Sending a bolt of lightning toward a rapidly moving shadow moving from tree to tree and even the ground, Noah's eyes darted in multiple directions, those organs blazing with the speed force's empowerment. The black shadow disappeared, effectively dodging the bolt; even if Noah had never planned to hit it, before appearing amongst the whiteness of its environment, and a series of spikes quickly burst out of the ground to shoot towards Noah's position.
Trees shattered and snapped at the power in the attack, but Noah simply took a few steps forward to directly burst out of the area of the attack. Seemingly picking a random direction, Noah lunged forward with his bare hands and caught hold of a solid figure.
Before the stunned entity could react, his figure turned to a yellow streak and he moved to bash the dark figure into every single tree within a radius of 50m. Needless to say, chaos spread out as explosions capable of seriously injuring lower stage tier 3 occurred in the area.
Eventually halting his incredibly rapid movement, Noah hurled the bloodied black figure towards a sturdy-looking tree only a few hundred meters from his position. The figure crashed into the tree and snapped it. But it didn't stand up from its position.
Noah managed to lay eyes on the magical beast attacking him, and he felt his curiosity get piqued at its sight. It resembled an ape, a really lean ape, and it stood at around 8ft in height and was incredibly light on its feet all four of them.
Its fur being darker-than-black caused its shadowy figure whenever it moved.
[Snowy mountain: Evolved ape]
[Tier: 3[middle-stage]]
[Affinity: Earth]
[Level of danger: Unknown]
It looked alive, but Noah felt no fear towards it. Their fight had barely lasted a minute. And from his short inspection, he confirmed that the beast lacked in the field of physical strength, merely possessing speed and agility. An attribute Noah had in abundance.
'It would be an issue for slower cultivators,' Noah thought while one of his daggers appeared in his hand. He remained unafraid of the ape didn't mean lowering his guard. It had an above-average cognitive level.
And just as he predicted, it tried to escape him. The ground beneath Noah turned loose, almost tripping him, unfortunately for the beast, Noah turned into a blur to arrive right behind it. His dagger flashed and he separated its relatively small head from its shoulders.
A red octahedral core shot out of the ape's body, and Noah quickly stored it. Merely a few seconds passed before its slender figure disappeared.
Noah had spent half of the day traveling towards the higher regions of the mountain, and in his rapid journey, he had managed to spot seven more stones. He understood that waiting to search would have allowed him to gather more, but seeing how far he remained from even seeing the top since a cloud shielded it from his eyes, he could only choose the wise decision of journeying farther.
During his hike of sorts, nine magical beasts had been unfortunate enough to encounter him, as what followed were short battles that ended in his victory.
Noah could only guess that the beasts of that mountain had been groomed to remain weak since none of the beasts he had encountered featured an orange core apart from the bear, which was over a kilometer below him.
Sweeping his emotionless gaze on his wrecked surroundings, Noah could only feel that his decision to remain without emotions had been a good idea. Notwithstanding he had begun to experience a headache. A backlash for utilizing that portion of his mind for too long.
Focusing his gaze on the path ahead, Noah took the moment to wonder if Ariana was okay down there. In truth, he felt unsure whether or not other aspirants had traversed his current position on the mountain, but he recalled leaving many in the cloud of snow his rapid movement created.
pαndα`noνɐ1--сoМ Turning into a blur, Noah sprinted with the sheer power his body could muster, and the result was a white cloud zooming left and right between the trees.
The level of snow in that region had crossed the halfway mark to his knee, a few more inches and he would be knee-deep. Thankfully his rapid movement allowed him to run on the soft snow.
Noah continued his lone journey to the top for many hours, only thoughts of what his future in the guild would be crossing his mind. Occasionally, he would encounter roaming magical beasts but had limited himself to killing a few. Choosing to stop when he had hunted and killed twenty in total.
This brought the amount of beast he had stored for the dungeon to a bit over 50. Noah felt tempted to go hunting for more beasts, but each fight started taking longer, and he had to limit his movement due to the now steep regions he had arrived on.
Noah risked falling multiple times, and he couldn't imagine having to recross his already traversed areas because he fell.
Notwithstanding, he made sure to kill any beast that tried to attack him. However, such encounters had started getting rarer with each passing hour.
The night of the second day eventually arrived but he had only gathered a total of 42 stones. Noah figured the next day would be for finding stones since from his position, the peak of the mountain looked vaguely visible. A good sign.
Luckily for him, he didn't have to kill another set of beasts to find an empty cave, only that the cave he encountered was small.
The night was cold and an even bigger snowstorm occurred, bringing the thickness of the snow to around 28inches.
However, none of those conditions affected Noah apart from the fact that when the day broke he had to dig through the wall of snow that formed at the cave's entrance.
A pure white blanket seemed to cover everything in his line of sight, and even the trees had stopped featuring green leaves only pure white ones.
The cold in that place felt immense, enough for him to feel it, though only by a bit. The air density in that place had plunged, but such details didn't matter to him due to his uniqueness.
Unfolding his consciousness while white mist exited his mouth with each breath he took, Noah began the hunt for inscribed stones while also traveling higher. Though he focused mainly on finding the stones and didn't go higher than a few ten meters until he met the fifty inscribed stones mark and even exceeded it by a little bit.
Unfortunately, this took him more than half the entire day, and by the time the sun began to set, Noah had gone over 700m higher and had crossed the seventy mark of inscribed stones. Having in the red ring seventy-nine.
With only a bit more than one day left before the trial ending, Noah remained unfazed when powerful explosions began to resound from lower elevations of the mountain. His fellow aspirants were working their butt off to cross good distances, and even he had decided that there would be no rest for that night.
It would be full speed towards the still relatively distant peak.
It was with this thought that Noah ran higher into the mountain. And when he remained only a few hundred meters from his goal, he arrived in front of a thick formation of white trees spanning for few kilometers in length, and a strong presence lay inside it.
Noah felt his eyes grow cold when he realized that the aura within the forest belonged to something in the higher-stage.
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