16. Forming an Alliance

Ye Lan glanced at Yu Jue, lgiving her a slap once again and easily got her weapon, a long, barbed whip with a curved tail! Ye Lan raised her hand and swung her sleeve; several willow leaves in her hands were darted towards Yu Jue. A fit of painful groaning were heard by everyone before Yu Jue had time to react. It turned out Ye Lan had hit Yu Jue’s dumb acupoint! How cruel she was!

Almost everyone present gasped while looking at the waving of Ye Lan’s long whip. She only struck ten slashes, and each of them scraped Yu Jue’s flesh, making her unable to breathe evenly because of the severe pain. The chief knew exactly what was going on. It was the highest level of whipping, though the injury didn’t look severe, her internal organs might have been broken into pieces!

Thinking that his employer had asked him to take Yu Jue out, the chief said, “Miss! Please show some mercy.”

Ye Lan didn’t want to cause more trouble as she wanted to save her energy for tomorrow’s fight! So she gave Yu Jue two more lashes before she stopped and put the whip away, “You’d better learn from this lesson. From now on, think twice before you act!”

Ye Lan clapped her hands; the way she showed her contempt was too hard for people to resist complaints!

“Thanks a lot, Miss! Thank you!” The chiefhurried to ask someone to take car of Yu Jue and took out some pills to heal her wounds. Yu Jue had now learnt the lesson and dare not look up at Ye Lan!

“You guys are mercenaries?!” Ye Lan had gained some knowledge about this land as several days had passed since she first set foot on the Continent. She was asking about their identities as she looked at them, but she sounded so affirmative that the chief kept answering her “Yes, yes, we are!”

“Since we are going together and you just made a good guess about what I want. You’d better not stop me!” Ye Lan liked to make it clear beforehand.

The chief of the mercenaries responded positively. An alliance was now officially formed!

The next day, all of them set off early to the Forest of Beasts. The deeper people got into the woods, the higher level beasts they might encounter, and naturally, the cores of the beasts were more refined and purer! The rare medicine was also in abundance in the forest apart from the beasts, which also happened to be Ye Lan’s targets! The medicine could save people’s lives, and that’s what mattered in this world! Only when you were alive would you get what you want!

All the nine people, including Yu Jue, who was taught a lesson by Ye Lan yesterday, were all behaving themselves as expected. Ye Lan also found that she had beaten Yu Jue quite badly at the fit of anger. She knew clearly how strong her attack was. Though it was not lethal, her attack would make an average spiritual cultivator unable to recover in at least three days. Therefore, after they were allied, she regretted once in a while that she had made her attack too early, and she shouldn’t have hurt Yu Jue, who had now become a burden to their journey. She could have done this before they were departed. What she didn’t expect was that the medicine these mercenaries gave to Yu Jue worked so well and Yu Jue could now move without any difficulty. Though her movement still looked unnatural, she was getting definitely better!

Ye Lan was now more desirable for the medicine! These were life-saving stuff!

As they walked deeper into the woods, several low-level spiritual animals jumped out but were all killed easily by the mercenaries! This also made it possible for Ye Lan to know their capabilities. The boss might have just made it to stage four, and the rest of them were around stage three. Most importantly, Ye Lan was sure none of them were over stage three, level six!

The deeper they walked inside, the less warmth they felt from the sun and more coldness was rising from below. They had finally made it to the heartland of the forest. Ye Lan was observing the herbs carefully along the way and had put all the herbs she dug into her ring, wondering to herself, what a great relief—the ring saved her the trouble of carrying a bag!

None of them scattered around or gathered up as they moved towards the depth of the woods. Ye Lan heard someone shouting ‘Watch out!’ as she was about to pick an attractive blood red herb.

Thanks to her years of experience as a special agent, as well as her unparalleled ability of sensing the coming danger, Ye Lan dodged the moment she heard the shouting. However, either because her ability got rusty, or because the beast moved too fast for her eyes to catch, she surprisingly noticed nothing just now!

The latter was more possible!

Ye Lan quickly dodged the beast who had a twisted face. The beast was no higher than the height of a human, but had an extremely quick speed when attacking. Ye Lan soon realized she was its only target as she tried to dodge its attack!

The chief frowned while looking at Ye Lan dodging the attack. He called his men to march forward as the beast core would belong to whoever killed it! If they got the core first, Ye Lan would have no excuse to rob it from them!

It didn’t take the eight of them much effort to kill the beast, since the beast was only an upper class of level two. Ye Lan saw its core fall from its body as it got smashed, which was as small as ever! However, one of the mercenaries took it as a treasure and carefully put it into the pocket after polishing it!

Ye Lan laughed.

They went on and came across several little beasts whivh were only at level 2 or 3! Ye Lan gave a helping hand to finish them off and left some others for the mercenaries to deal with.

Nevertheless, after they eliminated two beasts that came out together, another one, which was different from the previous ones, jumped out. Ye Lan frowned at the tall and strong saber-toothed tiger and backed up a few steps. She glanced at Yu Jue angrily as she knew it was her who caused the trouble and let the tiger jump around! The mercenaries also found Yu Jue a bit annoying. They would have kicked her away if Yu Jue had not been favored by the employer. Those mercenaries were not willing to sacrifice their lives even though they had to fight hard to make a living!

Yu Jue, once seeing Ye Lan’s murderous look, dodged behind the closest man to her and dared not look at Ye Lan!

Ye Lan squinted at the saber-toothed tiger and found it tricky to deal with!

After several rounds, Ye Lan was swept backwards by the attack from the tiger’s tail. She flipped around before standing still after a few steps back. As for the mercenaries, they had already been beaten down and fell on the ground, injured!

Ye Lan gradually clenched her fists, a warm breath rose up from her stomach while the murderous look was appearing in her eyes. She slightly opened her fiery red spiritual wing and the surplus spiritual breath was converted into a sea of flying fireflies, which looked bloodily romantic at the moment of crisis!

The saber-toothed tiger went on its full attack, roaring, after a close stare at Ye Lan who was then in the air. Ye Lan, at her bottleneck of reaching the level 5 from level 4, was struggling to fight with the tiger the whole time and now was the time to find out who was tougher!

After yet another spiritually powered growl, which made the wounded mercenaries cover their ears naturally, Ye Lan was also forced back a few steps by its shock wave. The fallen leaves from the trees in the 5-meter radius rustled and everyone there were shocked.

Damn it! Ye Lan attacked faster with hand movements andher pupils got smaller. The spiritual power was circling around her, forming a hand sword and dashing toward the tiger after a few turns. The tiger, however, avoided the attack with several jumps and was appearing right in front of her within no time. Ye Lan was now moving even faster to its back, meanwhile, she gathered the leaves along the way and shot all of them straight to the head of the tiger. It seemed the leaves hit its eyes as the tiger let out an even sharp roar. Ye Lan was now gathering even more leaves to hit its eyes, which seemed to be the weakest point of the tiger. The tiger retreated several meters away as expected. Right at the moment when the tiger found it too late to run away, Ye Lan flew all the way up, with her mighty, stirring spiritual power. After a clean cut, the tiger’s hot blood splashed all around, even to the surrounding tree. Ye Lan was no exception. The strong smell of blood made her couldn’t help but throw up. However, Ye Lan, covered by blood, full of hostility and a thirst for killing, was now standing still, like an awe-inspiring goddess of death!

With a mass of warm air building up in her stomach, Ye Lan calmed herself down, she felt uncomfortable with her bloated belly. She summoned the old man in her mind. The old man, quickly told Ye Lan to sit down in meditation, “Hurry, sit down and meditate. What a blessing in disguise. You have made it through your bottleneck after the hard hit! The tiger hasn’t died yet and thesurrounding spiritual sea is quite rich. Take this opportunity to practice. Don’t waste it!”

Ye Lan immediately sat down to meditate. The mercenaries, looking at the dying tiger which was barely breathing, and then Ye Lan who sat next to the tiger, didn’t dare to go near, so they had to wait aside. There was some warm yellow light radiating around Ye Lan and slowly flowing around her. With time going by, the light surrounding her started to clear out and its colors changed from warm yellow to light yellow, to orange yellow and finally orange red. The circle of light flowed even faster, like swords, fast and sharp, swirling around Ye Lan, cutting every passing fallen leaves as they touched the blades!

The mercenaries were astounded but had to stand by Ye Lan. However, the tiger almost bled to death. Blood was the most desirable thing for many animals in a forest like this. The mercenaries soon became restless as more and more low-level spiritual animals came toward them. Though they were here for the beast core, they found it too hard for them to deal with so many of animals within such a short time. To make matters worse, there would be more and more high level beasts that they couldn’t fight against coming soon.

The chief watched Ye Lan worriedly, while his second hand retreated to his side in a fierce fight, “Chief, we can’t hold this for long, we should retreat now! Or our brothers will be eaten by the coming kick-ass animals!”

“We’ll all be killed!” The chief felt a twitch in his heart. He knew the outcome, but he couldn’t leave this girl behind as she would definitely be eaten by other animals! But he looked at his men in the intense fight, wondering what if he didn’t retreat…

“Damn it! Hold on for some time! We should stick to our promise!”

With the order given, they carried on fighting against all odds. Ye Lan meanwhile, was focusing on breaking through the bottleneck and finally, with a yell, as the light swords span even faster, the spiritual power exploded! “Get down!” The boss shouted instantly as he was watching her move all the time until he saw she got into a new level. The shock wave of this spiritual power killed all the surrounding low-level spiritual animals within no time. All of a sudden, the smell of blood became even stronger, while the middle-level animals were dying, the low-level ones were smashed into pieces! The mercenaries slowly raised their heads, watching the animals who they were just fighting with dying, and then they turned to look at Ye Lan, wondering what a scary woman she was! How scary the spiritual power could it be to have such a strong explosive strength.