"Taking a look wouldn't hurt. We might discover something."
Seeing that
The three then changed direction and flew straight toward the source of the bloody scent.
After flying for more than ten li, a patch of unusual color appeared ahead—an oasis roughly a li across had materialized there.
In the blink of an eye, the three were hovering above it.
In truth, what might be called an oasis appeared blackish-yellow in color, with barely any tall trees—mostly low shrubs and unidentifiable wild grasses.
At the center of the oasis lay a pool more than ten zhang across, filled with churning rivulets of crimson blood. Beside the pool lay more than a dozen Black Abyss beast corpses of varying sizes, all pinned to the ground by stone stakes.
Blood flowed ceaselessly from these corpses into the pool.
The stench of blood from the entire oasis rose to the heavens, enough to make one retch.
"How did these beasts end up in the desert? They should have been in the dense forest we saw earlier." Lei Lan studied the scene from the air with some surprise.
"They haven't been dead long, otherwise the blood would have coagulated." After a careful look, Bai Bi offered her own assessment.
Moments later, he returned to his original position, eyes narrowed as he fixed his gaze on the blood pool.
"What is it? Did you find something, Brother Han?" Lei Lan asked curiously.
"Yes, I did find something."
A golden light shot out, splitting in a flash into seven or eight sword lights that burrowed into the ground near the pool.
Lei Lan and Bai Bi were both startled and hadn't yet figured out what was happening when screams erupted from where the sword lights had pierced the earth. Several streams of black blood bubbled up. The nearby ground suddenly exploded as several ape-like monsters burst forth from underground.
They stood several chi tall, each with four ears on their head, wielding crude stone spears whose tips emitted a faint white glow.
"Resentment Ape Beasts! No—this oasis is a Giant Spirit in disguise!" The moment Bai Bi recognized the appearance of these ape-demons, she suddenly realized what was going on and cried out in alarm.
"A Giant Spirit!"
Just then, the ground beneath the three erupted with a tremendous rumbling, then shook violently without cease.
At the same time, the blood in the oasis pool churned outward and a red shadow shot forth.
In a mere flash, it was before
Lei Lan and Bai Bi were alarmed—the red shadow was impossibly fast. Even if they wanted to intervene, it seemed they wouldn't make it in time.
But
With a muffled bang!
A palm as white as jade eerily materialized before him, snatching backward with lightning speed to seize the red shadow in a firm grip.
The two Holy Sons finally got a clear look—it was a blood-red object as thick as an arm, resembling a long tongue, with a fist-sized fleshy ball at its tip covered in inch-long black barbs that squirmed ceaselessly.
But
At that moment, five white bone skulls suddenly appeared on the surfaces of
In but the blink of an eye, the entire tongue was transformed into a slender, five-colored icicle.
Without the slightest hesitation,
A ripple of azure light flashed, and with a crisp crack like shattering porcelain, the icicle instantly fractured inch by inch, dissolving into a shower of crystal light that vanished without a trace.
A tremendous roar of pain echoed from underground. The blood-red glow in the pool swirled in a vortex until not a drop of blood remained, and then with a deafening boom, the entire oasis shattered apart, revealing an enormous creature amid the destruction.
It was colossal above yet impossibly slender below—a monstrous flower roughly the same size as the original oasis had been.
Its petals were a pale silver matching the desert, but at its heart it was crimson as blood—it had in fact transformed from the blood pool itself. And the long tongue that had just attacked