Eastern Continent, Demonic Fog Valley.
"What terrible luck—we've been teleported straight into a Forbidden Zone."
The Crimson Witch gazed at the faint red mist swirling around them, her slender brows furrowing slightly.
Forbidden Zones were something both the Western and Eastern Continent's major powers investigated in meticulous detail. These places were far too dangerous for players at the current stage to set foot in casually. Once inside, unless a player could physically leave the area, there was no way to teleport out.
After entering maps above Level 100 in the Divine Realm, spatial rifts and random teleportation points were scattered everywhere, making it all too easy to be sent to these hazardous locations. To prevent guild members from blundering around blindly after being teleported to such places, the great superpowers made sure to brief them thoroughly beforehand.
The Demonic Fog Valley was one of the Eastern Continent's most notorious Forbidden Zones.
The entire area was perpetually shrouded in an eerie red mist. Anyone who entered—even a Tier 4 class—would find both their physique and perception heavily suppressed, their combat power reduced to less than half of what they could normally muster.
To make matters worse, the monsters inside the Demonic Fog Valley boasted extraordinarily high physical and magic resistance. The weakest among them were Level 130 Great Lords, and it was not uncommon to spot Tier 4 Legendary monsters, or even High-tier Legendary monsters. Even a party of Tier 4 powerhouses entering would be fortunate to escape with their lives. For this reason, the great superpowers had designated the Demonic Fog Valley as a top-priority alert zone.
"We're actually quite lucky—we weren't sent to the central area. We're only at the boundary between the inner zone and the outer zone." Macafrei, vice-commander of the Silver Lion Corps, studied the map and pointed toward a ravine winding through the forest ahead. "If we run in that direction for a little over three hours, we should be able to reach the outer zone of the Demonic Fog Valley."
As a Forbidden Zone, the Demonic Fog Valley not only prohibited all forms of teleportation, but the crimson mist also grounded even Tier 4 players—flying was completely impossible, and even flying mounts were rendered useless. They could only rely on their own two legs.
"Guild Leader Black Flame, we should leave this place as soon as possible," Fitehaliya urged, looking toward Shi Feng. "If we linger too long, we'll easily get surrounded by monsters, and getting out of the Demonic Fog Valley will become even harder."
Inside the red mist, a player's perception was severely suppressed, but the valley's monsters were unaffected. They could detect players long before the players spotted them. Coupled with their high intelligence and self-awareness, their attacks almost always came in coordinated ambushes.
The danger was so extreme that even a party of Tier 4 experts would be in deep trouble upon encountering them—especially in the inner zone. According to the Divine Will Tribe's intelligence, High-tier Legendary monsters appeared there with alarming frequency, and Legendary monsters were plentiful as well.
Any significant commotion from a battle could easily attract a swarm of Tier 4 Legendary monsters, making the situation extremely perilous for even Tier 4 experts.
"Understood." Shi Feng nodded.
The moment he arrived in the Demonic Fog Valley, he had probed his surroundings. His perception was currently suppressed to a radius of two thousand yards, and within that range alone, he had already detected two Legendary monsters and over thirty Level 140+ High Great Lords. Running into any of them would be a serious headache.
The four of them then followed the ravine forward.
With Shi Feng among them—a man whose mental strength had reached Tier 5 and who had grasped the principle of creating a domain with a single thought—they walked through the ravine for over an hour without a single battle breaking out. Fitehaliya and the others found this quietly remarkable, wondering whether some player army had previously swept the area clean.
However, as they drew closer to the outer zone, monster density actually increased instead of dropping, as if the entire valley were a trap designed specifically for players—easy to enter, impossible to leave.
Even with Shi Feng's two-thousand-yard perception range, choosing a safe path was becoming increasingly difficult.
"Hm? Players?"
Shi Feng suddenly sensed a violent surge of magical elements in a stretch of forest about two thousand yards ahead, directly along the route leading to the outer zone. It was unmistakably the signature of active combat.
The violent fluctuations from the battle had barely registered in his perception before the thunderous roar of impact reached even Fitehaliya and the other two, crystal clear.
Moments after the blast, a Level 145 High-tier Legendary monster—a Four-Winged Feathered Dragon—hovered in the sky a thousand yards away, unleashing its roar toward a patch of forest and incinerating everything within a five-hundred-yard radius to ash.
As the forest burned to cinders, three figures became dimly visible through the haze—one woman, two men, all of them Tier 4. Two of the three were people Shi Feng had crossed paths with before: Yanyun Shiliu Meng, the second vice president of the superpower Tiger Shine, and the assassin Chi You.
That all three had survived the Four-Winged Feathered Dragon's roar was entirely thanks to the Tier 4 Guardian Knight among them.
However, that Guardian Knight had clearly taken a devastating toll from the blow. His remaining health was critically low, and with no healer in the party, they could only rely on potions for recovery. Against a High-tier Legendary monster like the Four-Winged Feathered Dragon, they clearly would not last much longer…
"Damn it—to die here, what a waste!"
Yanyun Shiliu Meng, who led the group and gripped a deep crimson staff, stared up at the sixty-meter beast hovering in the sky, her eyes burning with unwillingness.
"Exactly! We should have fought those outsiders head-on instead—at least that would've been more worthwhile than being killed by this thing." Chi You, the assassin at her side, nodded in agreement.
"What could we do? Who could have guessed we'd run into a monster like this the moment we ducked into the inner zone?" Yanyun Shiliu Meng said bitterly. "It seems the heavens want us dead."
They had barely managed to escape the pursuit of the outside world's players, fleeing from the outer zone of the Demonic Fog Valley into the inner zone. They thought they had shaken off those outside experts, only to be discovered by the Four-Winged Feathered Dragon lurking at the boundary line.