The next monster to attack them was a human-sized mantis with wooden eyes. As it flew out of the canopy towards them, Huang Niuniu slashed its wings with Lotus Razor. It screeched, falling to the ground, where Li Yao separated its head from its body.

They encountered monsters twice more within the next hour. They harvested the cores, and Fang Zhao put the corpses in his ring.

This monster frequency was far less than normal—that meant the Spirituality Shrouding Charm was doing its job. They were only attacked when a monster of vicious nature directly noticed them with sight, smell, or hearing. For monsters based on gentler archetypes like deers and bisons, they left the group alone. Of course, they could have been primal beasts. It was hard to confirm without specialized skills or tools.

Yu Han got one or two Pure Qi for each fight.

But Huang Niuniu had longer reach, while Fang Zhao and Li Yao were faster to melee. So Yu Han took the duty of guarding his whip-lashing teammate.

He also had his Thousand Petals Awareness activated, focusing on sounds rather than sight. And right before they crossed the final living root bridge to the Second-to-Last Bog area, both he and Fei Rui picked up the minute vibrations of the ground.

“Shit,” Yu Han called out. “Something big’s coming.”

A mushroom-covered boar burst out of the forested grove to the right, trampling the foliage in its path. It glared at Yu Han’s group, nostrils flared with engine-like snorts.

“A Rot-Dweller Swine!” Fang Zhao said. It looked different than it did on the notice they had seen before. Large mushrooms grew on its back and sides, some like matsutake and others like chanterelles. Most had hyphae like webs, connecting each mushroom to its skin.

The boar was a metre tall and twice as long. Its heavy muscles bulged as it stomped its foreleg on the ground. The two tusks looked like they had been dipped in acid and then laced with cartoon poison.

Yu Han had read about this beast in the Creature Compendium. They apparently stunk so bad that it would make mentally weaker disciples weep. The Coveralls were doing their job, though, keeping the worst of it out.

The boar squealed, then charged. The ground was damp, but minute dust still rose in the boar’s path.

「The pig thing is coming! Do you want me to eat it, Yu Han?」 Fei Rui bobbed left and right on his head.

“Leave it to us.” Yu Han got into Mountain Root Stance. He wasn’t crazy enough to take the Rot-Dweller Swine’s charge head-on.

He didn’t have to.

With a cute scream, Huang Niuniu lashed out with Lotus Razor. The metallic whip extended in the air in a silver arc. The segments elongated, and the razor-sharp blades between them hit the boar’s front leg.

It sliced through a thin white layer of fungi and left two gashes, but the wound wasn’t deep enough to draw blood. The Rot-Dweller Swine growled but kept its charge, further speeding up.

“Why does it have such thick skin?!” Huang Niuniu retracted the whip. Usually, the Earth-grade weapon was sharp enough to dismember limb from body.

"Didn’t you read the mission notice?” Yu Han shouted. “We have to take out its mushrooms!”

Li Yao held his swords horizontally and dodged the boar just as it was about to skewer him with its tusks. The swords slashed the side of the speeding beast, cutting off the fungal growths there like scissors through cloth.

As the boar was about to rush past Li Yao, he slashed with both blades into the hide. The swords went in, leaving two deep wounds as the boar charged.

When the mushrooms were cut off, the fungal webs that reinforced the Rot-Dweller Swine’s hide would slacken, rendering its armour useless.

“Great job,” Yu Han said, though feeling the trepidation. The boar had initially charged for him and Huang Niuniu, who were in the middle of the trail. But now it angled to the left, squealing hoarsely as its black eyes became red. Blood spluttered from its wound as it slowed.

Fang Zhao was on it in an instant. He started with Thunderclap Punch, the fist striking into its injuries. He then followed up with seven quick chops.

The boar roared, coming to a full stop.

“Retreat,” Yu Han shouted.

Fang Zhao tapped the ground lightly with his feet and glided back as if he weighed as much as a feather.

Feather Scale Step!

Not a moment too soon, several of the fruiting bodies on the boar’s back exploded into a cloud of spores. The Coveralls would protect them from the brunt, but avoiding the attack altogether was better, unless they wanted to be momentarily blinded.

Huang Niuniu let out a yell and struck the cloud with her whip. It seemed to slash through the screen, revealing an injured boar slowly hobbling away.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“It’s a Primal,” Yu Han said. Monsters wouldn’t think of retreating. If it were one, it would follow up offensively after its poison spore attack, not run away.

“Not so fast!” Huang Niuniu retracted Lotus Razor and unclasped Pale Spine. Before the boar could move far, Pale Spine had wound around its right hind leg. She clicked a protruding bone on the handle, and the ribs sprung out from the whip body, piercing into the boar’s tough hide.

She pulled, and the boar squealed as it was dragged back. By this time, the cloud of spores had just about dispersed. The three boys jumped in.

Li Yao slashed apart the shrooms on its side. Fang Zhao kicked its leg to trip it again. Meanwhile, Yu Han pierced his halberd into the hide near its heart.

With a squelch, the blade went in. The Rot-Dweller Swine raised one last cry, then went still.

None of them got any Pure Qi. Primal Beasts were natural life—empowered animals.

“Bad ROI,” Yu Han grunted, pulling the halberd out.

“What’s that mean?” Huang Niuniu asked.

“Return on investment. We used up physical strength but didn’t get any Pure Qi to show for it. Primals don’t have cores either, so all we have is the corpse.”

“You don’t actually want there to be more monsters, right?” Huang Niuniu said. “They’re evil!”

“Yeah, but also more valuable.”

Li Yao patted Yu Han’s back after sheathing his blades. “It’s not the same, holding the swords with these thick gloves.” He made a fist and then a palm. “At least we’re getting practice in. And with Fang Zhao’s ring, we can bring it all back.”

Fang Zhao gathered all the severed mushrooms and stored the loot all together.

“Red Eyes, hold a sec,” Li Yao said. “The pig farted that bunch of spores there. Won’t all that get on the other stuff in the ring? It’s poisonous.”

“That’s not how this storage ring works.” Fang Zhao gazed fondly at his hand. It was covered with a glove, and the ring was underneath it. Apparently, that didn’t stop the item storing process. “It keeps each unique thing or group of things separate. Like they each have their own cabinets. I’m not sure how it works, but even if I store a pond, the water won’t get the other items wet. The fish and moss in the pond will remain in the pond, even in the ring.”

“Can you take those fish out without ejecting the water?” Yu Han asked, intrigued. They’d never really talked about the storage ring in the Sect. Who knew what could be listening

“I think so?” Fang Zhao willed a mushroom from the Rot-Dweller Swine’s back to appear. The cut on the base was clean, though, so perhaps this was one Li Yao had sliced off.

“Try to take out a mushroom that’s still attached to the pig,” Yu Han said.

Fang Zhao tried, and a mushroom appeared in his hand. This one didn’t have a smooth cut. At its base were a network of bloody roots. Did the ring know where this mushroom stopped and swine started?

“That’s creepy, man.” Li Yao yucked.

“Try to take out its blood next,” Yu Han said. “Only its blood. Nothing else!”

Fang Zhao perhaps realized what Yu Han was getting at. He took some distance and pointed his open palm outwards.

For some time, nothing happened.

“It won’t work?” Yu Han’s face fell.

“It will,” Fang Zhao said, stressing his words. “When I want to take something out, an image of it appears in my mind. I can see everything about it, inside to outside. Well, most of the time. The Qi in the Lanterns of the Blue-Veined Underspores makes peering inside foggy. That’s not the case with the Rot-Dweller Swine. And I have to concentrate—here we go.”

Suddenly, a few hundred litres of crimson appeared in midair, the whole mass shaped like a pig made out of red threads. The next moment, gravity took hold and the mass fell down, splashing the whole area with red.

“Shit,” Li Yao said. “This much blood’s gonna attract beasts with sharp noses.”

“Can you selectively take the blood back?” Yu Han asked Fang Zhao.

The red-eyed boy crouched, touching the blood-soaked ground with his gloved palms.

“It’s going to take a while,” he said. “I can’t just take a chunk of the ground either. No, I can. But that’ll take longer. It has to be shovelled up first. I think? This is tricky.”

“Why shovel?” Li Yao said.

“The process of shovelling does something. Creates a separation between the ground at large of this Hidden Realm and the loosened soil. It does not have to be shovelling, but any process that conceptually separates the ground I want with the totality.” As Fang Zhao spoke, blood slowly seeped into the ring storage. But though the liquid layer on top was gone, the ground underneath was still damp with red. “If I can store this whole layer of earth, I can then bring out just the blood to separate it. But I think if I wait too long before storing this blood-mixed earth, the separation between the blood and earth will lessen, making the process harder.”

“Why?” Yu Han asked. “How does it—or you—know where blood begins and mud ends? Maybe this soil has blood from other beasts too, already degraded and assimilated. Blood is mostly made of water, and some other organic materials. Can you take each of them out separately?”

There was plasma and the different blood cells. Dive deeper, and there were molecules and atoms. Could Fang Zhao, with this tiny ring, replicate the process of taking a composite mixture of elements like earth, blood, and other bio-trash and separating them into their basic constituent parts?

Centrifugation, filtration, distillation, evaporation, enzymatic reactions, cell sorting, electrolysis, and all other means of matter separation that modern science had taken millennia to achieve. Could this one ring do it all?

“My mother could do it,” Fang Zhao said. “Her Cultivation Realm was high enough that she could overcome the bond between objects that made them more than the sum of their parts. I… can’t.” He waved his hand, and earth popped out. “This had been mixed with the blood. But as you can see, the soil still looks reddish.”

Yu Han sighed half in relief and half in disappointment. “You can take out the blood. You should probably be able to separate the meat, bones, skin, and everything else smoothly.”

The red-eyed boy nodded.

“Don’t take my job, Red Eyes,” Li Yao said with a laugh, patting Fang Zhao.

Yu Han was jealous. He wanted a storage ring so badly!

Looking at Fang Zhao and Li Yao making short work of the monsters, and even Huang Niuniu contributing greatly with her newly learnt whip art, Yu Han couldn’t help but feel like the weakest of the group.

The Martial Arts they practised were built to be offensive. The Ox Tail 72 Sweeping Form, on the other hand, was mostly to hone a soldier’s body rather than a pure Martial Art. It trained Yu Han efficiently but was less useful than Fang Zhao’s Bronze Crane Leg, Li Yao’s Silver Serpent Sword Dance, and Huang Niuniu’s Spiral Dance of the Willow and the Wisp.

Unless he used Fei Rui, he wouldn’t be able to beat any of them in a fight. As things stood now, he was the weakest link.

Now, Fang Zhao had two cheat rings—though one might be cursed. Between Li Yao and Fang Zhao, Yu Han’s money was on the latter coming out on top in a duel. Though the outcome might be different if it was no-holds-barred, a fight-to-the-death. Li Yao, a former gang member, would have plenty of dirty tricks up his sleeves.

If I got a cheat ring out of it, Yu Han tutted. I’d take a curse any day. Well, maybe not.