Immortal

11. The Rat Tide [II]

Warriors walked out of the teleportation array and looked around, each with a moved expression on their faces.

Those who participated in this trial included the elite of the younger generation as well as overlords who had been rampant in the human world for hundreds of years and were well-informed and knew the origin of these stone carvings.

Twenty thousand years ago, after the sage Fruga defeated an army of thousands of dreads, martial arts flourished in the human world and many masters emerged. 

As more and more people practiced martial arts, the classification of people in the martial arts gradually became clearer, divided into seven major realms: warrior, master, innate warrior, innate master, grand master, saint and sovereign, and each realm has seven small levels.

Ten thousand years ago, after the saint Fruga ascended, the Heavenly Book written by himself was circulated among the people. As a result, new great changes and trends appeared in the martial arts of the human world. 

Anyone who first comprehended a page of the Heavenly Book and mastered a unique magical power, could capture magical beasts, even the dreads, and then subdue them and make them his own followers, known as the familiars. 

Later, this unique magical power gradually spread, and more and more warriors collected the familiars. 

Some people used the familiars as mounts, some as personal guards, and some refined them into their own clones. All kinds of familiars followed the top masters and made great achievements in the previous dreads catastrophes.

Nowadays, among the warriors in the human world, familiars were not common, but the most powerful skills to control the familiars were still in the hands of the four immortal sects. The familiars of ordinary people would have to be changed when they died, and have to collect another ones. 

The four immortal sects are different. They could refine some of the top familiars who have fallen for many years into stone sculptures, and let them guard some dangerous forbidden areas and set up powerful restrictions. 

These huge stone sculptures on the grassland were obviously left intentionally by the four immortal sects to guard this trial field.

What kind of forbidden land needed to be guarded by four such ferocious gods of war?

What exactly were these destined war gods suppressing?

In other words, what kind of dangers did this grassland pose?

The more the trialists thought about it, the more uneasy they felt, and their faces tensed up. 

Looking up, the grassland was lush and peaceful, and when the cold wind blew, they could even see many cattle and sheep. It seemed peaceful and safe. However, behind this peace, there was no telling what kind of danger was hidden. The four vicious and ferocious familiars made people feel an irrepressible uneasiness and even fear.

People were tense and Lachlan was also a little uneasy.

As soon as he was teleported here, he felt an indescribable danger. This danger, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, seemed to come from the depths of the grassland. Observing it carefully, it seemed to come from behind the long mountains, or even from deep underground.

When the danger was weak, it seemed to come from just a few ordinary monsters, posing no real threat; but when the danger was at its strongest, it was like a raging ocean, like the vast and boundless starry sky, giving them a feeling of being boundless and completely unable to resist, as if standing in front of the gate of heavens. 

This feeling made Lachlan feel very uncomfortable. He slowly calmed down by reciting the Nine Revolutions of Life, took out the sheepskin map in the package, compared it with the surrounding terrain, and determined his current location.

This map was actually very simple, with just a few strokes outlining the grassland and the surrounding mountains. On the map, a red line stretched across the grassland to the foot of a mountain on the opposite side, with the starting and ending points both marked with unique cyan teleportation arrays. 

It seemed that the task of this assessment was to cross the grassland in front of us and rush to another teleportation array at the foot of the mountain. It was simple and clear.

"Hey, what is this?"

"Ah..., a corpse." 

"No, it's many corpses!"

Some participants suddenly screamed. After walking a few steps on the grassland, they unexpectedly found that there were bones everywhere under their feet. The seemingly peaceful and safe grassland was buried with countless corpses and drifting souls.

The cattle and sheep ahead were startled and ran away.

Then a series of rumbling noises came from the horizon. 

At first, it sounded like the sound of a flood; the sound got closer and louder, like a thousand horses galloping; finally, it was like the earth was cracking and the ground was shaking. 

Someone climbed up the sparse bushes and looked into the distance, and his face turned pale.

At some point in time, a black line appeared behind the horizon, sweeping in like a flood. After a while, when the distance was closer, it could be seen that it was not a black line, but countless monsters, some the size of a dog, similar to a mouse but not a mouse, with a black tortoise shell on their backs, teeth and claws gleaming, looking extremely ferocious and hideous.

"It's the turtle-backed rats. Run!" Someone who was knowledgeable and experienced quickly recognized what kind of monster it was and screamed in shock. 

Lachlan was also surprised. He had also heard of the turtle-backed rats, which were the size of a dog but as strong as an ox, with sharp claws on their hands that could tear tigers and leopards apart alive. Then the turtle shell on its back, which was as hard as iron and difficult to be damaged by ordinary swords. 

Only the exposed limbs and necks could be attacked. If it was just one or two of them, it would be fine, as all the people present were innate warriors, so it would not be difficult to kill them. 

But this time, when Lachlan looked around, he was afraid that there were tens of thousands of them rolling over like a mighty flood. 

Who could stop them like this?