"Stop trying to get her on your side, Patty. She knows how to balance the game between you and me." Scotty said with frustration in every single one of his words.
"..."
Patty gave Scotty a cold glance before ignoring his presence and instead turning his head to look at the two twins who had mysteriously appeared. After confirming that everything was ready, Patty signaled Miessy to release the rogue immortal cultivators so they could begin the third test.
Without hesitation, Miessy lifted her arms into the sky and allowed her beautiful star tattoos to once again take over the sky. With hundreds of blue stars in the night sky, they formed dozens of small constellations that had a similar appearance to humans.
After creating her Sky Map, Miessy lowered her right arm until it formed a 90-degree angle with the ground. As soon as her right arm was in its place, the dozens of small constellations of rogue immortal cultivators seemed to have been imbrewed with life.
In less than a second, the stars that made up the constellations fell out of the Star Map and crashed into the soft ground, and quickly reformed into the rogue immortal cultivators who had dazed looks in their eyes. After regaining their consciousness, all the rogue immortal cultivators regained their memory of the trials and looked around their surroundings with curiosity and caution.
"Wait, this isn't the Branch Forest. This is the Endless Forest. We are in the inescapable Endless Forest!"
It didn't take long before one of the older rogue immortal cultivators' pupils contracted as they recognized that they weren't inside anywhere in the Green Branch Forest. Even though the aged rogue immortal cultivator had been alive for nearly 140 years, he had never dared to enter the Endless Forest.
However, he couldn't stop his younger self from being curious about the Endless Forest and its mysteries, so he frequently visited the edges of the Endless Forest that connected to the Branch Forest. Even from afar, he could tell that the Endless Forest held more dangers than the tame Branch Forest.
The mere atmosphere inside the Endless Forest was laced with hidden oppression and madness. Simply staring into the forest's depths gave him a headache for days as he saw things he didn't think were possible.
On his first day, he saw a small rabbit eat a six feet tall lion alive while licking its two front teeth with satisfaction. But, what struck fear in his heart the most was that he saw clear intelligence on a human level in the rabbit's eyes when he accidentally met its gaze.
He couldn't believe what he saw back then and even suspected that he had seen a demon. But after the years passed, he began to realize that what he witnessed in his youth had a minimal chance of being a demon.
If it had been a demon, he would not have been able to escape with his life even if he had been in the Branch Forest. Even a newborn demon had the nearly unspeakable amount of power to slaughter everything in its path.
Only rogue immortal cultivators who had reached the Crystal Spine realm or a martial artist who had reached the Martial Grandmaster realm could even compete with a newborn. And once a demon surpassed its newborn stage, only immortals could handle demons.
To have not only escaped with his body and life intact showed that the creature he saw before wasn't a demon but something else entirely. Even when years passed by and he returned to the exact location he had seen the rabbit, he quickly realized that the entire Endless Forest seemed to have changed.
The forest seemed to have changed several times every time he visited the edge of the Endless Forest, giving him a hint at why it was frequently called the Inescapable Forest. Recalling all his memories from his youth, the old man felt his heart racing rapidly as if trying to escape his body.
Hearing someone scream that they were in the Endless Forest sent a terrifying chill down the spines of all the rogue immortal cultivators as they used every means possible to try and identify their location. Very quickly, other rogue immortal cultivators came to the terrifying conclusion that they weren't inside the Branch Forest like the immortals had promised but the evil Endless Forest.
Watching the rogue immortal cultivators realize the depths of their situation, Patty, Scotty, and Miessy all looked at the rogue immortal cultivators with cold, indifferent eyes.
"This is the location of the third test. As I mentioned earlier, you will have to hunt sentient plants to collect their cores. Don't be a fool and underestimate any of the plants, animals, bugs, or anything inside this forest since it's more likely they will kill you than the reverse."
"After you have found a sentient plant and successfully killed it, all you need to do is stab it with your chosen weapons and allow it to absorb them. Once the weapon lets out a golden glow, that means the absorption has been complete, and you have gained one point."
"To have successfully passed this test, you need to be in the top ten ranked based on the number of points that everyone has collected in a week. Does everyone understand what they need to do?" Patty said calmly as he carefully explained the process that each rogue immortal cultivator needed to follow to collect a plant core successfully.
After finishing his speech, Patty noticed that all the rogue immortal cultivators had nervous faces, and their lack of confidence in their abilities began to show. Compared to how many rogue immortal cultivators thought they could survive this challenge when they were under the impression they would be in the Branch Forest, almost none of them kept those thoughts.
The only thing passing through everyone's heads wasn't to successfully pass this trial but ways to survive not only the dangerous creatures in the forest but also the other rogue immortal cultivators.
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