Back at the battlefield, Shen Cong swiftly gave chase along the direction Xu Yun had fled.

Before long, Xu Yun's blood-scent reached Shen Cong's nose. To use a crude comparison—his sense of smell right now was absolutely far beyond a dog's.

Over four kilometers of distance, in under two minutes; there was no way the reek of blood could have dispersed.

Like a lamp in the dark night, it let Shen Cong know the bearing of the fleeing Xu Yun without any careful discernment at all, while the Third Eye could clearly see the footprints Xu Yun had left as he ran. Footprints and blood-scent, the two signs working in concert, sketched out Xu Yun's escape route in full.

The battlefield lay at Yanzhuang Town, beside the Beijing–Shanghai Expressway.

Xu Yun's flight bearing was due west. Due west of Yanzhuang Town were hills large and small; a little to the south was the headwaters of the Lotus Mountain Oasis, and off to the southwest lay the Xintai Stadium at Quangou Town.

The map was etched deep in Shen Cong's mind.

After roughly three thousand meters of pursuit, plenty of information had already become clear. "Xu Yun didn't head toward Quangou Town—he's not planning to link up with Du Jun at the Xintai Stadium. The Bug Warrior factions cooperate with each other, but they also claw at one another, and Xu Yun's wary of Du Jun. The old intel put Du Jun at three cores, but a few months on, he may be four cores by now."

A Bug Warrior's advancement was the transplanting of a bug core.

Every transplant carried an enormous risk of failure—at best, a bug-core conflict that killed one of the cores, or both. And there was a large risk that the conflict between bug cores would collapse and kill the Bug Warrior's body outright. This was precisely why, at present, Xu Yun was the only five-core Bug Warrior.

The survival probability was too low.

But since Xu Yun could reach five cores, there was no reason others couldn't break past four.

"Xu Yun's wounded, more than…