Yaoyao had not only come back to life; its grade had leapt straight from Tier-3 to Tier-5, and every one of its attributes had more than doubled. At level 12 its mana now stood at a startling 2,650 — and the automatic revival ability it now possessed, along with the three Mystic Spirit Walls it had unlocked, made plain just how powerful a true Mystic Spirit Snow Fox… really was.
The Wall of Vengeance: an extremely powerful repulsion skill, driving enemies back three meters every second and adding very high damage on top. With that barrier up, getting anywhere near Yaoyao was all but impossible unless your movement speed was very high indeed. The Wall of Heaven’s Barrier: a full twenty seconds of invincibility on a cooldown of only three minutes, several times stronger than Ye Tianxie’s own Soul of the Evil Dragon — a skill that heaven-defying could perhaps only ever have turned up on a freak like Yaoyao. The Wall of Heaven’s Grace: a wide-area protection and blessing skill; once it opened, it not only shielded the companions around it but raised Yaoyao’s already formidable healing by an enormous margin again.
Fate had not granted it powerful attacking skills, but had made up for that with protective skills more frightening still. Yaoyao had recovered only the smallest fraction of its power at this point, and even so, what it was showing Ye Tianxie of its strength was staggering.
The Snow Wolves that had been flung clear came rushing back in at once. Landing on the ground, Yaoyao did not pause or hesitate for an instant, and a ring of crimson light flared abruptly across its snow-white body.
Chh!
Chh!
Chh!
The red wall of vengeance covered Yaoyao, covered Ye Tianxie and Su Feifei, covered a radius of five meters — and at the moment the first chh sounded, the red barrier flashed one instant of scarlet brilliance, and three Snow Wolves that had come inside those five meters were struck by a force entirely beyond resisting and driven bodily back outside it.
-612, -612, -612…
As the three Snow Wolves were thrown clear, every one of them lost better than a third of its health.
Non-elemental magic is a kind that appears very rarely, and the most terrible kind of all, because non-elemental means there is no such thing as resistance to it, and therefore no defending against it. The difficulty of casting it is enormous, besides. Wind magic works through the wind element as its medium, fire magic through fire… while non-elemental magic is cast with “nothing” for a medium. In all the hundreds of millions of years of the Lost Continent’s history, the people who could cast magic without an element at all, on “nothing” alone, have never amounted to more than a handful. The Wall of Vengeance was the one ability in all of Yaoyao’s kit that carried an offensive property — and an extremely powerful one at that. Ye Tianxie’s Dragon Rend Slash was no more than double damage on a single target; the Wall of Vengeance was triple magic damage to everything that came near.
Evolution had changed nothing in Yaoyao’s appearance. It was still only a small, delicate, entirely unthreatening little fox. And as the Wall of Vengeance opened, Yaoyao’s Mystic Spirit Cure went off in the same breath…
+1020, +1020, +1020…
Three recovery numbers, every one of them over a thousand, floated up off them, and the health the cold had just devoured came back to full in an instant.
Ye Tianxie stared at Yaoyao for a moment, then snapped out of it and shouted to Zuo Pojun — equally dumbstruck, and about to be run down by five Snow Wolves — “Pojun, get over here, now!!”
“Ah— ah… oh!” Zuo Pojun blanked for a beat, then wheeled around at once and charged toward Ye Tianxie, straight into the wall of vengeance.
Once formed, the Wall of Vengeance was not locked to a fixed area; it moved as Yaoyao moved, always covering the five meters around it. When Zuo Pojun ran inside, the five Snow Wolves hard on his heels came in after him… and were flung violently out again by the flashing barrier, throwing up a broad spread of damage numbers…
-612, -612, -612, -612, -612…
All three of them had gathered around Yaoyao now, at the center of the Wall of Vengeance, and watched with very different feelings as ten Snow Wolves threw themselves in from every side… If Snow Wolves had possessed enough intelligence, they would have stopped charging after being savaged once and simply waited for the Wall of Vengeance to run out. But plainly, if wolves were clever enough for that, they would not be wolves.
Being driven out by the Wall of Vengeance did not make them retreat. It roused their ferocity instead, and after a brief stall they came at it again, a berserk air about them — and were once again driven violently back.
-612, -612, -612…
A Snow Wolf had 1,600 health, so after three expulsions by the Wall of Vengeance the wolves toppled feebly to the ground… and even their corpses were driven outside it. The deaths at the front were no warning at all to the wolves behind them, which threw themselves at the target one after another and had their health emptied in turn.
The Wall of Vengeance could hold for twenty seconds at most per activation. It had run less than ten when all ten Snow Wolves lay dead outside it.
Looking at the wolf corpses strewn across the ground around the red barrier, Zuo Pojun and Su Feifei felt nothing but shock — or perhaps shock was no longer an adequate word for how violently their feelings were surging. Looking at that dainty little snow fox by Ye Tianxie’s feet, all they could manage was the way you look at a monster.
“Yaoyao, well done.” Ye Tianxie scooped Yaoyao up and held it against his chest, smiling as he said it. In the excitement, and the emotion of it, even that bone-cutting cold seemed not quite so terrible any more.
“Second Brother… is this… is this… is this really just an ordinary healing-type little fox?”
Level twelve. A brutal environment. And it had shielded all three of them that easily, and finished off ten level-25 monsters in so little time.
Ye Tianxie’s talents together with his current attributes could fairly be called broken — and this little pet at his side was, sure enough, nothing like a normal pet either. Every bit as broken, and then some.
“Don’t ask yet. We have to get out of here right now… Stay long enough and there’s always a point where you can’t hold on.” Ye Tianxie said it, took Su Feifei’s hand and pulled her Snow-Fleece Coat straight. Coat or no coat, Su Feifei was not him and she was not Zuo Pojun; she was a young mistress who had never known any real hardship, and neither the toughness of her will nor her capacity to endure came close to theirs. She truly could not stay long in a place like this.
Would there be a stronger enemy ahead?
The answer was… no.
The brutal cold of the Ice-Bone Severed Road was itself an extremely difficult and cruel test. Very few could tough it out the way Ye Tianxie had; most gave way partway through and turned back. That Su Feifei had held out this far was down to her own persistence, and owed a great deal to that Snow-Fleece Coat. In fact, those few Snow Wolves standing in front of it were the System’s own help toward getting a player through — because the only thing that meaningfully improves anyone’s chances of crossing is to gather Snow Wolf Pelts off them, go back, and have the pelts worked into cold-proof clothing.
And in an environment like that one, ordinary level-25 monsters though the wolves were, they made for a terrible and difficult test beyond any question. Never mind players at the game’s current stage — even a full party of level-25 players would find six of them next to impossible, let alone eleven.
Those eleven Snow Wolves were the last enemies as well… Getting past them meant getting past the test of the Ice-Bone Severed Road, and that meant the quest was half done.
Only half.
Half a minute later the exit of the Ice-Bone Severed Road appeared ahead of them at last, and all three felt excitement and unease at once… The unease was this: ahead lay the deeper reaches of the Ice-Severed Wolf Den, and would that be somewhere colder still than the Ice-Bone Severed Road? Because as a rule, the further in you go, the worse it gets.
Three White Dragon Horses came flying out of the Ice-Bone Severed Road together, and in the moment they left it they knew their worry had been entirely unnecessary.
There was no more ice here — nothing but snow. Judging by the feel underfoot, there was probably still a layer of ice beneath it. And the environment here was much like the snowfield outside the Ice-Severed Wolf Den — sharp enough senses would have registered that even the temperature was near identical.
It was still a freezing place, but set against the Ice-Bone Severed Road what they were enduring here felt like warm sun on a bright day. The near-white faces of Su Feifei and Zuo Pojun slowly began to ease, and both turned to look at Ye Tianxie… because ahead of them there was nothing at all but unbroken white snow. There was not even a road forward. They had come to the end.
Ye Tianxie’s eyes, though, had stayed fixed ahead the whole time. After a moment he spoke slowly. “Don’t go forward… look in front of you!”
At his warning, Su Feifei and Zuo Pojun looked where Ye Tianxie was pointing, and only then did they see that ten meters away from them lay a huge — wolf.
It was a white wolf, white of that near-snow shade with nothing else in it at all, as though its whole body had been buried under a drift, and it blended so perfectly into the ground around it that without a close look you could not make out the outline of a wolf. And the wolf was truly enormous. Lying stretched out there, at a rough glance, it ran at least five meters long.
The white wolf’s body was in a state of absolute stillness, its eyes shut fast, without a sound — for all the world like something dead.
“A white wolf… could that be the one the quest description mentioned — the Frost Snow Wolf?” Zuo Pojun dropped his voice and said it with enormous care, terrified of waking this fearsome Immortal Spirit Beast out of its sleep. An Immortal Spirit Beast like this was nothing like the level-15 juvenile in the Demon Shadow Forest; it was simply not something players could stand against.
Frost Snow Wolf (Deceased): Attributes: None.
The information the Eye of the Evil Dragon returned gave Ye Tianxie a jolt — this was the Frost Snow Wolf beyond any doubt. But — what was deceased supposed to mean!? Was this enormous body no more than the corpse of the Frost Snow Wolf the quest description had spoken of?
His brows drew tight. He looked at the Frost Snow Wolf in silence for a while, and his perception confirmed it… there was not the faintest trace of a life-pulse coming off it.
What was going on here?
“Don’t move yet… I’ll go and take a look.” Ye Tianxie said it, pushed his spiritual senses to their peak, and walked step by step toward the utterly motionless Frost Snow Wolf.
Ten meters, nine… six meters, five…
Just as his foot came down about five meters from the Frost Snow Wolf, a terrible sense of danger struck down at him from overhead. There was no time to look up. Ye Tianxie used Dragon Shadow Slash on the instant to dash backward, and in a blink he was where he had been standing before.
Crack!!
A long icicle shot down out of the sky and drove hard into the snow, then burst into countless splinters of ice that sprayed outward.
(End of Chapter 203)