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Having found his target, Wayne’s journey became considerably easier.
He followed behind the Gillian, and almost nothing stood in his way.
On the occasional stretch where he crossed paths with a hostile Gillian, he waited until both sides had ground each other down to a certain degree before moving in.
It was the most efficient approach.
And he needed those kills to consolidate his own Reiryoku.
What he hadn’t expected was that this one act of following would stretch into several more months.
The awkward part was that his whole intention of staying far from the Forest of Menos had been completely undone by this pursuit.
The upside was that the continuous replenishment along the way had pushed his internal Reiryoku close to its limit.
No matter how much he compressed it, there wasn’t a single drop more he could squeeze in.
Think of it this way: Wayne was the bottle, and Reiryoku was the water.
The bottle was full.
One more drop and it would spill over.
Months passed.
Wayne had followed this Gillian so far he’d lost count of the distance.
There had been a couple of dangerous encounters along the way.
On the road, they’d run into two Gillians with active consciousness — both dealt with smoothly by Wayne.
From a tactical standpoint, in the Outer Circle, Wayne’s intelligence was first-rate.
As long as the power gap wasn’t too extreme, he could hold his ground.
And if he couldn’t win, he could always run.
He wasn’t the only one benefiting from those kills.
The bigger beneficiary, in truth, was the unconscious Gillian he had been tailing all along.
Since Wayne’s own Reiryoku was already near saturation, almost all the additional Reishi being absorbed went straight into that bottomless pit.
Over the months, the Reiatsu radiating off the Gillian grew noticeably stronger.
By the time they reached the Forest of Menos, it would be capable of holding its own.
Half a year slipped by.
Wayne noticed the Gillians he encountered growing more and more numerous — and then, just today, something strange happened.
After stopping briefly to rest, he caught up to the Gillian marked with his Reiatsu imprint, and found two other Gillians walking alongside it.
All three moved in parallel.
None of them showed any intent to attack the others.
It caught Wayne off guard for a moment.
Then he understood.
He had to be getting close to the Forest of Menos.
Sure enough, on the third day of travel, he crested a tall hill — and saw it on the other side.
A boundless, endless forest stretching out to the horizon.
The Forest of Menos, right there before his eyes.
“Truly breathtaking.” Wayne stared at the vast expanse below and felt something stir in his chest.
He had imagined this place more than once.
But now that it was actually in front of him, it was even more magnificent than anything he’d pictured.
Beyond the hill lay woodland that extended as far as the eye could see.
Nothing like the barren stretches he had passed through, the trees here had actual branches and leaves, and the deeper in you looked, the taller and thicker they became.
A dense, yellowish-white mist drifted above the canopy, as though the Reishi was so concentrated it had taken physical form.
It swallowed the interior whole, leaving Wayne unable to glimpse even a corner of what lay within.
“I meant to stay far from this place.” A quiet sigh.
“But somehow…” In the end he had chosen Nel over safely sitting out the Gillian’s advancement, and even that choice wasn’t necessarily right.
“Forget it.
Let’s go.” He pushed the thought aside.
“Even if it’s a mistake — in a forest this vast, Yammy, who needs time to build his strength before he’s truly dangerous, may not be able to kill me at the very start of his evolution.” A small reassurance, aimed at himself.
He locked onto the Gillian through his imprint and fell in behind it, stepping one foot at a time into the boundaries of the Forest of Menos.
The difference was immediate.
The moment he crossed in, Wayne felt it.
Unlike anywhere else, the Reishi here was dense, thick enough that nearly every breath drew in an amount equal to an entire lowest-tier Beast Hollow’s worth.
And that was for him, a High Hollow.
What would a Gillian’s soul absorption pull in?
Wayne’s chest tightened at the thought.
“No wonder the Forest of Menos calls Gillians here.
This place really is a sacred ground that belongs only to their tier.” He murmured it once, then pressed deeper.
The dense forest was a different environment entirely.
Unlike the barren stretches he had come through, this place let Wayne make full use of his advantages.
His only constraint was that he couldn’t absorb too much Reishi right now.
Simply breathing was fine.
But if he devoured a few Gillians on top of that, he would almost certainly trigger the evolutionary stage, and that was the last thing he needed at this point.
At least until he knew the true identity of the Gillian he was following, he couldn’t afford to lose his mobility.
“Hey, big guy.” He trailed behind it, muttering to himself.
“Just who are you?
Is it Nel?
Yammy?
Or neither?” Now that he was inside the Forest of Menos, how was he supposed to help this thing advance quickly?
He turned it over and over, and eventually landed on one answer: use himself as bait.
Lure solitary Gillians toward the one he’d been tracking, kill them, stuff their Hollow Masks into the big fellow’s mouth, then let the Reiryoku bleeding off the corpses draw it further.
The main threat to keep in mind was this: within the Forest of Menos, aside from conscious Gillians, the most dangerous presences were the Adjuchas, those who had failed to reach the Inner Circle after advancing, or who had been stranded here for one reason or another.
If circumstances weren’t forcing his hand, Wayne had no desire to make enemies of those creatures.
Fortunately, the Forest of Menos was enormous, and as long as he didn’t venture into the core zone, the odds of running into an Adjuchas were relatively low.
Beyond Gillians and Adjuchas, the forest also held a population of lower-tier Hollow Beasts, the finest food source in the area, and the primary prey for those Gillians that had settled into peaceful coexistence with one another.
A Hollow Beast raised inside the Forest of Menos grew far faster than one anywhere else.
That was why so many High Hollows were willing to risk wandering here.
Once the Gillian arrived in the forest, it stopped moving in a single direction and began to drift aimlessly.
This was its final destination, after all.
Its remaining purpose was simple: eat, and prepare for its next evolution.
Wayne didn’t spare it a second glance.
He slipped quietly into another stretch of territory and, using his Reiatsu perception, tracked down a different Gillian.
Hunting Gillians inside the Forest of Menos was not the exclusive privilege of conscious Gillians or Adjuchas.
With enough strength, even a lower-tier Hollow could take one down by force.
Like right now.
He locked onto his target, used his Blade Claws to scale a tall tree with ease, and suppressed his Reiryoku until nothing leaked outward.
Against a superior’s perception it would have meant nothing, a cheap trick at best.
But against an unconscious Gillian, it worked just fine.
He crouched on a branch about thirty meters up and waited.
Below, the mindless Gillian lumbered forward without direction.
Wayne stayed perfectly still, a hunter at his stump.
When the Gillian passed beneath him, he released everything at once.
His Reiryoku surged into his Blade Claws, and streams of bright silver light bled off the edges.
He dropped.
One clean Shattering Slash, straight into the face of the Gillian below.
The attack came without warning.
It had no chance to dodge.
The witch-like Hollow Mask cracked and shattered with a thunderous snap.
The enormous body stood motionless for a few seconds, then crashed to the ground with a boom that kicked up a wall of sand and dust.
After that, nothing.
The massive corpse lay still.
Dead beyond any doubt.
Wayne was already gone, Hollow Mask in hand.
Using his imprint, he found the big fellow again.
The Reishi bleeding off the Hollow Mask in his grip caught its attention immediately.
The Gillian roared and charged straight toward him.
Wayne dropped the Hollow Mask on the ground and backed away.
He found a nearby tree and climbed up to watch.
The Gillian snatched the mask off the ground and swallowed it whole, then let out a satisfied shriek.
It didn’t bother looking for Wayne.
It turned around and went back to foraging.
“Tsk.” Wayne shook his head with a bitter smile.
“I’ve become a feeder again.” He was about to drop from the tree and follow when the big fellow suddenly stopped dead.
One roar, and then it was sprinting hard toward the distance.
“What’s going on?” Wayne froze.
Then his gut clenched.
Inside the Forest of Menos, unconscious Gillians rarely moved with deliberate purpose toward one another.
They were all drawn here by the same call of the forest.
Most of the time they preferred hunting the weak creatures that scraped by in the forest’s margins, which was exactly why Wayne had been able to relax a little after arriving, and go off to hunt on his own.
But a Gillian moving with purpose only meant one of three things.
One: the Reishi bleeding off a nearby dead Gillian or Adjuchas had drawn it in.
Given the distance from the Gillian he had just killed, that clearly wasn’t the case.
Two: a nearby Adjuchas had summoned it.
That was common enough.
Inside the Forest of Menos, Adjuchas held a degree of dominion over Gillians, the claim of a superior over its subordinates.
If that was the situation, even Wayne had no good answer.
Three.
A war between the two rival factions native to the Forest of Menos had just broken out.
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