Chapter 31 - Facing the Tide
With the siblings trailing right behind Benton, he raced at full speed toward the large source of qi. The journey took less than a minute, and he quickly stopped before entering the range of the mass of spirit beasts.
Most of the vegetation he’d encountered on his new planet so far looked strikingly similar to what grew on Earth. Not so for what lay before him.
The woods surrounding the overgrown path he traveled suddenly stopped, leaving a gap of twenty yards or so where nothing grew, literally down to brown dirt. On the other side, the trees were … different.
What struck him most were the colors. He’d been to New England in the fall. That display of nature had nothing on the one he was witnessing. Bright reds, brilliant yellows, beautiful blues.
Yes, blues. He’d never seen leaves that color. And all the hues existed on each of the trees in sight.
Another weird feature was that everything glowed with a weird vibrancy. The sight was so interesting and pretty and weird and almost overwhelming that it caused him to forget his mission for a moment.
As soon as he regathered his wits, he used his spirit sense to check on the harvesters. They hadn’t moved.
Ahead of him, the beasts were peppered throughout the area with little room between them, severely overlapping the distance he understood to mark the territory of a single one.
That was a lot of spirit beasts.
Still, with him and the two siblings fighting at once, they should be able to handle the amount in any given area. The real danger was if the fighting attracted more beasts from further away, and the new ones arrived before they were properly finished with the originals.
“We’ll fight in a wedge formation,” Benton said. “I’ll take center forward. Yang Xiu, stay about ten feet to my left and twenty feet back. Yang Ru, you’re ten feet to my right but even with me. Understand?”
“Yes, Senior Brother Chao,” they chorused instantly.