A few months passed, and Alex was having a hard time finding beasts to train against. Populous as it may be, the saint beasts in the Demonic forest weren’t infinite.
So, with time, the beasts were either dead or just too scared to come to fight him.
Since they were smaller in number, Alex had been spending most of the days lately simply training on his own or cultivating in the forest.
He had also finished learning about his saint ingredients and a couple more that were in his mind. Now, he only needed to start training on a few things to improve his pill recipes, then he could start making pills as well.
‘That’s it then,’ Alex thought to himself. It was time for him to return back to his aunt who must’ve returned from her training by now.
Alex sighed as he looked at the vast Demonic field in front of him and thought to return once he was much stronger.
He was about to turn around to return when a snake came slithering towards him. Alex stopped and got ready to fight. The snake was in the Saint Foundation realm after all.
The snake came hissing at him and stopped a few meters away from him. It hesitated for a moment before speaking, “Are you the one who’s been killing all the beasts around here?”
Alex looked at the snake curiously. Did it not want to fight?
“Yes, It is me,” Alex said.
“Then die!” the snake lunged at him.
The snake was large and had a thick body, yet it was still surprisingly agile.
However, Alex had fought many such beasts and could easily defeat them. He took out his sword and slashed at the snake.
The snake’s Saint Foundation 4th realm body was strong enough to survive his attack once, but when Alex slashed a second time consecutively, the snake died.
“Not very on guard, was it?” Ning thought and took the snake’s body into his storage bag.
Just then, out of the corner of his currently limited spiritual sense, he sensed something dashing at him with incredible speed.
Alex tried to move away, but whatever it was, it was too fast for him to dodge in time.
The beast slammed onto Alex, and Alex felt something dig into his left arm and chest. He was sent flying into the distance where he crashed with a tree, destroying it.
The momentum carried him over, crashing into another tree only to destroy it and keep going on.
He destroyed a couple of different trees before he finally came to a stop.
Blood poured out of the holes on his arm and chest, marking the snow below him crimson. Alex felt his head go blank for a second before it came back to him.
“What the hell?” he said softly as his unfocused eyes tried to look in front of him. His eyes cleared a second later and he saw a massive moose with ice-like antlers that were very sharp and at the moment red in some part.
They had his blood on them.
The holes in Alex’s arms closed up a moment later and he could start up as if nothing had happened just now. The only evidence that he was even wounded was the blood on the floor.
“You survived that? No wonder you could kill so many of them,” the moose in front of him said.
“It seems you hate me for some reason,” Alex said. “Although I don’t remember fighting any moose.”
“No, you’ve hurt no one I care about,” the moose said. “But you have hurt something I care about, balance. Your presence has brought an imbalance in the forest that is causing problems and I don’t like it.”
“I got it,” Alex said. “So you want to fight, huh?”
“Fight? No, this won’t be a fight,” the beast said. “I have nearly entered the Beast Core realm, while you’re struggling with breaking through to the 2nd real of Saint Condensation. Ours will be no fight, but a massacre.”
“Is that so?” Alex asked. He held confidence even against a beast that was sure to kill him if he breathed wrong. However, Alex didn’t fret. There was no reason to worry at all.
In fact, there was a reason to get happy even.
Finally, he had found a strong beast without having to go into the inner ranges where many of them would be, and together they might be able to kill him.
However, alone, it would be quite hard.
Blood poured out of his body and clung to him, forming armor around his body. He put away his sword and instead extracted the blood from the snow below him and formed a sword.
The moose looked at him weirdly. “What are you doing?” it asked.
“I’m testing,” Alex said. “I’m testing to see if I can kill you or not. At the very least, I should be able to keep up with you in this fight now.”
“Hah!” the moose exclaimed. “I told you human, this will be no fight.”
The moose’s ice blue antler’s glowed suddenly and giant ice javelins were shot at Alex.
Alex didn’t dodge the attack and instead struck it with his sword, destroying it at once. He hadn’t even used his Sword aura or any sort of dao in this attack, but he doubted they would be of any help with such a big difference in power.
The moose looked at him in shock. “Ho-how?” it asked.
Alex too looked at the result with a hint of surprise. He had expected his Blood aura to be strong, but he hadn’t expected it to be at the peak of the Saint Foundation realm in terms of strength.
He could most likely get it to Saint Core realm too, but he would require a bit more blood of strong—
His eyes fell on the moose. “Well, thank you for delivering yourself to my doorstep,” he said as he prepared to attack.
The moose, despite being scared fought back as well. It had seen Alex beaten and bloodied the last time it had attacked, so this time as well, it moved.
Alex could see the moose’s movement quite clearly this time around as he was looking at it with his eyes. And yet, the moose was still quite fast.
There was some sort of technique it was using to move in the snow through incredible speed.
Alex could dodge if he moved in time, but he didn’t feel the necessity for it. The moose slammed onto him and he skidded a few steps backward, but other than that, he was alright.
The moose, however, hadn’t expected Alex’s armor to be that strong and found his head ringing from the pain of slamming onto what was essentially a heavy rock for him.
The blood in Alex’s hands suddenly turned into a bunch of beads that he sent at the moose. The beads struck the moose and while they didn’t penetrate its body, they did leave nasty wounds all over it.
The moose sent out more ice attacks through its antler, but Alex used the same blood beads to destroy them before they could even go anywhere.
He moved his right arm and the blood beads flew back to him, changing into a sword. Then he used his other arm to tug on the moose using the blood that was still plastered on its antlers.
The moose tried to struggle, but the pull on its antler was too strong. In the end, it let go of its antlers, discarding them like a lizard dropping its tail.
The antlers flew towards Alex, which he quickly stored in his storage ring. He looked back at the moose and saw terror in its eyes.
Without even thinking about it, the moose turned around to leave. However, 4 different thin strips of blood caught onto its 4 legs, stopping it in its tracks.
Alex then teleported right up to the moose and stabbed the blood sword in his hand through the moose’s chest.
Blood poured out of its chest as the moose started dying. Then, Alex decapitated it, killing it entirely.
He sighed and took a deep breath once the battle was over. He looked at the blood flowing on the ground and decided not to waste it.
He sat down and started using his Blood Absorption skill to improve his blood aura even further.