Chapter 71: The Beginning of Harvest!
For three long, tense days, Daniel, Lia, and Ayra had used the small, surprisingly dry cave system nestled deep within the Whispering Mire as their temporary sanctuary.
The oppressive gloom and incessant, sanity-testing whispers of the swamp made true rest a luxury, but they had managed.
Daniel’s Tier 2 [Soul Assimilation] had fully recharged its thirty charges, and the potent energy from the third Golden Sun-Kissed Fruit had settled deep within him, making his S-Grade skills, the [Solar Flare Fist Art] and [Earthquake Colossus Form], feel like barely contained thunderstorms eager to be unleashed.
Lia’s healing aura seemed to glow with a richer emerald light, and Ayra, after consuming her share of the golden fruit, had spent most of the three days engaged in increasingly violent "meditation" that involved creatively reshaping several large boulders at the cave’s entrance with her great-axe.
Nyx, Daniel’s Shadow Wolf Pup, had grown noticeably.
The golden fruit fragments and the assimilated fang had clearly spurred her development; she was sleeker, faster, her shadowy fur now carried faint flickers of cold blue Soulfire, and she’d even stopped trying to eat Daniel’s A-Grade boots, which was a monumental step forward in their relationship.
The Yin region of the Taiji Basin, as Nyx’s wider scouting forays confirmed, was a brutal landscape.
Awakened recruits, desperate for Yin Cards to complete their assessment or enhance their Class Transition prospects, had largely thinned out.
Some had succumbed to the region’s myriad dangers, the territorial gloom-beasts, the treacherous terrain, or the insidious whispers that frayed at the mind.
Others, having gathered what they could, had already made the perilous journey towards the Yang region.
Those who remained were either exceptionally cautious, exceptionally desperate, or exceptionally predatory, preying on weaker teams.