The oppressive forest fell into a deathly, ringing silence once more, but Shen Jietian remained completely frozen in the mud.
His wide, bloodshot eyes stared fixedly into the gloom where the white wolf king and its formidable guardians had vanished.
Every logical cell in his brain screamed at him to stand up and flee, yet his physical form utterly refused to cooperate.
The sheer terror laced within that ancient, late-stage howl seemed to have bored deep into his very bones, sealing his meridians and anchoring his muscles with an invisible weight.
His legs trembled uncontrollably, and every fibre of his being felt as stiff and unyielding as cold iron.
Move.
Move, damn it!
He roared internally, desperately trying to force his spiritual energy to circulate and break the paralysis.
Yet, nothing happened.
A sheet of cold, viscous sweat thoroughly drenched his back.
The wolf king had departed to pursue a greater threat, but Shen Jietian knew with absolute certainty that it wouldn’t stay away forever.
Once the apex predator finished dealing with Old Zhao, it would likely sweep back through its territory to eliminate any remaining intruders.
If it returned and discovered him still lying helplessly in the dirt, his life would end right then and there.
The mere visualization of those intelligent blue eyes returning to finish the job nearly stopped his breathing.
Realizing that a purely mental effort would not suffice to shatter this fear-induced shock, Shen Jietian’s gaze landed on his rusty iron sword resting in the grass beside him.
A fierce, utterly ruthless glint flashed deep within his eyes.
Survival required desperate measures.
Without a single moment of hesitation, he grabbed the worn hilt, flipped the blade, and drove the chipped edge straight across his own thigh.
Slash!
A sharp, agonizing pain exploded through his nervous system as a deep, ragged laceration opened across his muscle, and fresh, crimson blood immediately flowed from the wound, soaking his trousers.
“Hiss!”
Shen Jietian sucked in a sharp, ragged breath through his teeth, his vision blurring momentarily from the sheer intensity of the biological agony.
Yet, the self-inflicted wound achieved exactly what he had calculated: the severe shock of physical pain completely shattered the lingering psychological paralysis of the wolf king’s aura.
As warm blood ran down his leg, control gradually flooded back into his numbed limbs.
His uncontrollable trembling weakened, and his legs finally responded to his commands.
Without wasting another precious second, Shen Jietian forced his aching body to stagger to his feet.
Run.
That was the singular, driving directive remaining in his consciousness.
He needed to put as much distance between himself and this clearing as physically possible.
He had to run before the pack returned, and he had to run before the spectre of death caught up to him.
In an instant, Shen Jietian made a conscious, tactical choice to sprint in the exact opposite direction of Old Zhao’s escape route.
The wolf king had explicitly tracked Old Zhao’s heavy spiritual fluctuations; heading anywhere near that trajectory would be nothing short of suicide.
Jagged branches and sharp briars whipped violently across his face as he sprinted blindly through the dense, fog-laden forest.
His wounded thigh flared with blinding pain with every single stride he took, his lungs burned like a raging furnace, and his frantic heartbeat thundered so loudly inside his ears that it drowned out the rustling of the canopy.
Still, he didn’t dare to slow his pace by even a fraction of a millimetre.
He had no way of knowing how much time he truly had left before the clearing was re-examined.
It could be minutes, it could be seconds, or perhaps he had no time at all.
The only thing guiding his frantic movements was the primordial desire to survive.
Suddenly, as he leapt over a patch of dense ferns, his boot nearly caught on a large, heavy obstruction lying concealed in the tall grass.
Shen Jietian stumbled violently, barely managing to rebalance himself against a tree trunk, and instinctively looked down to see what had almost tripped him.
The moment his eyes registered the sight, his face instantly turned an ash-pale colour, and his breath caught in his throat.
It was a corpse.
A deeply familiar corpse.
It was Chen Hu—or, more accurately, it was the gruesome remains of what had been Chen Hu mere minutes ago.
His bulky, robust torso was still entirely intact, resting face up in the dirt, but his head was completely missing from his shoulders.
For a brief, horrified moment, Shen Jietian forgot to draw air into his lungs.
His mind rapidly spun through the timeline of their escape.
Chen Hu had been the very first to panic and bolt from the clearing, fleeing long before the rest of them had even turned around.
By all rights, he should have possessed the greatest head start.
Then why was he lying here, dead and desecrated?
Shen Jietian forced his analytical gaze closer, inspecting the fatal injury.
The horrific cut stretching across the stump of the neck was flawlessly smooth and clean.
There were no jagged tears, no splintered bone fragments, and no signs of savage gnawing.
This wasn’t the work of a spiritual beast, Shen Jietian reasoned, his thoughts turning icy cold.
A wild predator would have torn the torso apart, feasted on the internal organs, and thoroughly crushed the bones to consume the marrow.
This clean, singular bisection looked explicitly like the work of a cultivator wielding a high-grade artifact weapon imbued with sharp spiritual energy.
Someone—or something human—had executed him in full flight.
The realization sent an entirely new, paralyzing chill cascading down Shen Jietian’s spine.
But as his eyes scanned the rest of the corpse, he noticed an anomaly that was even stranger and more contradictory: the embroidered storage bag remained perfectly attached to Chen Hu’s waist sash, entirely undisturbed.
Shen Jietian stared at the pouch, absolute confusion filling his mind.
In the lawless wilderness, if a rogue cultivator had ambushed and murdered Chen Hu, the primary motive would invariably be to plunder his resources.
Why on earth would an attacker commit the crime but leave the valuable storage bag behind?
Had the killer been interrupted?
Or was Chen Hu struck down by a stray, lingering environmental hazard or a hidden restriction array that they hadn’t detected on the way in?
There was absolutely no time to indulge in a prolonged deduction.
Every single survival instinct in his body was screaming at him to vacate the area immediately.
Gritting his teeth, Shen Jietian reached down, ripped the blood-stained storage bag from the corpse’s waist, and tucked it into his own robes.
“Sorry,” he muttered, the hollow apology barely leaving his lips before he spun around and began running again.
This time, he deliberately veered into a completely different geometric direction from the path Chen Hu had been carving out.
Whatever unknown force or hidden entity had slaughtered Chen Hu, Shen Jietian wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
The dark forest blurred into a chaotic smear of green and grey around him.
In his heightened state of paranoia, every elongated shadow cast by the setting sun looked like a lunging predator, every rustling leaf beneath the wind sounded like the approach of silent paws, and every snapping twig made his heart violently jump into his throat.
Then, breaking through the ambient noise of his flight, a high-pitched, resonant howl echoed from the heart of the valley.
It was the unmistakable voice of the white wolf king.
Shen Jietian’s face instantly drained of what little colour it had left.
Moments later, a chorus of several more feral howls answered the summons from various sectors of the forest.
One…
three…
five…
and then suddenly, dozens of synchronized cries spread throughout the entire valley network.
The sheer volume of the response caused his scalp to go completely numb with horror.
The scattered pack had officially regrouped under their monarch’s command.
Perhaps they had already successfully tracked down and slaughtered Old Zhao.
Perhaps they had eliminated the twins.
Perhaps they were now actively fanning out in a systematic grid to hunt down any remaining stragglers.
Shen Jietian didn’t know the exact details, and he didn’t want to know.
His singular focus remained entirely locked on escape.
As he ran, pressing through a dense thicket of thorns, another critical realization slowly surfaced within his analytical mind.
He looked down at his torso and realized that the standard robe covering his body was thoroughly soaked with the pungent, copper-tasting blood of the subordinate wolves he had parried earlier.
To a pack of high-scent spiritual predators, that heavy odor was essentially a glowing beacon tracking his coordinates through the woods.
Without a single moment of hesitation, Shen Jietian unbuckled his sash and tore the outer robe completely off his body.
Bundling the blood-soaked fabric together, he hurled it with all his might deep into a dark, thorny ravine to his left.
Hopefully, the concentrated scent trail would act as a temporary decoy, buying him a few precious minutes of misdirection if the tracking hounds crossed his path.
Adjusting his course once more, he deliberately altered his direction toward specific areas of the forest where his spiritual senses could detect the minor, passive fluctuations of low-grade life forms.
He began actively tracking the subtle signs of spirit rabbits darting through the brush, the distant rustling of passive spirit deer, and even the faint territorial markings of slightly stronger, herbivorous beasts.
The more distinct signs of mundane animal life he discovered, the more profoundly relieved he became.
Because through his understanding of beast ecology, he had finally deduced a fundamental truth: when they had first entered the wolf pack’s territory earlier in the day, the forest had been completely devoid of small life because every single living creature had long since fled the apex predator’s domain.
At the time, their group had been too blinded by greed to recognize the absolute anomaly.
Now, the return of these passive, skittish spirit beasts served as definitive, living proof that he was successfully crossing out of the wolf king’s localized territory.
That mathematical realization became his solitary source of comfort as his physical limits loomed.
He ran.
And he ran.
And he ran until time itself lost all structural meaning.
The deep laceration on his thigh continued to bleed steadily, his spiritual energy reserves were nearly completely exhausted, and his peripheral vision was gradually blurring into darkness from severe blood loss and fatigue.
Several times, his boots caught on exposed roots, and he nearly collapsed face-first into the dirt; each time, through sheer, unyielding willpower, he forced his trembling limbs back up and kept moving.
He lost track of how far he had travelled, and he had no concept of how long he had been pushing his failing body.
Then, quite suddenly, the dense, ancient trees ahead began to thin out significantly, allowing a flood of brilliant light to pierce the canopy.
Shen Jietian’s pace naturally slowed down to a ragged stumble.
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, he dared to cast his gaze forward rather than constantly scanning the terrifying shadows behind his back.
And then, he saw it.
Rising majestically against the horizon was the massive, towering structure of the city wall—tall, gray, fortified with spiritual arrays, and deeply familiar.
The ancient stone stood proudly beneath the final, golden rays of the setting sun.
For a long, breathless moment, Shen Jietian simply stared at the gates in a daze, utter disbelief filling his bloodshot eyes.
He had made it.
Against all mathematical odds, he had actually escaped.
The intense, survival-driven tension that had been supporting his broken body for hours instantly vanished into thin air.
His exhausted knees completely gave out beneath his weight, and he collapsed heavily onto the hard ground just outside the perimeter line.
The cool, damp earth beneath his face felt strangely, unimaginably comforting.
His physical shell screamed in absolute, agonizing exhaustion, and his mind remained thoroughly scarred by the horrific events of the afternoon.
Yet, beneath the layers of pain and lingering trauma, an overwhelming, all-consuming wave of pure, unadulterated relief blossomed within his heart.
He had survived.
He had survived the wrath of the late-stage wolf king, the lethal betrayal of his trusted leader, the bloody trap of the inner valley, and the literal jaws of death itself.
He had survived it all-for now.
End of Chapter 5
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