"Should I go or not?" Mu Chen stood at the edge of the valley. It was several hundred carriages wide and equally deep, with landforms on both edges forming a V. There was a river flowing at the bottom of the depression, however, it wasn't too wide. Mu Chen was confident he could cross it without too much trouble. The valley formed a natural border, separating the life forms from one side to the other.

Hiss! A monitor lizard that had been basking in the sun, saw Mu Chen and lunged towards him, mistaking him for breakfast.

Mu Chen dodged to the side and slashed at the neck of the lizard in an attempt to chop it off in a single stroke. The sword struck the neck of the lizard with a loud thud and slid across, leaving behind a deep red welt in its wake. The pain made the lizard angry and it snapped at Mu Chen again.

"Damn!" Mu Chen dodged again. Although the lizard wasn't too fast, it's skin was tough. The area where its skin was weakest was the belly, but because its profile was very low, it was impossible to target it.

When the lizard attacked again, Mu Chen jabbed at one of its eyes. His sword penetrated through its eyes and the socket, into its brain. It's movements stopped. Mu Chen pulled his sword and the lizard fell down its body twitching. But as a monster beast, it was tenacious and it didn't die instantly even after its brain was pierced. As it died, the lizard gave the characteristic growl that Mu Chen had come to recognize as a trait of dying monster beasts.

Mu Chen was just thinking about getting the blood essence of the monster beasts when he heard the sound of several objects slithering on the ground. Mu Chen looked down the edge of the valley.

"Fuck!" To his shock, there were dozens of monitor lizards making their way towards him crawling on the slope. Over twelve feet long and two feet wide, they were even larger than the one he had just killed. Mu Chen scrapped his original idea and ran away.

Once he was near the trees, Mu Chen jumped and grabbed a branch and hoisted himself up, and continued to climb until he was fifty feet above the ground. This was a height he was comfortable with, even if he fell unprepared he would only get minor injuries. After making sure there was no threat of an ambush by some other creature, Mu Chen relaxed and began to observe the movements below.

Mu Chen saw the lizards gather below the tree he was perched on. They couldn't climb the trees so they began to hiss and make noises at him. Eventually, they got tired and went to their fallen comrade and began to fight between each other for ownership.

"This is not going to work." Mu Chen's expression was sour. Had he let himself get surrounded by those lizards, wouldn't that have been a desperate situation as well? Wasn't that his goal? But his first choice had been to evade. Because his sword couldn't cut through the skin of the lizard and he knew it would be difficult to individually target a particular lizard with others attacking.

There was no need to cross the valley. This small encounter with monitor lizards had already given him the answer. Mu Chen had thought he could push himself into a desperate situation, but he chose to evade when things were beyond his control. Maybe it was because his scenario of a desperate situation didn't involve facing multiple opponents. But that was also where the problem lied. He couldn't choose one desperate situation over another. Having the choice in itself was contradictory. When he faced the assassin, Mu Chen had no such choice. But he couldn't recreate the same scenario.

Unless he was insane or someone he cared for was in danger, there was no way for him to knowingly push himself into such a situation. Moreover, if that strike was just a fluke and he pushed himself into a desperate situation, wouldn't it be the same as committing suicide? Mu Chen was willing to take risks, but he would not bet his life on fate or luck.

"Looks like there is nothing more left to do in the forest." Mu Chen thought. Since crossing the valley was no longer an option, there wasn't any point in staying here.

"Hmm?" Mu Chen was about to leave when a thought struck him. When he had killed the lizard, there was hardly any blood. And he was at the top of the wall. Given the direction of the wind, there was no way the other monster beasts could have smelled the blood.

"Was it our fight?" If it was their fight that attracted their attention, they would have moved earlier. If it was not the smell of blood or their fight, then it left only one thing.

"It has to be that sound!" That low growl every monster beast made before it died, was it some kind of signal?

Mu Chen had planned to leave the forest but decided to stay a bit more because he wanted to verify his guess.

#

Somewhere in the forest, a human tackled a monster beast relying solely on brute strength. A feline type monster beast roared as it struggled to shake off the figure of a guy who clung on its back like a loach.

Mu Chen had managed to get a hold of the monster beast's neck. The beast's struggle became more and more frantic as it tried to shake him off. But Mu Chen continued to choke it with all his strength.

The wrestle between man and beast continued for a few minutes. The beast's movements gradually became slow. And then it came to a complete halt.

Because he was in close contact with the beast, Mu Chen sensed it with clarity. Just before it died, the beast gave a low hum. It originated from someplace deep down its throat.

After killing the beast, Mu Chen didn't linger any more and climbed up a nearby tree and hid using the thick foliage as cover. He controlled his breathing and even covered his mouth with a piece of cloth to prevent the moisture from escaping. As an extra precaution, he once again rubbed the juice of the wildflowers all over his body to mask his smell.

Mu Chen was patient. He had lowered his heart rate to one beat a minute and maintained a state of absolute stillness. He couldn't maintain this for long, but if his guess was correct, he wouldn't have to.

Sure enough, only a couple of minutes had passed and another monster beast appeared. Once it found the carcass of the monster beast, it began to sniff it. After confirming its death, it began to check its surroundings. For a while, it prowled the perimeter with the body at the center. After finding nothing, it came back to the body and gnawed at the chest. It dug the heart out, ate it, and left the way it had come.

Once he was sure the beast left, Mu Chen relaxed. "So the death growl is some kind of signal?" Mu Chen was surprised by this revelation. He used to think it was only the smell of blood that attracted other beasts but today he learned something new.

"This signal sent every time a beast dies?" Mu Chen pondered. "No, wait! That can't be true! Or I would have heard it more often." Mu Chen wasn't the only one hunting the beasts, the beasts themselves hunted other beasts as well, but he had not heard them send out such death growl on those occasions.

Did the beasts send such a death growl only when they got killed by humans? The more Mu Chen thought about it the more incredulous he felt. "Are there any other kinds of signal?" Mu Chen wondered.

Once the idea took hold, Mu Chen couldn't shake it off. He didn't have anything else to do either, so he decided to see if he could get to the bottom of this mystery.

Over the next few days, Mu Chen spent most of his time doing just one thing, he listened. As he meditated, the noisy backdrop of the forest became his area of focus. Mu Chen tried to isolate and distinguish every individual sound from the rest. He listened with intense focus: there were birds chirping, beasts growling, insects buzzing, the sound of leaves rustling...

At some point, Mu Chen thought he even heard people talking but he ignored it as he focused on the sounds he was most interested in. Soon Mu Chen was able to identify and isolate the death growls. They belonged to the beasts that got killed by the hands of other humans. As Mu Chen got better at listening, he discovered other sounds were similar to the death growls. They fell in the same range of sound, but they were different from each other.

Armed with this knowledge, Mu Chen began to try and understand what the other sounds meant. He already knew the death growl meant a cultivator killed a monster beast. And he was soon able to identify one another sound.

Mu Chen passed by a harmless monster beast, but he didn't kill it. But he still kept his attention. Soon after he passed by, that beast gave a hum. It was different from the death growl, but just like the death growl, ordinary humans couldn't hear it. But Mu Chen understood what it meant when another beast blocked his path: it was a warning sound that a human had arrived.

"There are other sounds that lie in the same range that I haven't been able to understand. I can think of them as words. If there are more such words, doesn't it mean they can exchange more messages with each other? Then doesn't it mean the beasts can talk with each other?" Mu Chen thought. "The monster beasts have their own language! And it's not limited to any species-they have a universal language!" Mu Chen was shocked by his conclusion.

It was common knowledge that monster beasts could not communicate, at least it wasn't up to the standards of human speech. At best it was a crude form of signaling; everyone could tell if a monster beast was threatening them when it roared at them.

However, Mu Chen had never heard that beasts were capable of conveying more complex information. In his impression, the beasts were not as intelligent as human beings to develop something like a language.

The monster beasts had a universal language they could use to talk with each other. If one could speak this language and talk to them, would it be possible to direct them? Or maybe, someone was already directing them?

"It's no wonder all those cultivators who tried to cross the forest never returned." Mu Chen muttered as he felt a shiver run down his spine. He had a premonition that he had vaguely touched the surface of some secret.

Mu Chen continued his observations. As he got better at using his enhanced hearing, Mu Chen felt as if he had stepped into a brand new world. The forest was no longer noisy. It could speak with you, you just had to listen carefully.

"It looks like this is the limit of monster beasts here." Today Mu Chen had identified another new hum: it was a call for help.

"The monster beasts beyond the valley should be capable of speaking more words?" He had a feeling the monster beasts here had limited vocabulary. Monsters beasts who had higher cultivation were usually more intelligent. So Mu Chen felt he could learn more about the beast language if he went there. Unlike his previous goal, he wasn't planning to fight the monster beasts, just observe, so the level of danger was low.

"Maybe tomorrow!" Mu Chen yawned. He was mentally exhausted since he had been awake for a few days. Even after the transformation, he could only stay awake for a few days at most. His usual little den was far away from his current location, so Mu Chen just decided to sleep on a branch of a tree.

While Mu Chen was enjoying his sleep, a human figure was chasing after a monster beast. Their chase took them across the valley and the river, in the direction Mu Chen was.