In truth, Shen Zuo had been piecing together a plan in his head ever since he'd first entered the forest, a plan built around using the "Growing Map" in a different way. Instead of just marking out routes and exits, he'd been using it to identify the best spots for setting traps, and to work out how much natural resources he could realistically gather from each area.
Over the past week, he'd conducted a thorough survey of most of the explored regions on his map, and had managed to build seventeen different traps. These traps were crude at first, meant not to take down enemies outright, but to serve as an initial line of defense, an escape route he could rely on while he fortified himself further and gradually expanded the map. With every expansion, he planned to search for new resources, and to hunt beasts with special abilities so he could put their hides or other parts to use in building more complex, more dangerous traps.
As for his skill in this area, Shen Zuo had grown genuinely proficient, so much so that the very first real injury he ever managed to inflict on his teacher Bai Ren during their training had come through a trap of his own design, even though he'd been nowhere near strong enough for direct combat back then.
And now, as he ran, fleeing from four Craigars, he wasn't just focused on survival. His mind was working at full capacity, asking itself:
"Which trap should I use now?"
Every trap he'd designed had a specific purpose, a specific location, a specific moment it was meant for. He had to choose carefully. This moment could change everything.
After half an hour of the chase, Shen Zuo felt his breathing starting to grow a little heavier, but he refused to let his body slow down. He knew the stone gorge was coming up, and that it might be his last real chance to widen the gap and clear a path toward the Caligra Eagles. The trail sloped gradually downward, and to his right sat a small rocky outcrop he scrambled up with practiced ease, before continuing to run until he reached the mouth of the passage.
He'd memorized this gorge beforehand. It wasn't more than three arm-spans wide, sound doubled inside it, and every movement echoed three times over. Halfway through, he pulled out one of the leather bombs. It had been strapped tightly inside his side pouch. He yanked the fuse free with his teeth and lit the end using the small metal flint fixed to his forearm.
He didn't wait for it to burn all the way down. He threw it back quickly, letting it drop to the ground and roll slowly deeper into the passage, before finishing his sprint out of the gorge, leaping onto a rock to the side, and vanishing behind another outcrop.
The explosion came without warning.
The blast echoed between the rocks like a death whistle. Smoke rose up from inside the gorge, and a powerful shockwave rushed outward. The first Craigar to enter the gorge, one of the healthy ones, had been sprinting hard to catch up with Shen Zuo, but was caught completely off guard by the sudden explosion right in front of it, taking the full force of the initial blast wave. It slammed into the stone wall, hit its knee and then its face, and collapsed to the ground in pain.
The injured Craigar, the one that had been frenzied with its jaw partially torn, entered a few seconds later. Shrapnel from the blast tore through its exposed leg and struck its shoulder, making it flinch and drop to one knee before dragging itself forward with difficulty, trying to push through and get out.
The remaining two stopped right at the entrance, hesitant to advance. The howling and thick smoke threw off their movement for a moment.
Shen Zuo didn't waste the opportunity. He climbed a few more steps up the raised ledge to the side and pulled the last two bombs from his pouch. One in each hand, he spun them quickly and lit them both, then hurled the first one with precision toward the middle of the passage, right where the smoke had gathered thickest. Barely a second later, the second one followed, thrown at a higher angle so it would land toward the back of the group.
The two back-to-back explosions didn't bring the beasts down, but they completely wrecked their balance. The injured Craigar collapsed onto its side, gasping in pain, struggling to breathe. The other two staggered back in shock, one crashing into the other and both rebounding off the side wall. Shrapnel left shallow cuts across their bodies and arms, and the smoke thickened the air, blurring their vision.
Shen Zuo didn't wait around to see the outcome. He turned and started counting seconds in his head:
'Seven seconds, ten seconds... if I use this window well, I can put real distance between us. That's it for the bombs now.'
Then he took off running to the right, where the path dropped down between the rocks toward a narrow stream he knew well.
"The way the books described them as slow-witted turned out to be strangely accurate," Shen Zuo thought, mocking the dim-witted beasts, then continued. "Well, their thick hides make up for their stupidity, I guess. Those five explosions, if I'd used them on any other kind of beast, would've turned them to shreds."
"What now, Shen Zuo? Killing them outright is hard and honestly not worth it, but I really should've expanded the map in their direction earlier... ugh, if only I'd brought a bow and arrows."
"Well... let's just hope the sound of those explosions draws some other beasts in," Shen Zuo muttered, still running, the echo of his own breathing now colliding in his ears with the echo of the blasts. "Good thing I'm close to Caligra Eagle territory," he thought, glancing up through the gaps in the trees at the gray sky above.
Those eagles were natural-born predators, always hunting in groups, striking with a speed too fast to track. But their one real weakness was their heavy sleep. They slept the way a creature in a decades-long hibernation might, which made killing them while asleep easier than sneaking up on a tortoise.
But...
Any loud enough sound was enough to wake them. Any tremor in the ground, or booming echo like the one those bombs had just made, could jolt them awake in an instant, and utterly without mercy.
Shen Zuo gritted his teeth.
"I need to hide, and fast... or I'll be dead before I even know where the strike came from."
Shen Zuo eased off his speed slightly, giving his body a chance to catch its breath, weaving through tight turns as if tracing out a wide circle. After a few more minutes of running and maneuvering, the Craigars began closing in on him again. The instant he felt them come within striking range, he suddenly burned through his remaining energy, launched into a full sprint, and dove into a narrow pit he'd prepared beforehand.
His slim frame barely slid inside. The moment he settled at the bottom, he triggered a simple locking mechanism made from a wooden plank. The Craigars quickly smashed the plank apart, but their bodies couldn't fit through the narrow opening.
But the pit was only the first part of his plan. At the bottom, he'd dug another narrow tunnel, sloping down slightly before leading toward a second pit several meters away. He began crawling through it quickly, his body scraping against the muddy walls, but he kept his composure. "Just a few more seconds... just don't let the Craigars find this tunnel."
He finally reached the second pit and slowly raised his head to check outside. The area was quiet... but the sounds behind him were starting to change. It wasn't just the Craigars' growling anymore... there were other cries mixed in, sharp, fast, almost like a whistling wind: Caligra!
Shen Zuo slowly pulled his head back into the tunnel and sat there in the dark, seeing nothing but shifting shadows on the narrow clay walls. His silence was absolute; the only sounds cutting through the quiet were the metallic scraping as the Craigars clawed at the edges of the rocks trying to dig into the pit, and the sharp shrieks of the Caligra Eagles drawing closer by the second.
He could count them in his head: roughly thirty of them, their cries echoing throughout the forest like some raging chorus of terror. There was no escape left for the Craigars now. With numbers like that, their fate was already sealed.
Shen Zuo sat quietly, staring silently into the dark, waiting impatiently for the chaos of the confrontation about to erupt just outside the tunnel, knowing full well that the Craigars, with no way left to flee, had death coming for them, it was only a matter of time now.
And either way, Shen Zuo had gotten exactly what he wanted.
The four Craigars finally fell, their deaths sealed amid the chaos of the fight. The Caligra Eagles tore into their prey with a savagery that showed no awareness of what they were actually walking into. The Craigars, slow and stupid as they seemed, fought with a desperate frenzy in their final moments, their poisoned fangs never once stopping their tearing and clawing until the very last instant.
Shen Zuo, still inside the tunnel, didn't even need to look to picture what was happening outside. He already knew the outcome. The eagles, in their violent frenzy, wouldn't realize the Craigars' bodies were venting poison until their own muscles started trembling and their wings grew too heavy to hold up. Some would drop dead right where they stood; others would stagger off a short distance before collapsing without a sound.
At least a quarter of them would die, by Shen Zuo's estimate.
At least forty Caligra to begin with... maybe thirty left now? Possibly fewer.
The result? Shen Zuo was the sole winner of a battle he never even had to fight w
ith his own body.
He sat there in the stillness, watching the time tick by.