance force numbered five hundred, and their firepower was simply not on the same level.
"Hurry, hurry, there might be their air force units overhead. Be careful not to get laser-guided. Once locked on, you're dead for sure." The Grand Elder was very familiar with the army group's combat methods, because the Federation Army Group developed that rapid response method of laser guidance and laser cannon strikes, as well as air support for the ground, specifically for terrain like the Forbidden Land.
The elder looked back and saw that someone had taken out a laser-guided launcher.
His eyes were bloodshot; if the enemy were to complete the long-range laser guidance, at least half of them would die: "You guys go first, I'll hold them off!"
But as soon as he finished speaking, the sound of a sniper rifle rang out in the distance, and a spray of blood mist immediately erupted from the officer holding the laser-guided cannon.
At this moment, Chen Jiazhang also appeared in front of everyone around the fire pit: "Hurry up, Chen Yu might be in the sky, if we don't leave now we won't be able to leave!"
The elder was filled with grief and indignation: "As expected of knights, nothing good ever comes from meeting you!"