About five days had passed since Shirong had started hunting for beasts. He would hunt for about eight hours straight every day before stopping to travel further. The constant hunting was replenishing the spirit qi he would use during the fights and even exceeding it by a small margin.

While it was a rather small net increase in his total spirit qi amount, it was still more than what he would obtain by cultivating normally. Lin Wu meanwhile was having a great time. His spirit qi stores and vital energy stores were rising steadily and even their progress with the systems analysis was going well.

Lin Wu had already scanned the area around him with the help of the system and knew that they were at the edge of the second ring, soon to enter the third ring. Had it not been that Shirong needed to rest as well, they would have already entered the third ring a day ago.

Still, Lin Wu was not one to complain about someone that was basically power leveling him for free. He was liking this 'carry'. All Lin Wu had to do in exchange was bear the blows which he was quite used to now and could ignore without much problem and also to use the skills when he was directed to.

~Shing~

~Splatter~

~Drop~

Shirong just cut off the head of another beast that looked like a lizard that had scales with the texture of wood. He then stabbed the green Crystal spear into the beast to let it absorb the spirit qi for him. A second later, he felt the liquid spirit qi pouring into him and quickly absorbed it into his dantian.

Shirong was still a bit doubtful about the strange energy that flowed around his core. That was the reason why he was not absorbing the spirit qi directly into his core. He would gather it into his dantian and would then properly assimilate it when he went to rest.

This way he was able to sense for any abnormalities that may arise due to the strange energy. Though after five days, he was finally feeling that there was most likely no problem with his core.

~Sigh~

"Another day of hunting in the third ring should push me back to the peak stage of the Core condensation realm…" Shirong muttered to himself.

Another thing Shirong was doing during this time was to keep an eye on the communication Jade slip. He wanted to be alerted the moment the news about the messenger came and thus kept an eye on it. But now that five days had passed, and he had come this deeper, he was in a dilemma whether to return back to the town or not.

If the messenger really did come now, he would take at least two days to travel back, even at full speed. But if he did that he would also end up depleting a significant part of the spirit qi he had obtained. It would have been fine if he was still at the first ring, as returning would have at most taken a day.

He wouldn't be making much of a loss there either. The other side of his dilemma was that, if he crossed the third ring of the Millennium forest and entered the fourth, even if the messenger came, he wouldn't know as he would be beyond the maximum range of the jade slip.

This jade slip was a low quality one and thus could not communicate for that far off a distance with its maximum range being 500 kilometers. If Shirong had his previous one it would not have been a problem to communicate even at a distance of a 1000 kilometers, but that jade slip had been destroyed along with the spatial storage ring.

A lot of things had become problematic for him due to that incident, and he had never expected that a loss of a spatial storage treasure would inhibit him so much.

~Sigh~

"I need to make a decision soon, or there would be no turning back…" Shirong muttered to himself after thinking for a bit.

The sky was turning dark, and it would be night time soon. The noise of the beasts was only starting to get louder as the sun went down, bit by bit. It was as if the entire forest came alive at night and a cacophony of growls, howls and cries echoed.

Shirong soon found some shelter and chose to rest. He knew very well that the danger during the night time was much greater than the day time. While he had confidence in his strength, he knew better to err on the side of caution.

He assimilated all the spirit qi that he had obtained during the day and slept after that. He had already set up some protective and alarm formations around, so he wasn't as worried. The place where Shirong was resting currently was an old tree that had collapsed.

The bottom of its trunk was rather wide and hollow, making him able to comfortably sit inside. While Shirong had lived in luxury most of his life at the Ji clan, he was no foreigner to a life of a wandering cultivator. He had been to many missions before and had explored dangerous areas.

He didn't mind being tainted with dirt and water, and neither was his mind affected. The Ji clan wasn't one that would raise a flower in a green house, incredibly weak to the outed elements. No… they raised unyielding trees that would grow through mountains and shatter rocks with their roots.

Still, none of this applied to Lin Wu, and he was comfortably laying on the side of Shirong. The man had placed him on a folded piece of cloth that was rather soft and of a good quality. While the cloth and spear were spotlessly clean, Shirong himself was stained with blood and mud.

Lin Wu was getting bored and thus started playing with the map, checking out the areas, when he suddenly found something that caught his eye.

"Oh? What's this?"