Killing his way through the metal jungle, Song Lu Tian followed the directions on the map and traveled for quite some distance before the atmosphere seemed to change. He felt the temperature in the area drop, and he started to see dozens of large pillar shapes covered in metallic coils. The pillars were softly humming and had tiny blinking lights upon them. Each of the pillars was blowing out icy cold air from the top, which contrasted with the warmer air from the area he was just in. Each of the pillars had a huge cloud of mist billowing from the top and dispersing into the densely packed metal weaving above them.

Finding nothing dangerous about them, he continued onwards, the temperature in the area continuing to drop and the misty clouds no longer present over the pillars with the blinking lights. One of the blinking lights reflected off something in front of him and Song Lu Tian knew he had reached the final checkpoint. The little glimmer was caused by a thread of silk, one which Song Lu Tian used a sword to slice through, finally showing a bit of caution. As the map said, once he ran into spider silk, he had reached the outer edges of the Double Flowered Ice Camellia’s area. This was also the most dangerous area for his retrieval task, the map listed that the number of spider species in this area was innumerable.

With his skills, Song Lu Tian took no chances and brought forth his Sword Formation. The dozen swords flickered with energy and sword Qi sprung forth from their edges. Waving his hand, the swords started to spin, rotating around his body like the spokes of a wheel. They formed into four three pointed wheels, varying in angle with each rotation to turn him into a walking blender. The energy expenditure wasn’t light, but he wanted to get this task over with and start exploring the areas on the map that were still listed as unvisited.

Most of the spiders felt the deadly energy whirling around him and ran away. Others tried to assault him and without fail they were sliced into bits, just like the many webs that blocked his path. After a few more minutes, he started to see many large blue-green shrubs growing from random places on the metallic structures around him. The shrubs had many little caterpillars and other tiny insects crawling about and feeding on the greenery. Heading further into the area, he finally caught sight of his target.

On some of the shrubs large flowers had bloomed. They opened delicately, the icy blue petals shaped like that of a small teacup with golden yellow stamens in their centers. Song Lu Tian slowed his Sword Formation and got a closer look. Frowning, he continued onwards. The flowers were Ice Camellia, but they were not double flowered. The description clearly stated that the double flowered ice camellia has twice the number of petals as these did, usually shaped like not just a cup, but also a soft of flat saucer. From the side they would look like a wondrous tea setting. The map specifically mentioned that there would be both single and double flowered camellia here, otherwise, Song Lu Tian might have just taken the description as being incorrect.

There was a disturbance up ahead and Song Lu Tian kept back, watching as a group of giant blue butterflies the size of a manhole cover were going to battle with a spider the size of an end table. The aura they gave off seemed easy to handle for him, being near the middle of the third rank, but the map such large butterflies liking to feed on the Double Flowered Ice Camellia, so he waited to follow them to the right area. Thankfully, the butterflies came out on top of the confrontation and scared off the spider. Song Lu Tian stopped his Sword Formation, hiding his Qi and aura as much as possible, tailing the butterflies to what he could only call a ‘grove’ among this metal forest. The camellia flowers here were easily double the size of the others he’d seen, with double the petals and a shape that matched the description he was given.

After observing a while to make sure there were no hidden dangers, he leapt out and started harvesting the Double Flowered Ice Camellia. The butterflies were quite upset, but after he killed a few of them with a single slash the rest of them flew away. His swords slashed with marvelous accuracy, shearing the flowers from shrubs. Song Lu Tian merely had to walk past and store them into one of his storage rings. The grove was quite large and the flowers from it filled up more than half the ring’s space. He even kept a few dozen for himself in a separate ring. He was told nobody else would think they were valuable, but there was no harm in double checking it himself. With the first grove cleared, the big man continued on to look for a second grove of the Double Flowered Ice Camellia, his search distracting him just enough that when a beetle crawled out of the Beast Bag he wore on his waist he just flicked it away, thinking it was one of the local insects. The beetle wasn’t even at the first rank, so it failed to even catch the young man’s attention.

Of course, if he had taken the chance to look closer he would have recognized that the beetle was a reddish black color, with a single large horn and a strange concave underbelly. It was in fact a Charming Lance Beetle, one which Sage had linked with and purposely chosen to leave at its minimum strength after hatching from an egg. After Song Lu Tian had moved far enough away, the little beetle walked under one of the shrugs and hid itself beneath a metal outcropping. From out of the beetle’s body a ghostly apparition slowly slid out. The spirit was shaped like a humanoid and it took a quick look around before focusing in a spider nearby. Floating towards it, the spirit disappeared into the spider’s body and a few seconds later the spider curled up and fell to the ground. The beetle stabbed its horn into the dead spider’s body and drained it of its blood and fluids, converting them into energy and starting to rapidly increase in strength and size.

The spirit, Sage’s Twin Soul, immediately found a second, third, and fourth target. Creating a food supply for the beetle. Once it had grown from the size of half a finger into a palm, it lifted its wings and carefully released a passenger. It was a small ant with a large and elongated abdomen. As the Twin Soul killed more of the nearby spiders, caterpillars and butterflies, the Beetle began to dissect them and feed them to the ant. Within just an hour the Beetle had already reached the size of a large dog, while the ant had grown to the size of a thumb and was laying eggs endlessly. With the help of the beetle they fed the first few ants that hatched, but soon enough there was an army of ants tending to the queen and processing the dead insects and even the nearby vegetation to feed the queen and newly hatched larvae.

Sage was linked to the Charming Lance Beetle, having snuck it into the Beast Bag he’d given to Song Lu Tian. At the same time he put his Twin Soul into its internal space and also hidden a Queen Ant underneath its outer shell. It prevented the Beetle from using its wings, since that would make the ant fall out, but it was just a gamble in the first place. While it took a good amount of work to increase the strength of his Twin Soul, Sage considered it a worthy sacrifice for a chance to explore Thunder Mountain Bridge. He was far too old and nowhere near the standard of a genius so there was no way he’d ever get here on his own. Instead he took the risk that the ‘Merge’ link with the Beetle wouldn’t be cancelled and that souls wouldn’t be tested upon entering the bridge. When Song Lu Tian entered Thunder Mountain Bridge, Sage felt something brush against the Twin Soul, but thankfully from within its hiding place inside the Beetle, the energy seemed diminished and neither of the two connections were broken. He didn’t expect to accomplish much here, but some basic exploration would be enough to simply sate his curiosity.

I wonder what other sorts of treasures this place holds.