Suspended high in the sky were three green, scorching suns.
One large, two small.
The large one hung dead center, while the two smaller ones sat on the eastern and western flanks, both far inferior to the central sun in size and brilliance.
But none of that was what had caught Han Li off guard. What put him on alert was the mass of blood-red luminous clouds swirling around the three green suns.
Those vivid, dripping-crimson clouds hovered silently near the green suns. From a distance, they radiated a hypnotic, almost entrancing beauty.
Han Li squinted at the crimson clouds for a good while, then his nose twitched—he caught a faint, honey-like sweetness drifting through the air.
His expression darkened. One sleeve swept outward without the slightest warning.
With a sharp whoosh, a streak of azure light over ten zhang long shot out, flickered once, and vanished into the dense forest as a brilliant arc.
An instant later, from the direction the azure light had disappeared, a heaven-shaking roar erupted.
Then the earth nearby trembled violently, and silence fell once more.
Han Li remained rooted to the spot, gazing calmly toward the source of the roar.
Moments later, the azure light flashed back out of the forest at full speed, blurred, and slipped into his sleeve without a trace.
Only then did Han Li drift forward, floating lightly in that direction.
A distance of several dozen li was, for Han Li, the work of an instant.
Before him, amid a stretch of collapsed white-wood trees, lay an enormous creature hundreds of zhang long.
The colossal monster appeared to be part insect, part beast. Its body had been sliced into several sections, yet one could still make out the gossamer wings and antennae typical of spirit insects, as well as the fur and claws that only a beast would possess.
From a distance, it looked like some grotesque fusion of a giant hornet and a rhinoceros.
The massive corpse emanated precisely that sweet fragrance Han Li had smelled earlier—only at this close range it was overwhelmingly intense.
Han Li swept his gaze outward and found that the grass and the surrounding white-wood were all withering at a speed visible to the naked eye, turning sere and yellow in the blink of an eye.
Near the giant's corpse, the ground was littered with black, mantis-like bugs the size of watermelons, all long since devoid of any trace of life.
"This creature's toxicity is no joke. Anyone within a hundred li would probably drop dead from its aura alone." Han Li circled the corpse twice before murmuring to himself.
The monster's appearance was utterly bizarre, and he could not identify what it was—most likely some rare and unusual beast native to the Asura World.
With that thought, he flicked a finger toward the ground.
A puff of silver flame shot outward, flashed once, and landed on the enormous corpse.
Whoosh—rolling silver fire engulfed the monster's body in an instant, annihilating it into nothingness.
Having finished that, Han Li unhurriedly turned his palm over and produced a white crystal sphere the size of a chicken egg. After sweeping his gaze across its surface, his brow furrowed slightly.
The sphere showed no anomalies whatsoever, which meant Mo Jianli was clearly too far away for either of them to sense the other.
In that case, there was no rush to regroup. They could each seek their own opportunities first.
Ten-odd days was neither particularly long nor particularly short.
Having settled on a plan, Han Li oriented himself, then took off in a streak of azure radiance over ten zhang long that tore through the sky.
His flight speed, however, was not especially fast—he stayed only a few hundred zhang above the ground.
After all, this trip to the Small Asura World was not about traveling. It was about treasure hunting.
As he flew, Han Li released his vast divine sense, enveloping everything within a radius of three to four thousand li.
With the sheer power of his spiritual perception, blanketing over a hundred thousand li at once would normally have been effortless. But now he needed to focus on every minute detail—even penetrating the ground to a depth of hundreds of zhang—so naturally the range had to be drastically reduced.
Powerful spider-type creatures were, after all, predominantly subterranean.
Even so, being able to scan such a vast area in a single sweep was entirely due to Han Li's divine sense being far more formidable than that of an ordinary Mahayana cultivator.
If it were Mo Jianli or Xue Ran in his place, focusing on everything above and below ground within a radius of a few hundred li would already be considered excellent.
This was the primary reason he remained so confident in this expedition, despite lacking any bloodline ability related to the Asura Spider.
As for Mo Jianli, he too seemed to harbor a fair degree of confidence in locating the Asura Spider—presumably he possessed some special means of tracking it as well.
These thoughts flickered through Han Li's mind even as his divine sense swept over every inch of terrain across thousands of li in nearly an instant, his streak of light gradually receding into the distance.
……
Elsewhere within the same spatial realm, the white glow in Mo Jianli's hand condensed, and a crystalline jade sword materialized from a sky full of sword shadows.
Before him, in a stretch of tumbled rocks over a hundred zhang away, several beasts with tiger heads and scorpion tails lay cleaved in two amid pools of blood.
Mo Jianli's gaze swept across the carcasses once before he put away the jade sword, opened his mouth, and spat out a faintly purple sphere of light.
Inside the sphere was a small purple banner, no more than a few inches tall.