Chapter 3: Double Pupils Are Inherently a Path to Invincibility, Why Rely on the Tianmeng Iceworm?
Star Dou Great Forest outskirts.
After half a month of grueling travel, pushing through day and night, Liu Yuan finally stood at the edge of the most infamous Spirit Beast habitat on the continent.
Before him stretched an endless ocean of deep, primordial green.
Towering ancient trees thrust upward, their massive canopies blotting out the sun. The air here was heavy, thick with the damp fragrance of rotting soil and the faint, metallic scent of old blood. From deep within the shadowed woods, the low, guttural roars of beasts echoed intermittently. It was a stark reminder to every intruder that this domain belonged to the wild—the truest, most brutal portrayal of the law of the jungle.
Liu Yuan took a slow, deep breath, letting the heavy air fill his lungs as he adjusted his state of mind.
He did not charge in blindly. Instead, his hand dropped to his waist, drawing a gleaming short blade from its leather sheath.
This was a Rank 1 melee spirit tool.
While its rank was nothing to boast about, a cheap acquisition made while passing through a border town, it possessed the distinct advantage of being exceptionally sharp and structurally solid. Upon injecting a thread of spirit power, the blade would hum, projecting a faint layer of cutting Qi along its edge. For dealing with low-rank Spirit Beasts, it was more than sufficient.
"Whew... Let's begin."
Liu Yuan lowered his center of gravity.
He wore no protective goggles or veils, allowing his eerie, dual-pupiled eyes to be directly exposed to the humid air. In this perilous forest, vision equated to life. He would not tolerate a single obstruction to his sight.
He took his first cautious step, crossing the invisible boundary into the Star Dou Great Forest.
Despite successfully awakening his Double Pupils, Liu Yuan harbored no arrogant delusions. He remained acutely aware of his current flaws: a severe lack of actual combat experience and a physical constitution that was still relatively weak.
Because of this, his pace was agonizingly slow. He controlled his breathing, ensuring every footfall landed silently against the forest floor. His Double Pupils darted continuously, scanning the dense underbrush and twisting branches, maintaining absolute vigilance against any lurking threats.
Rustle...
He had only ventured a few hundred meters into the gloom when a dense patch of tall grass to his left suddenly swayed. There was no wind. A subtle, scraping sound slithered through the air.
Liu Yuan's footsteps stalled instantly. His Double Pupils locked onto the exact origin of the disturbance.
The very next second.
"Roar!"
A sharp, ear-piercing shriek shattered the silence. A grey blur erupted from the grass like a fired cannonball, bringing with it a foul, fishy gust of wind as it lunged directly toward Liu Yuan's face!
It was a baboon, standing roughly a meter tall, its muscular frame covered in coarse, matted grey hair. Its crimson eyes burned with a bloodthirsty, mindless ferocity, and its extended claws glinted with a cold, lethal light under the dappled canopy.
A ten-year Spirit Beast. A Wind Baboon!
Faced with this explosive ambush, the Liu Yuan from before his awakening would have panicked, likely tripping over his own feet in a desperate bid to survive.
But in this fleeting moment, within his field of vision, the world seemed to grind to a halt.
The Wind Baboon's pouncing trajectory, which would appear as a lightning-fast blur to an ordinary person, was suddenly riddled with glaring flaws under the piercing gaze of the Double Pupils. Its movements became sluggish, almost comical.
The exact sequence of its muscle contractions, the precise angle of its descending claws, even the cruel anticipation flashing in its red eyes... every minute detail was captured and processed by his divine sight.
This was the second innate ability of the Double Pupils that Liu Yuan had unearthed during his half-month journey, standing alongside his Distortion ability.
Insight.
Or, more accurately, the power to see through all falsehoods and illusions.
Before these eyes, an enemy's speed was infinitely reduced, and the tiniest physical omen of an attack was infinitely magnified. This granted Liu Yuan a reaction speed and predictive combat capability that vastly eclipsed ordinary men.
'Too slow.'
Liu Yuan snorted coldly in his mind.
Just as the Wind Baboon's filthy claws threatened to graze the tip of his nose, Liu Yuan shifted his weight. His body tilted slightly to the right in a minimalist, perfectly calculated evasion, allowing the fatal blow to swipe through empty air.
The Wind Baboon clearly had not anticipated that this seemingly frail human could casually sidestep its flawless sneak attack. Carried forward by its own violent momentum, the beast could not alter its trajectory in mid-air. It sailed past him, entirely exposing the vulnerable back of its thick neck.
This was the opening!
A ruthless glint flared within Liu Yuan's dual pupils.
His right hand, gripping the short blade, flexed with sudden, explosive force. The dense, Rank 20 spirit power churning within his meridians surged into the hilt like a bursting dam.
Hum!
A brilliant layer of white light instantly ignited across the surface of the short blade. The weapon's sharp Qi intensified drastically, emitting a high-pitched whine.
"Die!"
Liu Yuan let out a low, guttural shout. He drove the short blade forward, plunging it viciously into the back of the Wind Baboon's neck!
Squish!
The sickening sound of metal parting flesh and sinew echoed clearly. Supported by his surging spirit power, the Rank 1 spirit tool bypassed the Wind Baboon's tough hide and dense muscle as easily as a hot knife sliding through tofu, driving straight into the cervical spine.
"Squeak—!"
The Wind Baboon unleashed a shrill, agonizing scream. Its heavy body convulsed violently in mid-air.
But Liu Yuan offered no mercy, nor a single second to breathe.
He locked his grip, twisted his wrist with brutal torque, and ripped the blade outward with all his might!
Crack!
A crisp, sickening snap of breaking bone rang out. The hideous baboon head detached entirely, spinning wildly into the air. Warm, crimson blood erupted from the stump like a pressurized fountain, painting the surrounding green grass a stark, glistening red.
Thump.
The Wind Baboon's headless corpse crashed heavily into the dirt. It twitched sporadically for a few seconds before going completely still.
Slowly, a faint white ring of light materialized, rising steadily from the bloody carcass. It was the distinct symbol of a ten-year spirit ring.
"Whew..."
Liu Yuan took several measured steps backward, ensuring his boots remained clear of the expanding pool of blood. He panted slightly, his chest rising and falling.
While the execution appeared effortless and clean, this was, in truth, his very first real kill.
Staring down at the decapitated corpse and the steaming blood soaking into the earth, his stomach churned with a brief wave of nausea. Yet, rapidly overpowering that discomfort was a cold, surging thrill—the absolute exhilaration of holding life and death in his own hands.
'So this is actual combat... With the Insight of the Double Pupils, these low-rank Spirit Beasts pose absolutely no threat to me.'
Liu Yuan calmly flicked his wrist, shaking the thick blood from his short blade. He paid no mind to the floating ten-year spirit ring.
He could not afford to linger.
The heavy stench of fresh blood would attract more formidable predators. He needed to move immediately.
'I must hurry and find the Tianmeng Iceworm.'
Liu Yuan sheathed his blade. His figure blurred into motion, swiftly vanishing into the shadowed depths of the dense forest.
However, reality often proved far more skeletal than one's grand ideals.
Liu Yuan had assumed that armed with his foreknowledge of the timeline, combined with the unmatched tracking vision of his Double Pupils, securing the Tianmeng Iceworm would be a simple matter of walking up and claiming his prize.
He was dead wrong.
The Star Dou Great Forest was unfathomably massive.
Even the outer perimeter alone stretched across a vast, boundless expanse of untamed wilderness. Attempting to pinpoint the exact location of a million-year Spirit Beast—one that was actively and desperately concealing its aura to evade its natural enemies—was no different from searching for a single, specific needle in an ocean of hay.
Time bled away, day by day.
Five days... ten days... fifteen days.
A full half-month evaporated.
Liu Yuan had practically turned the outer region upside down, scouring every trench, hollow, and thicket he could find.
Along the way, he weathered countless ambushes from the local wildlife. He fought everything from the initial Wind Baboons to ten-year Nether Wolves, hundred-year Variegated Cats, and even a handful of bizarre, undocumented beasts that had just crossed the threshold into the thousand-year level.
Every brutal encounter served as a whetstone, honing his combat instincts and stripping away his amateur hesitations. He grew increasingly lethal, his mastery over his visual prowess deepening with every spilled drop of blood. Now, he could fluidly and instantly switch between his Insight and Distortion abilities mid-clash, turning deadly strikes into glancing blows and finding fatal openings in a fraction of a second.
Yet, the single prize he coveted above all else—the Tianmeng Iceworm—remained entirely absent.
"Damn it... Where exactly are you?"
Huddled inside a damp, concealed tree hollow, Liu Yuan leaned heavily against the rotting wood. He aggressively gnawed on a piece of stale, dry ration, his brows locked in a tight, frustrated knot.
This half-month of high-intensity tracking and relentless slaughter had drained him. His physical stamina was stretched thin, and his mental fatigue was mounting. The neat, functional clothes he had arrived in were now reduced to tattered rags, exposing several shallow, crusted claw marks across his arms and chest.
"Is my luck truly this abysmal?"
Liu Yuan glared at the half-eaten dry pancake in his hand, a surge of raw irritation flaring in his chest. 'Or is this the so-called mandate of heaven? Is the Tianmeng Iceworm strictly bound by fate to Huo Yuhao? Does the world simply decree that as an anomaly, I have no right to claim it?'
He refused to accept such a pathetic notion.
"I will search for another half-month!"
Liu Yuan took a vicious bite out of the hard ration, a cold, ruthless light igniting in his dual pupils. "I refuse to believe it. A living man will not let himself be suffocated by a dead end. Since I have stepped into this forest, I will absolutely not return empty-handed!"
After forcing himself to rest and recover his spirit power, Liu Yuan dragged himself out of the hollow and resumed his hunt.
This time, he pushed his boundaries, expanding his search radius dangerously close to the mixed zone, where the true terrors of the forest roamed.
But fate, it seemed, was determined to mock his efforts.
Another grueling half-month bled away.
The dense emerald canopy above slowly transitioned, the leaves curling with a withered, sickly yellow as the season turned. Liu Yuan's face was now covered in a thick, unkempt layer of stubble, his wild appearance resembling a feral savage more than a human cultivator.
And still, the result remained a bitter zero.
Forget the Tianmeng Iceworm; he had not even spotted a single, ordinary ice-attribute worm in the dirt.
Instead, his aggressive push inward had nearly cost him his life. He had accidentally crossed paths with a ten-thousand-year Demon Ape. Had his Double Pupils not provided him with extreme long-range vision and the predictive insight to map an immediate escape route, he would have certainly been pounded into bloody ape dung on the forest floor.
One full month had now passed since he first stepped past the tree line.
Beside a narrow, babbling stream on the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest.
Liu Yuan squatted by the rocky bank. He scooped up a handful of the freezing, crystal-clear water and splashed it over his grime-covered face. As the ripples settled, he stared down at his disheveled, hollow-eyed reflection in the water.
He let out a long, heavy sigh.
"It seems... this specific path is a dead end."
The harsh reality was staring him right in the face, and his pragmatic nature forced him to accept it.
Some opportunities were simply not meant to be seized, regardless of how intimately one knew the timeline.
"Dragging this out any further is pointless. Not only am I burning precious time, but my luck will eventually run out, and I will lose my life for nothing."
Liu Yuan stood up slowly. The frustration and exhaustion that had clouded his gaze washed away, replaced once more by a chilling, absolute clarity.
Failing to intercept the Tianmeng Iceworm was a bitter disappointment. It left a lingering taste of unwillingness in his mouth.
But this failure did not mean his road to the pinnacle was severed.
With the legendary Double Pupils in his possession, why should he ever fear a lack of options?
He had already formulated a backup plan.
If the heavens truly denied him the million-year ice worm, then he would simply hunt down the most optimal, brutal spirit ring available to synergize with his eyes. He would forcefully maximize the innate, terrifying advantages of his visual prowess.
Double Pupils were inherently a path to absolute invincibility.
So what if he didn't have the Tianmeng Iceworm?
He would carve out his own heaven-defying destiny with his own two hands!
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