After completing his first clean, efficient kill, Lin Jie beca like a precision killing machine in high-efficiency mode, rigorously executing the hunting plan he had rehearsed in his mind countless tis.
He exploited the brief confusion and information gap caused by the Slick-Skin Devil group's first mber going missing, repeating the sa tactic.
He constantly shifted his position, creating multiple deceptive sound sources in this dark forest by unheard-of ans—tossing pebbles and producing faint tallic scraping noises with fine threads.
Whenever a startled Slick-Skin Devil instinctively lunged from its perfect hiding place toward one of those false prey, it was t with a death kiss from the Serene Heart, its bullets tempered with Ghost Jellyfish neurotoxins and absolutely silent.
"Pfft."
The second Slick-Skin Devil, trying to slip between the narrow gap of two trees with its paper-thin body to attack a stone moved by Lin Jie’s thin thread to create a rubbing sound, exposed its spine and was struck precisely by a bullet.
"Pfft."
The third Slick-Skin Devil was lured by a convincingly imitated whistle of a forest night owl.
When it poked its indistinct head out from behind a towering rock, a bullet that had been waiting for a long ti fired from an extrely tricky angle and hit the fragile, elongated neck.
...
Lin Jie was like a master of illusions walking in the dark.
He used sound to build a death stage full of lethal traps for these arrogant predators.
This one-sided picking-off lasted for nearly an hour.
When Lin Jie fired the fifth special bullet laced with neurotoxin and successfully brought down another Slick-Skin Devil that tried to ambush him from the branch above his head, he finally stopped.
Not because he was tired, but because Lin Jie keenly sensed that the rules of the forest ga had changed.
The remaining Slick-Skin Devils finally realized sothing was wrong.
They no longer reacted to any single disturbance, and they stopped all independent probing hunting behaviors.
What followed was a cautious, deadly collective contraction.
Lin Jie could clearly see on his analyzer that the pointers representing spiritual signals were trembling faster and faster.
They finally realized that tonight they had encountered an extrely dangerous natural enemy, one who understood how to use their hunting instincts to conduct reverse hunting!
"This is trouble."
Lin Jie leaned against a large tree, his brow tightly furrowing.
His guerrilla tactics had lost effectiveness; next he would face the collective encirclent of the Slick-Skin Devil group, full of anger and vengeance!
He glanced at the analyzer in his hand; the pointers representing spiritual signals had, in a short ti, pointed to ten different directions, and the fluctuation frequency kept accelerating.
Lin Jie estimated the group’s size at no fewer than twenty individuals.
A head-on fight would be a one-way ticket to death.
He had to find a breakthrough before the encirclent closed completely.
Lin Jie’s brain raced again; he overlaid the topography map in his hand with the pointer directions on the analyzer in a life-or-death comparison.
Finally, his gaze locked on a steep slope to the southeast labeled "Rockfall Zone."
That spot was the weakest link in the encirclent’s spiritual signal, seemingly because the terrain was too rugged for effective concealnt, leaving only one Slick-Skin Devil stationed there.
That was his only way out!
Lin Jie packed away all his equipnt, gripped the Serene Heart tightly, then transford into a lithe leopard and charged toward that break point!
He no longer deliberately concealed his silhouette; instead, he pushed his speed to the limit of what he could reach.
He ran along the rugged mountain path, leaped between interwoven roots and vines, ears filled with the whooshing night wind and the scraping chase sounds behind him.
The Slick-Skin Devil guarding the slope noticed him, the high-speed target, at once.
It shifted from stealth into attack readiness.
It hid behind one of the jagged rocks in that rockfall area, waiting for Lin Jie to enter its optimal attack range so it could deliver a fatal blow.
This was a race of speed against death!
Lin Jie’s heart hamred wildly in his chest.
His lungs burned as if seared by flas, but he dared not slow down even a little, because he knew that if the pursuing group caught up, he would be torn to pieces in an instant.
"Closer... closer..."
"One hundred yards... eighty yards... fifty yards..."
Just before Lin Jie’s body was about to crash into that perilous rockfall area, he activated the ntal Staircase early, and his mind suddenly erupted into an intense clarity!
His eyes swept rapidly across the steep slope made up of dozens of huge boulders ahead.
Then he smiled.
He had found it.
He had found behind which rock that self-assuredly concealed "ghost" was hiding.
Among those dozens of weathered stones with moss-covered, cracked surfaces, only one rock cast no shadow.
Under tonight’s faint moonlight striking from a particular angle, every protruding rock threw a long or short shadow on its opposite side.
Only that mid-slope, two-person-tall granite boulder had a "clean" back.
The Slick-Skin Devil was pressed perfectly, seam-to-seam, against the shady side of that rock with its paper-thin body!
A near-artistic flawless camouflage!
Yet this perfection, in the eyes of Lin Jie—who had seen through countless tricks and details—beca an unmistakable flaw!
"There you are!"
A silent roar exploded in Lin Jie’s heart.
He charged at the shadowless rock with reckless montum!
He intended to use himself as the final bait!
The Slick-Skin Devil behind the rock didn’t expect its perfect camouflage to be exposed in an instant.
It also did not expect the prey to rush straight at it.
Just before Lin Jie’s body struck the rock, a thin, sowhat twisted black shape sprang out from behind the boulder like a tightly compressed spring being released!
Razor-sharp claws carved a deadly black arc in the dim moonlight, aiming straight for Lin Jie’s throat!
But what it saw was Lin Jie’s face bearing a sneer mingled with pity.
And the black muzzle already aid squarely at it.
A prid Sensation-Nullifying Bullet silently entered the mouth of the Slick-Skin Devil, which was wide open and ready to tear its prey, at a distance of less than five yards!
Its body froze, horrified to find that its mouth and entire head had suddenly lost all sensation.
It could feel its body still lunging forward from inertia, but it could no longer control its head to perform the "bite" action.
Its weapon had been forcibly switched off on the conceptual level just before the attack was executed!
This fatal delay and confusion caused by numbness gave Lin Jie a life-or-death counterattack opportunity!
His body dropped into an incredibly agile posture, then slid forward, passing between the long legs of the Slick-Skin Devil that had temporarily lost balance due to head numbness!
At the sa mont he slid past, the Serene Heart in his hand spit smoke again.
This ti, the bullet targeted the ankle joint that supported the Slick-Skin Devil’s entire body balance.
Two distinct fears of numbness descended upon the predator at this mont!
First it lost control of its head, then it lost sensation in its ankle!
This dual cognitive disarray at the neural level sent its whole body into collapse!
Its lanky body, having lost balance, tumbled down the slope like a puppet whose strings had been cut, rolling disgracefully into the area Lin Jie had prepared for it downhill.
On the ground of that area, Lin Jie had arranged a seemingly chaotic but actually lethal net using a "silk thread" stripped from a Slick-Skin Devil carcass.
Finally, after a futile, silent struggle, this Appalachian rail-ghost was humiliatingly bound by its own kind’s weapon in its own hunting ground.
Lin Jie stood up from the ground and brushed the dust from his clothes.
He walked step by step to the UMA that had already lost the ability to resist, its eyes wide with fear as it stared at him.
He raised the Serene Heart and pressed the muzzle to its forehead.
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