Chapter Ninety-Six: The Sky-Reaching Great Tree

Ma Yi did not get a proper moment of rest the entire night. For the first time since the end of the world, he spent an entire night trembling with fear beneath a blanket of leaves. A place like this should never have been somewhere their level was qualified to enter for trial. After observing through the night, Ma Yi discovered that the lowest-tier creatures in this mysterious land were already insects and beasts at the seventh or eighth level, while most of the others were at the tenth level, and some had even reached the so-called Transcendent Realm.

As the sky gradually brightened, the forest, which had once been thick with danger, slowly fell silent. Only then did Ma Yi carefully crawl out from beneath the leaves. He looked left and right, and once he confirmed that nothing was threatening him, he quickened his pace and ran toward the trunk of the giant tree.

Suddenly, Ma Yi stopped.

Ahead of him, or rather high above him, a small white fruit hung there.

“Such a huge tree, and it bears such a tiny fruit?” Ma Yi thought in confusion. But then he reconsidered. Trees bore fruit; what was strange about that? So he stepped through the air and flew toward it.

The fruit was not large, and it was wrapped inside layers of leaves. If Ma Yi had not caught it from such an odd angle, he never would have noticed it at all. It was only about the size of a basketball, its outer layer resembling either translucent flesh or a shell, with the seed inside clearly visible. Out of curiosity, Ma Yi plucked it straight from the branch and brought it under his nose to smell it. There was neither a fragrant aroma nor any foul odor.

He took a tentative bite. He was already prepared to spit it out at once if it tasted bad or proved poisonous. But the moment he bit into it, a stream of warmth flowed down his throat and into his abdomen. In an instant, every limb and bone in his body was immersed in that comforting heat, as though he were lying in a warm pool in the dead of winter, soaking in blissful relaxation. The sensation was so overpowering that Ma Yi could not help shivering.

“This fruit is a treasure,” he thought.

He glanced at the giant fruit in his hand and, without much hesitation, bit into it greedily. Even the seed was picked clean by him, leaving behind not the slightest trace of flesh.

He looked at the seed, which was smaller than a fist but still not by much, thought for a moment, and then tucked it into his pocket.

Along the way he encountered no more of those fruits, and Ma Yi finally arrived at the main trunk of the giant tree. By then, it could hardly still be called a trunk. Before his eyes there was only mottled bark, stretching endlessly to both sides with no boundary in sight.

Following the trunk, Ma Yi kept climbing higher and higher, and his speed grew faster and faster. He had to find a safe place before nightfall. Otherwise, the dangers of the dark were not something a mere ninth-level being like him could withstand.

By winding around tree trunks thicker than skyscrapers, Ma Yi passed through the clouds clinging to the giant tree’s trunk.

The instant he broke through the cloud layer, a surge of danger suddenly exploded in his mind. Without even thinking, Ma Yi dashed sideways for dozens of meters.

To prevent another attack, Ma Yi used another burst of acceleration after dodging, putting more distance between himself and the source of danger before looking up to see what had happened. At that point, he no longer knew how he was supposed to be shocked. Above the clouds, several birds the size of nightmares were circling in the air, in every color and shape imaginable. Just from their presence alone, Ma Yi could tell that each of them had reached the Transcendent Realm, and some even made him feel fear.

The one that attacked him just now was the smallest of them. After failing to hit its target, it paid Ma Yi no further attention and simply spread its wings again, flying higher into the sky to circle with the larger birds. Only then did Ma Yi realize that countless tiny insects were also swarming through the air in dense clouds. The giant birds were chasing and devouring those insects.

He called them tiny only because they were far away. Ma Yi estimated that if those insects were standing beside him, none of them would be any smaller than he was. That smallest giant bird had probably mistaken him for one of those insects.

“Run. Get away first and talk later,” Ma Yi muttered.

He was not stupid. Once the birds finished eating those insects, would they not turn their attention to him? In this place, the only sensible move was to flee. Ever since he arrived at this trial ground, he had felt unbearably stifled, as though any random thing could take his life at any moment. He was truly weak to the bone. He had no idea where all the human experts had gone, or why he still had not seen a single one.

And if the monsters here were this powerful, was this really a place suitable for trial by someone at the entry level?

After several narrowly escaped encounters, Ma Yi finally reached about two-thirds of the way up the giant tree. Resting on a branch, he wondered whether, if he could not fly, he would be reduced to a puddle of flesh if he fell from here.

What puzzled Ma Yi even more was why, after seeing this giant tree, he had been so determined to climb to the top and take a look. It was as though some unseen force had been quietly altering his subconscious. The higher he climbed, the stronger the monsters became, and the less his life seemed worth. He could die at any moment, and yet he still wanted to climb higher. He still wanted to see the top of the tree.

As he climbed, Ma Yi also encountered ants as large as trucks crawling along the trunk. And not just one kind. The red ants and the black ants seemed to be rivals, battling fiercely up and down the bark as if two factions were fighting for territory. Their corpses covered the trunk, while more and more giant ants kept charging toward the battlefield, one after another, relentless as a tide.

He also saw a moth with a wingspan of more than a hundred meters. Its strength was at least in the Transcendent Realm, yet it was absurdly timid. If Ma Yi had not accidentally stepped on its wing, he would never have noticed this fellow, whose body color matched the trunk of the giant tree perfectly. Ma Yi broke out in a cold sweat from the fright, but the moth was just as startled; after flying off a certain distance, it found another place on the trunk and clung there to continue disguising itself.

“Every step is a shock,” Ma Yi muttered, wiping the sweat from his face and continuing his upward flight.

By his estimate, he had already flown vertically for several hundred kilometers, yet he was still very far from the tree crown. This tree was actually over a thousand kilometers tall. How thick was Earth’s atmosphere again? Perhaps not even a thousand kilometers. At that height one would already have left the planet. And yet here, in this trial ground, a single tree towered to more than a thousand kilometers, and that was only the lower level of the crown. As for the upper reaches of the crown, who knew how much farther they still were?

He found an upturned piece of bark and crouched beneath it for another night. It was a dry, half-detached sheet of bark, and just the gap beneath its lifted edge seemed spacious enough for six or seven people to sit inside without feeling cramped at all.

The world outside was something Ma Yi no longer dared to look at. Screams, beast roars, and bird cries kept erupting one after another. At least several times during the night, beasts or other creatures ran across the bark where he was hiding, making it thump under their feet. Ma Yi did not dare move at all. He even suppressed his breathing to the limit, terrified that a single careless slip would draw the attention of those beasts.

Another harrowing night of cowardly survival passed.

Today, Ma Yi reaped a great harvest. After reaching the crown, strange and exotic fragrances filled his nose. Following the scent, he discovered many dead animal carcasses. After these animals died, their blood seemed to have been completely drained by something, yet their sharp claws and fangs were untouched. Even without their owners, the fur and hides remained incredibly tough. To strip off a single claw nearly a meter long, Ma Yi spent half the day wrestling with it. If he had not been afraid that danger would return after dark, he would have wanted to stay here longer. In that half day, he had taken one claw from one corpse, and also collected several small blades of grass that gave off a strange fragrance from within the bodies of these animals.

They looked like nothing more than ordinary grass, hidden by the beasts beneath their fur and carried with them. Anyone could tell at a glance that they were good things. Ma Yi had read enough novels to know that such herbs were probably the legendary spiritual medicines or immortal grasses. He did not have any container for them, but he was bold. If he could not carry them, he would simply eat them. Either way, he would not lose out.

If an informed person saw what Ma Yi was doing, they would surely rage aloud. If these spiritual herbs were used for refining medicine or alchemy, their effects could be greatly enhanced. But Ma Yi could not take them with him. Carrying them would be like wearing a beacon. The fragrance alone could be detected from far away by other creatures. How else was he supposed to hide from monsters whose strength all surpassed his?

With the claw in hand, Ma Yi continued struggling upward. The higher he flew, the more dead animal corpses he found. But just like the animals below, they all shared one common trait: the blood within their bodies had been completely sucked dry by something. This made Ma Yi uneasy. After all, what kind of creature could kill these powerful beasts and then drain them so thoroughly?

The stronger the animal, the more spiritual herbs were hidden within its fur. Ma Yi was not foolish. Not a single herb with a pungent, aggressive smell did he dare touch. As for the herbs that smelled gentle and mild, he swallowed them all without missing a single one. He truly was not afraid of eating himself into trouble.

Of course, consuming these herbs was not without effect. In just one day, Ma Yi’s strength had already reached the peak of the ninth level. And after eating so many herbs, apart from feeling unusually full, he also sensed that his spirit, eyesight, and physical stamina had all improved dramatically.

Looking at the summit of the crown, now just within reach, Ma Yi’s heart began to pound violently. At last, he was going to climb to the top of the tree.

Along the way, aside from the small fruit he had found beneath the tree, Ma Yi had already eaten no fewer than a hundred spiritual herbs within the crown. Though his mind and body now felt excellent, his appearance was rather less so. He had once had a body defined by hard muscle, but now he looked exactly like a man weighing three hundred pounds. His entire body seemed inflated, swollen beyond recognition. This was the result of having consumed far too many herbs all at once. Some could not be digested in time, while others were broken down too slowly, causing vast amounts of energy and elemental power to accumulate within him.

“This...” Ma Yi finally reached the summit of the sky-piercing giant tree, and before he could even feel excited, he was stunned by what lay before him.