The departure of the great merchant caravan did not bring the calm Tian Xin expected. Instead, a tense, brittle atmosphere settled over the hunter.
"Shen Ji," Tian Xin said, his voice flat and strained, "I need you to help me with a chore."
After the caravan left, Tian Xin worked on the house, He spent The entire afternoon.
Tian Shen Ji watched his father with unsettling clarity. His father's actions made no sense. He had merely traded his deep sorrow for an obsession with pointless preparations. They were not preparations for a normal hunt or for the winter, yet Tian Xin offered no explanation.
Then his father's final and strangest chore began. Tian Xin ordered Tian Shen Ji to help him pack every important item, clothes, simple possessions and move them all.
When Tian Shen Ji asked why they were doing this, Tian Xin just smiled a thin, broken expression that held no warmth.
"Just preparing," Tian Xin murmured, pressing his cheek against his son's. "A hunter must always be prepared."
Tian Shen Ji nodded, his heart heavy. He felt a pang of pity for the man. His father was clearly breaking apart, clinging to these strange and menial chores just to stay functional. The boy decided the most he could do was obey.
A day later, under the white glare of a full moon, Tian Xin slipped away from the house. He moved deep into the Black Crescent Mountain Range. He moved like a shadow, his heartbeat slowed to a rhythmic thrum, his presence so suppressed that the mountain birds didn't stop their chirping as he passed.
He was searching for something that he himself didn't know, maybe a reason for his paranoia. When he discovered the moonlight falling on a deep and narrow ravine. On any other occasion he wouldn't have given a second look but now he was in a state of almost dispersion.
He penetrated through the thin mist. observing the scene from as far and discreetly as possible, trying his hardest to conceal his presence. What he saw at the bottom of the ravine was a sight that shocked him to his core.
Below him, moonlight didn't so much shine as it pooled like liquid silver right above a small, obsidian-dark lake. Surrounding the water were two packs of wolves, hundreds of them, their fur bristling in the cold air.
"Black Moon Wolves and White Moon Wolves," Tian Xin whispered to himself.
The Black wolves had a sturdy body and fierce killing aura that seemed to darken the ground beneath them.The White wolves were agile and deadly, their fur shimmering with a silver glow that made them look illusory.
He was more than a little puzzled. These two types of demon wolves were natural mortal enemies. By all laws of the forest, they should have been tearing each other's throats out, turning the ravine into a river of blood. Instead, they stood in a terrifying silence.
At this juncture, Tian Xin realized he had two options. The first was to quietly detour around the ravine and return to the village to raise the alarm, but his gut told him he would be too late. The second was to wait and see if the packs would eventually start fighting and in the process weaken each other.
Then, he sensed a presence so terrible it made his skin crawl. A couple of seconds later, he saw it.
Under the full moon, a giant wolf emerged from the shadows of a cave at the ravine's end. His fur wasn't just glowing; it seemed to be covered in a layer of actual silver frost, with blood red eyes and emanating a killing aura that was dreadful yet also majestic. It was a pressure that weighed on the air itself.
"Could it be the legendary Wolf? The Spirit Blood Moon Wolf!" Tian Xin pupils constricted.
The beast was a creature he had read only about by mistake in an almost destroyed book. His wife,Shu Yan, had been an avid reader; she had read so much that at one point he didn't have anywhere else to buy her books, so he had to borrow from the village archives.
Unfortunately for her most were about beasts or geography. She had read them while grumbling, and he had accompanied her to keep her company. What few things he had read about this beast, for a simple village like Xiao Tian, was already enough to categorise it as a nightmarish creature.
It had the agile body shape of the White Moon Wolf but the heavy, powerful constitution of the Black Moon Wolf. It possessed the strengths of both species and the weaknesses of neither. Its bloodline was of a higher grade so its potential for cultivation was higher as well, at the very least it was a Foundation Establishment.
On the way back, Tian Xin felt a cold sweat break across his back, his mind raced with the sheer impossibility of it. Was he and the village really so unlucky? Even if deep in the outer layers of the Black Crescent Mountain Range, demonic beasts of this caliber should be non-existent. Hell, even in the inner layers, they were considered rare terrors of unimaginable destruction.
To see them here so close to the village was definitely a bad omen. Even a three-year-old child could understand there was something wrong at play.
"I need to go back," he hissed to the trees. "Even if the village is not the target, this pack is still a dangerous tide that will drown everything in its influence zone."
He began the sprint back. The silence of the forest was gone, replaced by the rhythmic sound of his heart.