The Ninety-Fifth Card: Land of Trials

More than ten days had already passed, and Ma Yi had begun to suspect he had been played for a fool. Why had there been no news for so long? Just as he finished lunch and was sitting with Liu Wen and Liu Xue watching television, a black vortex suddenly opened above the roof. Before Ma Yi could even react, he was sucked inside, leaving Liu Wen and Liu Xue sitting on the sofa in stunned confusion.

“Damn it!” Ma Yi was tossed end over end inside the passage, utterly unprepared. The world spun into chaos around him, and the overwhelming force of the pull was far beyond anything he could resist.

He spun for what felt like minutes, maybe even tens of minutes. In any case, even with his sturdy physique, he was dizzy enough to vomit. Then the violent force hurled him hard onto the ground. If not for his tough hide and thick flesh, that fall would have been enough to make him cough up blood.

Shaking his still-groggy head, Ma Yi looked up and saw that hundreds of pairs of eyes were fixed on him. For a moment, the whole place fell silent.

“Hello,” Ma Yi said awkwardly, greeting everyone with a smile.

“Rube.”

Every single person gave him a cool, dismissive glance, then turned back to look at the platform ahead.

Not far away stood a raised dais built from some kind of wood. Upon it stood several old men with white hair and white beards, and Ma Yi’s sudden arrival had interrupted their speech.

“What is there to be so amazed about?” Ma Yi muttered to himself. He straightened up as well and listened to what the elders were saying.

“This trial offers the richest rewards of all the trials, and at the same time it is the most difficult. Inside, you may encounter many fortunate opportunities. We will not take any of them away from you. However, remember this: fighting one another is forbidden within the trial grounds. At critical moments, you should unite and face danger together. Otherwise, it will already be fortunate if only thirty to forty percent of you make it back alive. Remember, unity is the most important factor. I know you come from different families, and many of those families even bear grudges against one another, but in this trial ground, you must cast aside all notions of family. You are comrades now. You are brothers-in-arms.”

Listening from below, Ma Yi finally understood a little. This trial ground was dangerous, and only by working together would they have a better chance of surviving. At the same time, there were many unknown opportunities hidden within, and whoever found them would keep them.

“All right, everyone prepare yourselves. The gate will open at once!” The elder’s words had barely fallen when, suddenly, a huge vortex appeared in the stone wall beside the platform. Mixed within its spinning depths were countless streaks of colored light, like a whirlpool of brilliance.

“Set out,” the elder ordered.

One by one, all the human experts who stood closest to the vortex rose and walked toward it. They seemed to melt into it like bubbles dissolving into water. Ma Yi, standing at the back, followed with the others and slowly walked into the multicolored whirlpool.

His brain lurched for an instant, then cleared again. Blinking, Ma Yi found himself standing alone in a forest filled with towering ancient trees. None of the people who had entered before him were anywhere to be seen.

“Damn, what am I supposed to do here?” Ma Yi stared blankly. What was the point of coming in? No one had told him beforehand. He had assumed everyone would be together after entering, so he had not bothered to ask. He had planned to wait until they were inside and then find someone to ask properly. Who would have thought the entry point was random? Not a single person had landed with him.

After thinking it over and standing dazed for quite a while, Ma Yi had no choice but to accept his fate and wander aimlessly through the forest. Since he was here already, he might as well take a look around. Besides, the leaves here were absurdly huge. The smallest tree he had found so far had a trunk two meters across and stood dozens of meters tall, and even that counted as a small one here.

“Eh, might as well climb a tree and see what’s up there.”

Ma Yi found an especially enormous tree. By rough estimation, its trunk was at least six or seven meters in diameter. He sprang upward, stepping on the air as he rose higher and higher.

The tree was at least two or three hundred meters tall, and even the smallest branch was a full meter thick. The higher he went, the thinner the branches became, but not by much. Only when Ma Yi reached the treetop did he realize that even the crown branches were as thick as a person’s arm.

Looking out, he could see an endless sea of giant trees stretching beyond the horizon.

“What the hell is that?”

Ma Yi turned around and stared dumbfounded at a massive tree in the distance. How should he describe it? Big. Just how big? So big it seemed capable of holding up the sky.

The nearest branch of that tree was already several miles away from where Ma Yi stood. Yet the farther upward the tree grew, the wider its branches spread. The higher it rose, the broader its canopy became, until it pierced straight through the clouds and cast a colossal reflection above them.

It was the first time he had ever seen a tree so enormous, and curiosity drove him to immediately change direction and fly toward one of its branches. But what looked like a short distance turned out to take him a full hour of flight before he finally landed on the nearest branch. Just this one branch was wide enough, Ma Yi thought, for a large off-road vehicle to race along it with room to spare. It was truly too huge.

“First get to the main trunk,” he thought, and immediately acted on it.

He ran along the thick branch, the great tree’s leaves each the size of a small room. It was like a gigantic monster of a tree.

This time, Ma Yi had truly miscalculated. If he had known, he would have flown straight upward from the start. By the time the sky was beginning to dim, he was still only halfway to the main trunk of the towering tree.

To avoid encountering something unpleasant in this unfamiliar place, Ma Yi decided to find somewhere to hide first and continue on after daylight returned.

With his current size, it was easy enough to find a thick patch of leaves. After arranging several leaves around him, he lay down on one and quietly drifted into thought.

Just as he was getting drowsy and preparing to sleep, strange noises suddenly came from nearby.

Confident in his own skills, and bold by nature, Ma Yi carefully shifted position on the leaves and peered through a gap. One look was enough to jolt him upright in alarm.

On a leaf about five hundred meters away, a large swarm of strange insects was desperately gnawing at the foliage. That alone was not especially frightening. What was terrifying was that while they gnawed, they were also spitting out one strange green bead after another, setting them aside as they worked. Beside the swarm was a giant caterpillar-like creature that rapidly swallowed the green beads the little insects spit out.

And this giant caterpillar was actually stronger than Ma Yi.

He could feel a tremendous danger radiating from it. Not a mere threat, but danger. If it had only been a threat, that would simply mean the creature’s strength was close to his. But true danger meant it was stronger than him by far.

What’s more, every time the giant caterpillar ate one of those little green beads, Ma Yi could feel its power increase a little more.

He shrank back and quickly moved to the side so the creature would not notice him. But just as he shifted, a huge bird of prey suddenly landed on the branch above him. Its icy, talon-like claws gripped the wood tightly, only about a meter from Ma Yi’s head. Those claws were far sharper than the red one’s.

Sitting on the leaf, Ma Yi did not even dare breathe too loudly.

As the branch trembled, the great bird spread its wings and took flight, heading straight for the branch five hundred meters away.

The little insects spotted it and immediately stopped devouring the leaves. Turning around, they spat a mouthful of thick saliva at the bird. Ma Yi did not know exactly what it was, but it looked like sputum. The bird paid no attention. With a single beat of its wings, all the spit was swept away. Then one set of claws struck true, piercing cleanly into the body of one of the insects.

Seeing that things were going badly, the giant caterpillar hunched down and tried to run. But the little insects were no match for the bird. In just a few swift movements, they were swallowed into its mouth. Then the bird hopped to another position on the branch, locked onto the fleeing giant caterpillar, and launched itself forward. Its hooked beak stabbed accurately into the caterpillar’s body.

The giant caterpillar writhed in panic. Fine hairs on its body shot out in all directions like arrows. Yet none of that did anything to the bird. The bird lifted the twisting creature with its beak, slammed it hard against the trunk, raised it again, and smashed it into the trunk once more. After a few such strikes, the giant caterpillar lost all breath and was swallowed whole.

Only after the bird had flown away did Ma Yi finally manage to pull the caterpillar’s hair out of his own leg with difficulty.

From a distance, the hairs had looked thin. Up close, they were as thick as a thumb and incredibly tough. Even with Ma Yi’s strength already at the late stage of the ninth level, and with defenses so strong that even missiles might not be able to break through, one single hair from that giant caterpillar had still punched cleanly through his leg.

“What kind of material is this? It’s terrifying. And those hairs are so sharp, yet they still couldn’t pierce that bird’s feathers. That bird’s power is probably much greater. What kind of place is this? A giant caterpillar and even a small bird are stronger than me.”

Ma Yi looked in astonishment at his wound. Luckily, his recovery was quick. In the blink of an eye, the hole in his leg had already healed completely.

Peering through the gaps in the leaves in the fading light, Ma Yi noticed shadows of all kinds moving through the forest below. From time to time, all sorts of hunts and killings played out beneath him. What shocked him even more was that no matter what creature it was, every one of them was incredibly powerful. Even the prey were at least stronger than he was. And the animals here were all bizarre beyond belief: foxes with rabbit ears, though whether they were truly foxes Ma Yi could not tell; they merely looked mostly like foxes. There were wolves with three tails, centipedes dozens of meters long, and giant beetles shaped like turtles.

All of them were fearsome predators. The giant beetle that looked like a turtle was astonishingly fast as well. With its four short legs, it could burst forward and vanish in an instant.

And in the forest below, under the darkening sky, the cycle of hunting and being hunted never ceased.