Chapter 135: The Griffin

In the wild, even with the female estuarine crocodiles guarding them, fewer than two percent of the hatchlings survive to adulthood.

But with Lu Chen’s guidance, the situation would be entirely different now.

It was easy to predict that the estuarine crocodile population would soon explode. That was precisely why Lu Chen was so eager to explore the alternate dimension.

As their numbers grew, he would have to open up a larger territory for his subjects to inhabit. Otherwise, once the land reached its carrying capacity, war might erupt within the population over living space and resources.

As Lu Chen pondered this, he suddenly caught a faint scent of sulfur drifting through the air.

The discovery stirred his curiosity. After a moment’s thought, he changed direction and flew toward the source of the smell.

A little over fifty kilometers later, Lu Chen sensed that something seemed to be watching him.

He immediately turned and surveyed his surroundings.

Yet within a radius of more than a thousand meters, there was no sign of any living creature.

This did not surprise him. After becoming a sixth-order ferocious beast, his eyesight had improved several times over, allowing him to see several kilometers into the distance at most.

But compared with certain birds of prey, he was still far inferior.

Their eyes contained millions of photoreceptor cells, enabling them to spot prey more than ten kilometers away with ease.

And the vision of raptors that had undergone evolutionary mutations was even more astonishing.

Lu Chen paid no particular attention to this. On the contrary, he remained perfectly calm.

His instinctive sense of danger had not issued any warning, which meant that the ferocious beast lurking in the shadows was most likely no match for him.

All he had to do was wait patiently, continue suppressing his aura, and pretend to be harmless… waiting for the hidden hunter to come to him.

As Mr. Lu Xun once said: the most formidable hunters often appear in the guise of prey.

Sure enough, several minutes later, Lu Chen heard a faint tremor in the sky.

The prey he had been waiting for had finally appeared.

“Chirp… chirp…”

A piercing cry rang out from the sky several kilometers away.

Moments later, several enormous silhouettes emerged.

Under the sunlight, their feathers shone like gold, glittering with dazzling, captivating hues.

They had the heads and sharp beaks of eagles, massive bodies resembling lions, and four legs. A pair of broad wings rose from their backs.

In short, they looked like some bizarre hybrid born from the union of a lion and an eagle after an enthusiastic bout of applause.

Lu Chen, however, found them strangely familiar. They closely resembled the griffins of Western legends from his previous life.

After flying closer, the creatures did not attack at once. Instead, they circled Lu Chen at high speed.

“Hiss… hiss…”

Lu Chen let out a terrified cry, fear glimmering in his beastly eyes.

Then he manipulated the Earth Swamp and rapidly descended toward the lower airspace.

Sure enough, this performance led the birds to a mistaken conclusion: the enormous creature seemed to be afraid of them.

After the griffins cried out several times, two of them broke formation and shot toward him at tremendous speed.

Lu Chen hurriedly released the Black Mud Swamp, covering his body in a thick layer of hardened mud armor.

Sizzle…

The two griffins descended headfirst, their sharp talons scraping against the mud armor and throwing off showers of sparks.

Seeing his subordinates launch their attack, the eyes of the griffin leader filled with doubt.

Throughout the entire exchange, the four-legged beast had offered no resistance whatsoever. Instead, it had continued dropping toward the ground.

Perhaps I was being overly suspicious, the griffin leader thought. This creature was merely large in size and seemed to pose no threat at all.

If the prey fell into the jungle, the griffins would lose their advantage in speed, and it might escape.

After hesitating for a moment, the griffin leader finally ordered an all-out attack.

At once, cries filled the sky as violent winds began to howl.

Crackle…

When the griffin leader rushed close, it suddenly opened its beak, sending arcs of pale-blue electricity flashing outward.

At last, they had entered the trap.

A trace of smugness flashed through Lu Chen’s beastly eyes as he watched the creatures attack.

He had not refrained from fighting because he feared them.

The main problem was that, against flying creatures in the air—griffins counted as birds of prey, didn’t they?—he had no advantage in speed whatsoever.

If these creatures missed their first strike, they would simply flap their wings and flee into the distance.

Even if Lu Chen released compressed energy bombs, he had no confidence that he could kill them all.

To wipe out the entire flock, he could only pretend to be harmless at first.

The birds had no idea that, as they attacked, the black, oily mud covering the reptilian body was continuously dispersing into the surrounding air.

In the end, it formed a faint cloud of black dust that completely enveloped the space within a radius of over a thousand cubic meters.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The next second, it was as though countless tiny bombs had detonated at once.

The entire sky erupted with deafening explosions.

“Chirp! Chirp!”

The griffins caught in the blast let out one anguished scream after another.

Feathers whirled through the air, blood mist scattered in every direction, and mangled bodies began plummeting from the sky.

However, the largest griffin—the leader—had not been killed by the explosions. After dropping dozens of meters, it once again beat its wings and staggered away in an attempt to escape.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

With a flicker of thought from Lu Chen, a gigantic claw formed from the Black Mud Swamp appeared and seized the creature.

“Crackle…”

The griffin leader struggled violently, unleashing flashes of lightning and thunder from its beak.

But the claw seemed to be made of the hardest rock in existence, leaving it utterly unable to break free.

Even the lightning on which the griffin leader relied for offense was completely ineffective.

Then another claw appeared and clamped down on the griffin’s wing.

Crack…

With a dull, heavy sound, the griffin, whose wingspan exceeded ten meters, was torn in half in midair.

After a few mournful cries, it fell completely silent.

As the claws of black swamp mud withdrew, Lu Chen opened his mouth and swallowed the flesh.

“Prehistoric griffin. Provides 7,893 energy points.”

The griffin leader weighed roughly a ton. By calculation, every half-kilogram of its flesh contained seven energy points, which was more or less comparable to the other ferocious beasts in the alternate dimension.

After swallowing the entire creature, Lu Chen was thoroughly full.

He did not waste the flesh of the remaining griffins, storing all of it inside his inner space.

As expected, the moment it sensed the scent of blood and flesh, the prehistoric demon-devouring tree began to stir. One slender, flexible root after another crawled toward the carcass of a griffin.

The roots clung to the flesh like the tentacles of an octopus.

Then the branches and main trunk tore themselves free from the soil.

Like creeping vines, they slowly shifted across the ground before taking root once more in the flesh and beginning to grow.

What the hell… what kind of monster have I been raising?

Seeing this, Lu Chen once again considered moving the demon-devouring sapling outside.

If it continued growing, who knew what kind of trouble it might cause?

But when he thought of the psychic wood core that provided tens of thousands of energy points at a time, he felt reluctant to give it up. In the end, he decided to observe it for a while longer.

After resting briefly, he flew back into the sky.

He traveled another dozen or so kilometers forward, and the sulfurous odor grew increasingly intense.

He could even see a vast gray-white cloud of mist spreading across the sky ahead.

Could this place, like the alternate dimension inside Mount Tiannan, also be shrouded in layer upon layer of dense fog?