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“Are the fragments of Shiyu’s soul and psyche around here?!”

Li Mu’s eyes lit up anxiously.

By that time, Feng had roused up the whole scavenging team.

Every one of them knew about the horrific legends of the blood moon. As members of the scavenging hunt, they had heard about how beasts and monsters in the wilderness would fall into a frenzy of rage and bloodlust with all reason and habits forgotten. The jungle itself would become a twisted warren of bloodshed and carnage and the phenomenon of the dual moons would create a distortion in the Time-Space fabric, causing anomalies to happen.

Suffice it to say that the perils of being in the wilderness have now increased a thousandfold with the blood moon now shining brightly overhead in all its macabre splendor. Even a regiment of soldiers from the military would gape in despair, never mind an ordinary scavenging hunt of a tiny village like theirs.

“Quickly! We need to get out of here! Fly east! We need to get back fast!”

As Oststern’s most experienced scavenger, it was up to him to rally the men to a desperate attempt to get home and the scavenging hunt headed east with all the speed they could call upon.

In the meantime, Li Mu discovered that the more they sped eastwards, the tremors of the rusted sword were becoming stronger.

He quietly followed behind.

The scavenging hunt covered barely one kilometer when they found themselves surrounded by more than thirty to forty pairs of eyes, each of them flaring red like will-o’-the-wisps blazing in shades of red, as the eyes circled around their front and flanks and cut off any path of escape.

“Gods, Windwolves!”

“We’re done for!”

The scavengers all went white with fright.

Feng bit his lip and ripped out his weapon. He rushed to the front of the column and barked, “Drop off half of the load! We’re going to plow our way through!”

“But, Feng, that’s the food we need…” gasped one of the scavengers reluctantly.

“He’s right, Captain! Without this food, what’s the point of coming?! When we get back, we’ll still starve to death!” With the survival of the whole village hinged upon the amount of food that the scavengers could bring home, none of them could bring themselves to drop the precious cargo that was now worth even more than gold.

“If you’re not dropping the load, we’re not getting back at all,” Feng yelled loudly, “What matters now is surviving! Don’t forget, your families are waiting for you!”

Amid tears and reluctance, the scavengers dropped half the loads they were carrying on their shoulders, including the cartloads of food while keeping as much of the meat as they could carry. With vain despondence, the men roared furiously, steeling themselves as they charged headlong into the pack of predator wolves.

Feng swung his weapon frantically to ward off any wolves thinking of attack.

With a couple of flashes, he cut down a pair of wolves foolish enough to try to test him.

“Huh?! That was too easy!”

Feng was shocked at how effortlessly he slew the wolves.

Windwolves might be just Class-1 beasts, but given enough numbers, they could become a potent threat even to a Worm-Realm Cultivator. What Feng initially thought was just a blow that would scare the beasts away, to his surprise, had turned into a blow that easily hacked the pair of wolves into halves.

But there was no time to think further as the notion slipped out of his mind in his haste.

He quickened his pace and shouted, “KEEP UP! DON’T STOP FOR ANYTHING ELSE! KEEP LI MU IN THE MIDDLE! WATCH HIM AND MAKE SURE HE’S SAFE!” Even with the threat of their own safety looming over them, Feng did not forget his duty to keep Li Mu safe.

After almost a half-hour of running.

“Whew!”

Everyone was panting for air.

The scavengers all paused for a respite, their faces all awash with both relief and disbelief at how they managed to survive a Windwolf attack. Most of them attributed it to their good fortune that they had stumbled upon a particularly weak pack of Windwolves literally every one of them had gotten away unscathed.

“No! Quick! This is not the time to rest yet!”

Feng urged them all to press on.

The scavengers would then encounter more wild beasts trying to waylay them—amongst them, a frenzied bear and a slither of venomous snakes—yet none of the scavengers were hurt in any way and hardly any of them could believe their good luck.

The gods must be taking pity on them, some of them surmised.

But they have had to leave behind a lot of food.

Meanwhile, Li Mu could feel the tremors of his rusted sword growing stronger and more distinct.

“Are the fragments around here somewhere?”

Li Mu thought quietly as he kept his eyes peeled.

All of a sudden, the scavengers stopped.

“W-What’s that?!” one of the scavengers whimpered, his eyes so large that they were going to pop out of his socket.

From a distance, one could make out the ghostly silhouette of an ancient and battered ship—reminiscent of a shipwreck that had emerged after centuries of staying at the bottom of the ocean—silently cruising in their direction at almost a hundred meters in the sky.

What a ghastly sight to behold.

Like the legends of the Flying Dutchman back on Earth, Li Mu spied the one-thousand-meter-long sailboat—a derelict woodwork leviathan that had been so whittled down by age that rots and cracks scattered all over the planed timbers of its decks and fallen spars, with seaweeds and soot obscuring the portal that led into the captain’s cabin and other cannonball-perforated holes that littered all over its hull…

“Gods help us… It’s the legendary man-of-war of death… The Lunar Specter!”

Another fable, one even more ghoulish and dreadful, clambered back up from the forgotten depths of Feng’s mind, haunting him enough to sap away all colors from his face.

It was said that anyone who had laid eyes on the Lunar Specter would never live past the fifteenth sunset.

More so, for a Lunar Specter that appears during a blood moon phenomenon where all death is certain.

“QUICK! Retreat! We cannot go near that cursed ship!” Feng hissed. The fear in his voice was unmistakable.

“But, Feng,” a stammering voice came up. “It’s on the route we need to use to get back. A detour would cost us more time… Which I don’t think we have…”

Despair darkened Feng’s gaze. “There’s no other way then. We cannot go near that cursed ship no matter what. Or something—” he hesitated “—something bad will happen!”

As if the infernal conveyance had read his mind, in a wicked stroke of fate, the Lunar Specter veered towards them in what appeared to be a languished and lethargic drift. But the truth was hardly so; at every plunge that resembled the Lunar Specter was plowing through high waves, it seemed to magically glide at twice or even thrice its usual pace. By the time Feng was almost finished, the shadow of the man-of-war of death was already upon them.

The scavengers cowered under its vast, ghostly shade.

“Gods…”

Everyone looked up, beholding the sight of the Lunar Specter—an ancient shipwreck more than eons old—struggling with the petrifying fright and cold that rendered them stiff and immobile.

“There’s no way to run!” they thought.

Meanwhile, Lu Ye was staring hard at this gigantic piece of ancient driftwood.

He could detect no signs of life onboard. Instead, the huge vessel reeked of death, rot, and evil like a Flying Dutchman that had cruised straight from the depths of the underworld. Nevertheless, there was no ignoring the rusted sword that was now trembling uncontrollably like it was having a seizure, especially since the Lunar Specter’s appearance.

“If that’s really a fragment of Shiyu up there…”

Li Mu needed to board the ship. He was sure of it.

It’s very possible that a fragment or fragments of Shiyu’s psyche and soul could be up there

“Still…”

He looked at Feng and the rest of the villagers. He could see that they reached safely back to Oststern. But doing that would mean missing the Lunar Specter. Possibly even forever. This really was a real dilemma.

But something changed.

The Lunar Specter stopped mid-air.

Next, it slowly began to land, lowering over their heads as if threatening to crush them like ants.

“QUICK! RUN!”

Feng roared at the top of his voice. Everyone charged at his lead. The last man was barely out of the ship’s shadows when it finally landed on the ground with a deafening crash.

BOOM!

The landing itself sent a huge wave of reverberation and dust into the air.

“Look!”

A cry made their heads turn in the direction one of the scavengers was pointing.

A torrential stampede of beasts of varying species—spanning as far as their sights could reach—was sweeping rapidly across the terrain toward the Lunar Specter. Blanketed by the morbid illumination of the blood moon overhead, the bloodshot eyes of the frenzied beasts looked like the notes on the scoresheet of a requiem that was now the droning and incessant roars of the charging beasts.

“They are coming! We cannot get out!” The scavengers braced with horror.

They were surrounded by the whole deluge of stampeding beasts with no avenues of escape; a lone rock in the sea of anguish.

“Oh, gods…” gasped another scavenger, his face fraught with desolate resignation, “Even the skies are filled…”

The blood moon’s crimson effulgence served as the perfect backdrop for the many glowing phantoms now drifting towards them. A closer inspection would reveal that these were the “demons” that Feng told Li Mu about.

“W-We’re done for…”

The scavengers had lost all hope of surviving.

But Li Mu remained as calm as ever. By his reckoning, the stampeding beasts and demons were not here for them. “They are rushing for this ancient ship. What is on this ship that is drawing them here?”

But it won’t be easy trying to keep the villagers safe from the claws of so many raging beasts and demons.

“Get onboard.”

Li Mu said suddenly with a finger pointing at the Lunar Specter whose ghastliness was only accentuated by the blood moon’s sanguinary radiance.

“What?!” Feng gasped, his mind unable to comprehend what Li Mu was talking about, “B-But that ship’s the—”

“There’s no other way,” Li Mu cut him off abruptly. “We’ll all die here if we stay out here. Getting onboard the ship is the only way we have. Trust me.”

Feng took one last look at the stampeding horde of beasts as if to persuade himself into listening. A beat of hesitation passed, and he said, “So be it. Listen to Li Mu; let’s get on board!”

Li Mu made a quick estimation. “Get onboard. I’ll hold up the rear.”

“What? No! Let me—” Feng protested before he realized what he was doing.

“Don’t worry. Trust me,” Li Mu smiled at him.

His assuring smile and his steady tone all of a sudden sounded just so moving that Feng and the other scavengers’ protests immediately crumbled.

“Go!” Feng cried, leading his men towards the three-hundred-meter-tall, dilapidated hulk and began to climb upwards.

“Wait for me on the deck.”

Li Mu gave a stomp with his foot and several lines of trailing runes shot across the ground in different directions like vicious serpents. Next, they interconnected with each other once they reached about a hundred meters away, conjoining each other and forming impenetrable walls of eldritch energy.

BOOM!

The initial wave of the stampeding beasts slammed into the wall and was squashed to death by the others behind. Blood spattered everywhere and there was no telling how many beasts had died in the initial collision.

“Gods, what the hell was that?!”

Feng was just halfway up the side of the ship’s hull when he looked back and what he saw defied all manners of his comprehension towards Li Mu.

“What was that?!

“Incredible!”

It hit him like a sledgehammer. Only now did he realize that their successful scavenging had nothing to do with luck. Fates had never once smiled at them, and it never will. Someone who had been keeping them safe and that person had been none other than Li Mu, the Chosen One whom they had been painstakingly trying to protect and care for

In the meantime, Li Mu was frowning as the golden shimmering walls of the forcefield he erected kept the first four waves from reaching the villagers.

CRASH!

The energy walls of the forcefield shattered like glass.

And the stampede of beasts poured right into with the force of a broken dam.

Li Mu blurred from where he stood. With the agility and speed of an apparition, he caught the remaining villagers who were not yet up the deck and took them up with him.

Just in time before the onrushing surge of beasts came within a hundred meters of the Lunar Specter.

“What now, Li Mu?” Feng and the others looked at Li Mu imploringly.

Knowing that Li Mu really was a real champion had rekindled any hopes of survival.

But before he could speak, Li Mu’s peripheral vision caught something else. Something even more astonishing.