Picking Up Attributes In Martial World

Chapter 165: Heaven Hunting Eye

The world shaped itself around him once again as Ye Jun stood on red earth beneath a sky the color of dried blood.

The horizon stretched in every direction without any end, an ancient wilderness that felt older than anything he had ever stepped on.

Gigantic skeletons rose from the ground at intervals, ribs the size of mountains, skulls with teeth longer than his body. Some of the bones were embedded so deep into the earth that they had become part of it, fossilized into the bedrock itself.

The mountains in the distance bore deep claw marks down their faces, each one wide enough to swallow a city whole.

Even the air around him felt wrong. It pressed against his skin like something was watching from every direction at once, and the space itself carried a faint tension, like a held breath waiting to be released.

’...This is the Hunt Trial?’ he thought.

Ye Jun’s hand moved to his hip on instinct. He had his own Ember Sword this time, not a borrowed one, the familiar weight grounding him slightly.

He probed inwardly and found that his cultivation was back to its actual level. No more artificial boost, no more king’s robes. Just him as he was, standing in a world that felt designed to eat him alive.

Ye Jun frowned. ’Different from the others. The previous ones tested how I thought. This one feels like it’s going to test how I survive.’

That wasn’t a surprise considering this was the Trial of Hunt.

He took a careful step forward, and that was when he heard it.

He froze, sensing breathing behind him. It was slow and deep, seeming to fill a chest the size of a hill. Each inhale tugged faintly at the air around him, like the world itself bent slightly toward the source.

Ye Jun didn’t turn immediately. His body had locked into stillness instinctively. His Threat Assessment fired automatically and gave him nothing. The feeling it returned felt wrong, as if whatever stood behind him existed beyond his ability to read.

’...What even is that?’

He turned his head slowly.

The creature stood perhaps two hundred meters behind him.

’The hell?!’

He wouldn’t have called it a beast. A beast had a shape his mind could hold. This damned thing had a body that was probably something between a great cat and a serpent and a hunting bird, but none of those shapes settled properly in his mind.

Its limbs were long and built for closing distance. Its head had no obvious eyes, only a wide flat plane of dark bone with shallow grooves where eyes should have been. Its mouth was a horizontal slit that ran the width of its face.

It was staring at him...without any eyes.

The grooves on its head shifted almost imperceptibly, and Ye Jun felt something pass through him. It was neither Qi nor killing intent, but something older. It went past his skin, past his meridians, and brushed directly against his Soul in the Spiritual Realm.

His Soul flinched.

The creature’s mouth-slit pulled wider in recognition.

’It found me.’

Then it moved.

Ye Jun had fought fast opponents before. But this was different. This was inevitable. The distance between them collapsed in a single breath, and his body reacted on training alone, Stone Step Footwork shifting him sideways while his sword came up instinctively.

He didn’t see the strike. He felt it. A crushing weight slammed across his ribs, and his body went sideways through the air, hit a fossilized rib, and bounced violently off into the dirt. Three of his ribs were broken before he had even finished registering the blow.

"Damn you!"

He scrambled upright, blood filling his mouth.

The creature was already on him.

He died without ever managing a second swing.

...

He came back kneeling on the red earth, whole once more. His breath caught as he blinked in shock.

’What...’

He looked down at himself. No signs of blood or broken ribs. His sword rested in his hand. The creature stood two hundred meters away exactly as before.

Watching.

’It revived me?’ Ye Jun wondered. ’Or was all of it just an illusion?’

The grooves on its head shifted again. The mouth-slit pulled into the same horizontal expression of recognition.

And it came again.

This time Ye Jun was ready. He moved before it closed the distance, Ashen Phantom Steps carrying him in an unpredictable arc while Wind Step Footwork layered on top of it for additional speed. He cut at its flank as it passed, and his blade skipped off something harder than anything Ye Jun had ever seen before.

The creature pivoted on a single limb, faster than its massive body should have allowed, and its tail came around in a brutal arc.

Ye Jun tried to block, but the block shattered instantly. His arm broke in three places and he was airborne again.

He died the second time.

...

By the tenth death, he had stopped tracking them as individual events. The pattern of his attempts blurred together into one endless slaughter.

He tried hiding, but the creature found him easily. He tried digging into the earth and ambushing it from below. It knew exactly where to strike before he even emerged. He tried using the fossilized skeletons as cover. It walked through them, breaking ribs the size of pillars without slowing down in the slightest.

He tried his Qi Suppression Field, hiding both his presence and his cultivation. The creature didn’t care. It wasn’t tracking his Qi. It wasn’t tracking his body either. It had marked his Soul, and the Soul couldn’t be hidden.

By the thirtieth death, the cold rage had started to settle into him.

By the fiftieth, he stopped thinking about strategy.

He started thinking about it.

How it moved. How it breathed before a strike. How its weight shifted slightly to its left side when it pivoted. How the grooves on its head deepened just half a heartbeat before it lunged.

It was learning him. He could feel that much clearly. Every time it killed him, it killed him faster than the last time, the kill landing in a slightly different place because he had already started defending against the previous pattern.

But he was learning it too.

Not consciously though. His mind had stopped being useful somewhere around the twentieth death. Assassin logic kept producing plans that the creature countered before he could even fully execute them.

Strategy was useless. Technique was useless. The thing he had spent his life building, the precise and efficient hunter’s mind, was being dismantled because something better at hunting than him was using it against him.

So he stopped using it.

By the hundredth death, something else had begun to take its place.

Around the two hundredth death, he stopped speaking, even within his own thoughts. The conscious narrator inside his head went quiet. What remained was watching. Just watching. The shape of the creature. The rhythm of its movements. The smell of the air before it shifted.

By the four hundredth death, he started to laugh.

"HAHAHAH!!! YOU DAMNED BASTARD!!"

It wasn’t a sane laugh. It came up out of his chest along with the blood that spilled from his throat after one of the creature’s strikes, wet and helpless and far too long.

He was kneeling on the red earth with his sword in his hand and his chest caved inward, and he was laughing at the creature.

And the creature, for the first time, paused.

Half a step. Barely anything at all.

But it paused.

’...There you are.’

The thought came without words. Just an instinct opening its eyes inside him.

He stopped trying to escape after that.

By the six hundredth death, he was moving toward it instead of away. By the eight hundredth, he was setting his own ambushes, using the fossilized skeletons not as cover but as bait.

He died most of those times, but sometimes he made the creature bleed. Black ichor splattered across the red earth, just a few drops, but they were the first drops it had ever shed in front of him.

"If you can bleed, then you can die!"

It started to circle wider after that. It stopped charging immediately.

By the thousandth death, the hunt had reversed in a way that had nothing to do with strength. He still wasn’t strong enough to kill it. He was something worse.

He was patient.

He had stopped being a cultivator with a sword and become a thing that watched and waited and read the smallest shift in its enemy’s stance.

Around the twelve hundredth attempt, the creature hesitated mid-lunge.

Ye Jun took its left foreleg off at the joint.

The damned thing couldn’t scream, so it simply retreated.

For the first time in this trial, it retreated.

Ye Jun stood there on the red earth with black ichor covering his arms, the laugh still stretched across his face, and he felt something settle behind his eyes. Not satisfaction.

Recognition.

"I see you now, bastard!" he laughed, a maddening smile plastered across his face.

The creature came back twice more. The first time he took its tail. The second time, he was waiting for it in a place it had not yet thought to search, and his sword pierced through the soft groove where its eyes should have been.

It died over a long stretch of breaths, its body finally collapsing sideways into the dirt. The mouth-slit relaxed into something almost peaceful.

Then its head split open along the grooves.

A single eye opened inside.

It wasn’t a physical eye, because he didn’t see it with his actual eyes. He felt it looking at him from somewhere behind his own face.

And then it moved.

It crossed the space between them without crossing it at all. He felt it settle inside his Soul within the Spiritual Realm, finding a place there as if it had always belonged.

It opened.

And it began to watch.

Ye Jun stood on the red earth, swaying slightly on his feet, and slowly the laugh faded from his face. The madness retreated, but the watcher remained.

He could feel it as a quiet presence now, woven into his Soul, woven into his Spirit. When he turned his attention toward the dead creature, the eye turned with him.

When he thought of an enemy he had once faced, the eye sharpened its focus, and he felt something stir. Weaknesses he hadn’t consciously noticed surfaced within his memory, patterns of movement he had forgotten resolving themselves into perfect clarity.

A name arrived in his mind automatically.

’Heaven Hunting Eye.’

Ye Jun closed his actual eyes for a long moment, breathing slow and deep while letting the trembling in his hands finally settle.

The world dissolved around him.