Chapter 431: Barren Battleground

Ascending into the skies by using elemental fire as platforms to leap on, Bai Yunfei quickly made his way up to look at what Xiao Qi had found....

Thanks to the ‘coil’ form, Bai Yunfei was already quite proficient with traveling through the skies using this method. It took him a few attempts to do it now that he was a proper early-stage Soul Exalt, but overall, there weren’t any problems.

“What did you find, Xiao Qi?” Bai Yunfei asked. But then when he looked at the same direction as Xiao Qi, his jaws dropped open.

“Wha—what is this?!” He managed to say after some time.

The Soulbeast Forest—as its name implied—was a forest with an ocean full of trees. These trees were tall and plentiful, and the area in front of Bai Yunfei was only just a small portion of the overall geography.

But what Bai Yunfei was looking at in front of him wasn’t another patch of trees, but....a barren wasteland!

A barren wasteland that extended for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers!

From the base of the mountain where Bai Yunfei was to roughly ten kilometers towards the wastelands marked a good portion of the forest where plenty of trees were still growing, if not felled in some places. With each incremental kilometer after that, the trees started to thin out, and then after one final kilometer, there was absolutely nothing but a wasteland!

There were no trees, no grass, and no mountains.

But what it did have was....absolutely nothing for kilometers all around. There was even a tremendous gulch on the left side of the wastelands!

Even from his faraway position, Bai Yunfei was still able to see that this gulch was several hundred meters deep at the very least!

And the most terrifying thing was that it felt like if a giant mouth was the one responsible for creating the gulch....

In the end, it felt like a natural disaster had befallen that entire area to reduce it from a lush forest to a destroyed wasteland.

Still in somewhat of a shock as he looked at the sight, Bai Yunfei’s eyes flashed brightly with light.

“This looks a little familiar, it kind of looks like a....”

“A battleground!!”

Spitting out those two words aloud, Bai Yunfei felt his heart skip a beat in shock.

This wasteland in front of him was a textbook example of the aftermath of a tremendous battle!

Bai Yunfei fought plenty of battles before with other soulbeasts where the aftermath was just like this, but smaller in scale. The area around them would be stripped of plant life, rock and sand were scattered to the skies, and the ground scarred with craters and ravines.

The only difference between the aftermath of Bai Yunfei’s battles and this was one was the size. Bai Yunfei’s battles only created a field of nothing about fifty meters in radius at most, but Bai Yunfei couldn’t even begin to tell just how big this wasteland was!

𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

“But....what kind of battle would leave behind such a tremendous sight like this?”

“Xiao Qi, I’m heading over, bring Xiao Lan with you!”

“Chirp!!”

......

Stepping onto his Tempest Sword, Bai Yunfei took off towards the wasteland while Xiao Qi carried a miniature-sized Xiao Lan.

Bai Yunfei came to a stop above the wastelands before making his descent to inspect the area.

Now that he was closer to the area, Bai Yunfei felt even more shock than before. It was a lot bigger than he originally guessed, and he could clearly see many different craters hundreds of meters deep scattered across the area as if a meteor storm had fallen onto the area.

But he knew that this was the aftermath of several explosions of elemental energy.

Most of the craters still had some water filling the bottom-most parts of them, with fragments of trees rotting away under the waters, meaning that they’ve been there for a considerably long time by now.

Some of the trees were already starting to grow moss.

Observing the area from the skies, Bai Yunfei was quiet for a while to gather his thoughts.

“I don’t know what happened here, but it must’ve happened at least half a year ago. It must’ve been a fierce battle if no grass is growing. There aren’t any soulbeasts around either, is it because of this battle? If they’re afraid of approaching this place even after so long had passed, the battle must’ve been extremely terrifying!”

From down below, something caught his eye,

“What’s that?!”

In one of the empty craters was something that stood out amongst its surroundings. It was smaller in size and quite familiar, just like a....

“A footprint!!” Exclaimed Bai Yunfei. There was the footprint of a soulbeast in the crater!

Upon closer investigation, the footprint looked reptilian in nature—like a lizard—but many times bigger!! The entire footprint was close to a hundred meters, and the claw marks were dozens of meters in length themselves!

Looking even farther ahead, several more identical footprints were identified.

“The owner of this foot is huge!!”

Sneaking a glance at the airborne Xiao Lan, Bai Yunfei compared the two sizes. If the blue-eyes wyrm were at its largest, it’d footprints would still be the size of an ant compared to this footprint!

“How does a fight of this magnitude happen in the class six area? It’s just not right....a tremendous soulbeast like this shouldn’t be in the class six area...

“Was this....a battle between Soul Exalts?! Class seven soulbeasts?!”

His eyes widened at the potential thought.

The more he thought about it, the more plausible it sounded. The only ones capable of inflicting such tremendous devastation onto the world like this were of the Soul Exalt stage and higher....

The closer he got to the battlefield, the bigger the crater in the middle got. By time he was down on the ground, the crater was already over five kilometers in diameter, and the entire bottom half submerged with water!

Now standing above the crater, Bai Yunfei was free to look at over half of the entire battlefield. There was nothing else to this place but the barren grounds, and now that the shock was gone, Bai Yunfei didn’t really see anything else of interest.

As he prepared to leave however, something else caught his eye.

“Whats this?”

Just as he turned around, his eyes caught onto a flash of light coming from the ground. Even with the clouds making it very dim in the area, the light was still enough to catch Bai Yunfei’s attention.

Flying another kilometer to the spot, Bai Yunfei squinted his eyes to look at the object shining in the ground.

Right there was a black object halfway stuck in the ground, but the part that was above the ground was shining with light.

Curious, Bai Yunfei descended next to the object and alighted from the sword. Stooping over, he grabbed hold of the item and pulled at it.

“Crack!!” Dislodging the object from the ground, Bai Yunfei pulled out a black metallic ‘plate’ the size of a brick. The edges of the ‘plate’ was curved so that one side was wide, and the other side was pointy. It was only two fingers in thickness, but the weight of the object was a hundred and fifty kilograms almost.

Equipment Grade: Low Earth

Elemental Affinity: Water

Defense: 600

Upgrade Requirement: 90 Soulpoints

A string of information trailed into his mind as soon as his hand touched the object.

“This...this is a low-earth tier equipment?!”

He stared at the plate in his hand in absolute befuddlement.

Staring at the object, Bai Yunfei noticed something familiar about it.

“Hold on, this looks a little strange. It looks kind of like.....”

“A scale!!”

Realization struck Bai Yunfei like a bolt of lightning.

What he was holding in his hand was without a doubt the scale of a soulbeast of some kind!

Then without warning, the water within the largest crater there began to churl and glow a deep blue light. Surging intensely with each passing second, the lake soon gave rise to a waterspout that shot itself out from the crater to come circling around Bai Yunfei!