269: Chapter 265: The Green-Haired Monster 269: Chapter 265: The Green-Haired Monster Inside the tent, everyone faced a choice: should they follow Chen Hai to the edge of the mountain forest, or should they remain quietly waiting within the tent?
The choice was theirs to make, but since Chen Hai had spoken, without any hesitation, they immediately chose the former.
At the same moment when Chen Hai’s Divine Soul departed and entered the mountain forest, Fang, Ye Cheng, and the others had already rushed to his side.
Seeing Chen Hai seated cross-legged on a stone slab at the edge of the mountain forest, they looked at one another with perplexity and confusion.
“What’s going on with Chen?
Didn’t he say he was going into the mountain forest to track down that thing?”
“Why has he just sat down here after getting to this place?
Without entering the forest, just sitting here, can he really find where that thing is hiding?”
“Fang, don’t look at me.
I don’t know much more about Chen Hai’s abilities than you do.
How would I know what he’s up to, sitting here like this?”
The group just felt utterly befuddled.
After exchanging glances, their attention uniformly turned to Ye Cheng.
Hu Laodao and Old Mrs.
Wu were old and slow, certainly not as nimble as Fang and the others.
Fang, Ye Cheng, and their group had already reached Chen Hai’s side.
However, Hu Laodao and Old Mrs.
Wu were still a good twenty or thirty meters away.
Of the few people present, the one most familiar with Chen Hai, and the closest to him, was undoubtedly Ye Cheng.
Who else would they look to if not him?
Feeling the inquiring gazes of everyone upon him, Ye Cheng merely shrugged his shoulders, neither confirming nor denying.
Not just Fang and the others but even he himself was equally mystified by Chen Hai’s inexplicable actions.
“Chen Hai, Chen Hai…” Without rashly touching Chen Hai’s body, Ye Cheng circled around him a few times, tentatively calling out to him.
Regrettably, Chen Hai, whose Divine Soul had already burrowed into the forest and left only his shell behind, was obviously not going to respond.
“Damn it!
Not this again!”
“This guy called us over here to go into the forest, right?”
“We just got to the edge of the forest and, without a word, he suddenly sat down.
Could he have had some revelation and started Cultivation again?”
Dissatisfied, Ye Cheng started to grumble with a pout.
The previous night, Chen Hai had rushed out of the military tent and suddenly sat down in the rain to practice the Little Five Thunder Skill, and he stayed put for several hours.
Now, having run to the edge of the forest and seated himself cross-legged, this action seemed much the same as the night before to the laypeople like Fang and Ye Cheng.
With Ye Cheng suggesting this, similar thoughts began to surface in the minds of the others.
They exchanged glances, feeling a sense of speechlessness.
However, just as these few sentences were exchanged, Hu Laodao and Old Mrs.
Wu, who were dawdling behind the others, finally arrived.
“Is Senior Chen’s physical body here, but his Divine Soul gone?”
“Is this a case of soul departure, entering the mountain forest?”
Originally suppressed by Military Qi and unable to use any spells, Hu Laodao and Old Mrs.
Wu finally recovered a bit of their strength near this Yin Land.
With their abilities, they only needed to look at Chen Hai a little more closely to understand the situation with Chen Hai right now.
“Soul departure?
Are you two joking with us?”
“Not long ago, an old man living in our yard kept saying he had cultivated a Golden Core; he even swore that his Golden Core was inside his kidney.”
“To prove the existence of the Golden Core in his kidney, that old man even went to the hospital to get an ultrasound done.”
“Lo and behold, after the ultrasound, the hospital doctors performed surgery and did extract a tiny lump from his kidney.”
“But the doctor said it was a kidney stone, not a Golden Core at all.”
“Do the soul departures you speak of belong to the same category as what that old man claimed about his Golden Core?”
…
Hu Laodao and Old Mrs.
Wu didn’t try to keep their discussion private from the others.
Their words reached the ears of Fang and the others, leaving them with odd expressions; two of them couldn’t help but burst into laughter.
Having witnessed Chen Hai’s Five Thunder Skill, Fang and the others had come to believe that Chen Hai indeed possessed some real skills.
But the concept of soul departure seemed too fantastical.
Though Hu Laodao and Old Mrs.
Wu were quite serious when they said this, and certainly not joking,
the people like Fang, who had not witnessed the scene of Chen Hai’s Divine Soul leaving his body and entering the forest, simply could not believe the truth of such a claim.
“Ladies and gentlemen, just because you haven’t witnessed something with your own eyes doesn’t mean it cannot exist.”
“Whether you believe our talk of soul departure or not, no one is going to force you.”
“All you need to know is that right now, Senior Chen won’t bother with you.”
“We will stay here, and until the Senior’s soul returns to his body, we will protect his physical form to prevent any harm from coming to him.”
…
Talking to laymen is just exhausting.
Explaining the matters of ghosts and gods to those who don’t believe, no matter how you explain, it just doesn’t get through.
Old Man Hu and Old Mrs.
Wu, too lazy to explain any further to Fang and the others, swept their discontented gaze over them and went straight to the point with a suggestion.
“Even if you don’t say it, we’ll definitely stay here and ensure nothing happens to Chen Hai!”
Beside them, Ye Cheng quickly spoke, promising Old Man Hu and the other.
Hearing his words, they were somewhat reassured.
Because they didn’t know how long Chen Hai’s Divine Soul, after the soul departure, would linger in the mountain forest.
After exchanging glances and nodding to each other, Old Man Hu and Hu Laodao took positions to the left and right of Chen Hai and temporarily sat down.
…
Inside the mountain forest, within the area that Chen Hai had demarcated.
Although it was still broad daylight with the bright sun shining high in the sky, the entire area was still filled with yin qi, permeating every nook and cranny.
Chen Hai, in his spirit soul state, had a different field of vision from ordinary people and could see things that the human eye simply couldn’t.
However, the presence of this yin qi severely obstructed his line of sight.
In this area, he had already walked around twice, but with only the Divine Soul Eye, he couldn’t observe any hidden unknown entity inside this Yin Land.
Even if he wasn’t exerting his full speed, with his Divine Soul’s running velocity, he could easily cover a distance of twenty to thirty meters every second.
With such speed, he could roam around a ten-mile radius of the mountain forest in a short time without effort.
He saw quite a few soldiers, carrying out Fang’s orders, closing their encirclement and moving quickly towards the Yin Land.
Even though it was a time of peace and the soldiers of Yanhuang Country had hardly experienced the trial of war, their spirit, qi, and mental state seemed very good.
During the time they had been stationed in the mountain forest, the number of soldiers who had lost their lives to the unknown entity was already more than a dozen or twenty.
However, in the eyes of those soldiers Chen Hai saw, he couldn’t find any sign of fear at all.
It was because of their protection that the entity hidden in the mountain forest had been confined here, preventing it from causing too much harm to ordinary civilians.
Otherwise, there would have been more than just two families wiped out because of that thing!
After circulating twice around the ten-mile area of the Yin Land without any findings, Chen Hai frowned and directly entered the ground, beginning his search underground.
The solid ground posed no obstacle to him.
In his spirit soul state, he couldn’t touch the earth and rocks, and likewise, they couldn’t hinder him.
Fang, Ye Cheng, and the others had searched this mountain forest back and forth several times during the previous days.
Yet they always failed to find the hiding place of that entity.
In Chen Hai’s view, if it wasn’t on the surface, then indeed, there was a good chance that the entity was hiding underground.
If he had only been observing and searching simply on the surface before, then now, the search he was conducting underground was much more meticulous.
Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour…
Time gradually passed.
Compared to the surface, searching for something underground was definitely a much larger task.
Underneath the mountain forest, besides soil and rocks, what Chen Hai saw most were naturally snakes and insects.
When he searched the northwestern corner of the Yin Land, he suddenly realized that the snakes and insects that could be seen at a glance before were hardly visible here.
Even further, he saw a group of big-headed ants specially avoiding this area when passing by.
It was as if, deep within the earth in this place, something lurked, making even these serpents and insects feel fear.
Seeing this abnormal phenomenon, Chen Hai became cautious.
Even as a spirit soul, he couldn’t be touched by ordinary creatures, and despite being unchanged from before, he became much more careful.
Beneath the earth, although his Divine Soul could move unimpeded through soil and stone, his vision was still limited to his surroundings and couldn’t penetrate the earth to see other areas.
“This is…” Passing through some soil and stone, Chen Hai suddenly found himself in a cave about two to three meters long and one to two meters high.
A humanoid monster with green hair covering its entire body, whose flesh seemed to have completely withered, lay motionless on the cold ground.
The monster wore a tattered jacket on its upper body and a pair of pants, now reduced to shreds.
If not for these clothes, it would have been hard for Chen Hai to associate this monster with a human being.
Just as he was thinking about getting closer to take a good look at the monster.
The creature, as if sensing something, suddenly opened its eyes.