Chapter 44: Special Mission

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A mountain goat.

These creatures were usually seen roaming in mountainous areas with good vegetation.

Although they spent a good portion of their time in mountainous regions, during the winter, they would descend to the surrounding forests of the mountains to find less cold places to shelter.

These animals were problematic to deal with, as their high agility and dexterity, combined with their attack strength, made it difficult for animals of the same level to compete with them.

The reason Ethan was unhappy to find one here was because the winter season had already passed, and it was safe to say they were currently in the height of summer.

So finding a mountain goat here in this season was a bit unexpected.

Ethan wasn't sure if he could face this creature. After all, although he had learned the basic combat techniques he had received in the sect, he had never actually faced an opponent, let alone a spiritual beast.

Ethan could tell at a glance that the animal in front of him was not an ordinary animal, but a spiritual beast.

Spiritual beasts were creatures that had evolved by absorbing spiritual energy from nature.

Their strength was classified into levels, and each level had three grades, ranging from low grade to high grade.

All spiritual beasts had different ways of absorbing spiritual energy from the environment.

Some did it by eating spiritual fruits, others by hunting other beasts, and so on.

The reason Ethan was unsure if he could face this beast was because, from what he could perceive, the beast was clearly a level one, mid-grade spiritual beast.

"Why is a creature like this here?" he asked himself, checking that he was still on the outskirts of the forest.

In this area of the forest, mainly non-evolved animals roamed, and the evolved ones tended to move to more inner areas of the forest because there were more resources for them, mainly due to the fact that there was a higher concentration of spiritual energy compared to here.

Rare herbs, spiritual fruits, and other things were more present in the more inner areas of the forest, so almost all spiritual beasts tended to avoid the outer areas of the forest.

The only reason he could think of at the moment was that this beast was eyeing the refreshing Herb.

"Haa, never once do things go my way," Ethan said with a slightly irritated voice.

He would have liked to move away from here and look elsewhere, but the problem was that he didn't know other places where this herb grew, and he didn't know how long it would take him to find one.

While he was absorbed in his thoughts on what to do, a familiar sound resonated in his head.

DING!

[You have activated a special mission!]

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[---------------------------------

[Special Mission]

- Collect as many refreshing herbs as possible within an hour.

REWARD:

- Gain (+5 QI) for each refreshing herb successfully collected.

Time remaining: 0 : 59 : 58

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"…"

For a moment, Ethan didn't know how to react to this.

Usually, he would have jumped for joy at receiving such a mission, but in this case, Ethan wasn't sure what was going through the system's mind.

"Does this thing want me to get impaled by that creature?" Ethan said to himself as he wondered why the system had given him such a mission. Sёarch* The Nôvelƒire.net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

But then, he stopped his stream of thoughts and focused on the mission requirement.

'Collecting refreshing herbs doesn't necessarily mean I have to face that spiritual beast.

In other words, if in the next hour, I somehow manage to get the herbs without getting killed by the goat, then I should be able to complete the mission.'

At first, Ethan immediately thought that trying to collect the herbs right now would be like openly challenging the spiritual beast, so he was a bit upset with the system, but then, thinking about it a bit, a lot could happen in this hour.

Maybe the beast would eat enough and leave. Maybe he could lure it somewhere else and collect the refreshing Herb.

The point was that the mission gave him enough leeway to manage the situation in his favor.

Thinking this way, Ethan immediately began to devise a plan to get rid of the beast somehow.

Defeating the beast with his current strength was not possible, or at least it wasn't possible to face it head-on.

'If I could weaken it somehow, then maybe…'

At first, Ethan wanted to find ways to lure the beast away, but he didn't know how.

Currently, there were no other beasts in the area, so he couldn't even make it clash with another beast.

Ethan reflected for a moment on different ways to tackle this problem, and after a bit of thinking, he decided to try to take down the beast.

At this moment, Ethan had a great advantage in his favor.

The beast was currently too absorbed in its meal to notice his presence, and Ethan wanted to use this to his advantage to launch a devastating attack on the beast.

He wasn't sure if this attack would be enough to kill the beast, but his intent was to injure it enough to be able to face it more easily.

Currently, he had a simple metal sword with him.

He knew that the sword wouldn't be able to do much damage to the thick skin of the mountain goat, so he decided to use the second weapon at his disposal, the blue lotus flame.

This flame, although of low grade, should be enough to deal a lot of damage to the beast, after all, being a rare flame, it had a very high heat intensity.

Ethan didn't believe the beast would come out unscathed from an attack with it.

Recently, Ethan had tried to dedicate some time every day to increasing his mastery in using the rare flame.

After several days of training, Ethan had learned to do various things with it.

For example, his mastery was now good enough to manipulate the shape of the flame at will.

He had tried to transform it into different shapes, and even some weapons, but soon discovered that the damage these weapons could do was minimal, especially considering that just to create them, it still took him several seconds, and even after that, to maintain the shape of the weapon, Ethan had to constantly supply his spiritual energy to it.

Currently, Ethan was only at the beginning of his cultivation, so he couldn't yet provide enough spiritual energy to the flame to increase its damage.

To remedy this problem, Ethan made several attempts, and in the end, an idea came to him.

'What if I could somehow condense the strength of the flame and use it like a grenade?'

Ethan didn't know if such a thing was feasible, but after a conversation with Bai Yu, he discovered that there were indeed techniques with the rare flame that used this principle at their core.

So he spent a lot of time training his flame manipulation to be able to condense it as much as possible.

And in the end, he succeeded, and when he tested it on a training dummy, the results were satisfactory.

The dummy had been annihilated by the attack.

Ethan wasted no time and immediately began to summon his flame.

He moved a little further away from the place so as not to alert the beast and immediately began to prepare his attack.

Ethan knew he wouldn't have much time to attack once the attack was ready, and this was because the fluctuations of his spiritual energy could be perceived by the beast.

As he concentrated his spiritual energy, he felt the heat of the rare flame growing between his hands.

With fluid and decisive movements, Ethan began to compress the flame, trying to keep it stable and compact.

He needed precision and control; any mistake could cause a disaster.

After a few minutes, the flame had taken the shape of a small luminous sphere, intense and dense.

Ethan could feel the power pulsing within it, like a heart of fire.

He knew this was his chance.

'Fire ball'

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FRANK_LEE_JUNIOR:

I hope you enjoyed yesterday's mass release.

I am creating small goals for you so that you can receive more mass releases in the future.

I'll post them in 1 or 2 days, in the author's notes below.

As usual, if you have any comments, suggestions, or errors to report, you know where to do it.

see you tomorrow.