The ’playful’ Cat roared again, a sound that now had strange echoes in the dense air of the platinum ring. Each step it took toward Zhao sent massive vibrations through the ground in this new environnt.
Zhao maintained his desperate flight, but now struggled against the growing pressure of mana.
Behind him, the Giant Bear Cat accelerated, its body also gradually adapting to the new territory. But the powerful vibrations it sent through the ground were impossible to hide.
And sothing had noticed them.
The ground trembled with a different rhythm.
These weren’t the heavy steps of the Playful Cat... this was sothing erging from below, multiple presences moving beneath the surface.
Zhao felt the change in mana before seeing it. Energy networks activating, underground communication systems lighting up like a giant neural network.
The response was almost imdiate, like disturbing a sleeping giant that had sensors scattered across miles of territory. The very earth seed to co alive, awakening to deal with the intrusion.
"Local inhabitants," he murmured, comprehension and terror mixing in his voice.
The ground beneath the Playful Cat opened.
Massive tentacles, thick as common tree trunks, erged from the surface like plant serpents awakening from deep sleep.
But these weren’t the Carrion Sprouts he had encountered in the golden ring. These were sothing evolved, refined, perfected by evolutionary pressure.
Platinum Network Sprouts.
"The scavengers beca predators," Zhao whispered, fascinated despite the danger.
The tentacles moved with greater intelligence, not just as reactive plants but as patient hunters waiting in their traps.
They coiled around the Playful Cat’s paws before the creature could react, and when the feline tried to jump to escape, it realized that those annoying vines that always erged from the earth were for the first ti stronger than it was.
What had been an apex predator in the golden rings was suddenly reduced to prey in this more powerful ecosystem. The hierarchy that had seed absolute for the cat was revealed to be rely local.
The beast roared, but it was no longer the sound of a confident bully. It was the cry of prey realizing too late that it had entered the territory of sothing more dangerous than itself.
The struggle that followed was brutally unequal.
The Cat was fast, strong, and had all the experience of a third golden ring predator. But the Platinum Sprouts operated on a completely different level and hunted in a huge group.
More tentacles erged with each second, creating an increasingly dense network around the trapped creature.
"They really work as a network," Zhao realized, observing from a safe distance in the heights while activating his silent flight.
In the distance, barely visible now through the saturated air, rose structures that made the previous trees look like dwarfs.
It seed there were very few now, in much more cleared spaces.
But now he could see there was sothing much more complex than the simple distribution of new space: These were assemblies of Golden Noses that had evolved in symbiosis with the Platinum Sprouts.
The massive "trees", now taller and thicker, had hundreds of Platinum Sprouts connected like an extended root system. They shared energy, information, resources. The Playful Cat wasn’t being hunted by a single plant; it was being buried as fertilizer for an entire ecosystem.
The scale of cooperation was staggering. Each tree represented not just a single evolved creature, but a central processing unit for hundreds of subsidiary organisms. The entire visible landscape was revealed to be a single, vast distributed intelligence for a single "tree".
The feline’s roars beca more desperate as more tentacles joined the constrictive embrace. Its strength, which had been dominant in the golden ring, was insufficient against the combined power of hundreds of plant predators working in unison.
"It wasn’t fast or strong enough to escape," Zhao murmured, feeling a strange blend of pity and relief.
The cat that had pursued him with implacable determination was now being dragged inexorably toward what appeared to be a communal mouth, a convergence of tentacles that opened and closed with a sowhat hypnotic digestive rhythm.
Soon it would be nothing more than mana nutrients for the vast organism that had claid it.
Zhao took advantage of the distraction to put distance between himself and the feeding site.
His flight was slightly heavier in the dense air, each silent beat of his wings generating more energy than he was accustod to controlling.
"And this is just the beginning," he reminded himself, thinking of the two platinum rings he still had to cross before reaching the territory where the king might be.
Fortunately, the sky seed less populated than the ground. The sporadic white camouflaged creatures that inhabited the airspace of the first platinum ring apparently hadn’t been interested in a small traveler moving almost invisibly with his stealth and a miserable mana signature by local standards.
Maybe he was well hidden, or maybe they simply didn’t consider sothing of his "quality" as a threat or worthy prey?
♢♢♢♢
Zhao would realize his assumption was wrong.
The first platinum ring stretched before him like a bigger than expected ocean of platinum nightmare sprouts.
He had flown for hours, each kiloter more exhausting than the last. The dense air had beco worse, and the mana accumulated in his lungs created a constant choking sensation that was beginning to require small doses of dicine to alleviate and move freely.
"This is taking longer than expected," he murmured, observing the horizon.
The scale was overwhelming. The golden rings, which he had thought were enormous, seed like private gardens compared to this. The platinum territory extended in all directions like its own entire world.
If this was only the first of three platinum rings, how vast was the territory he still had to cross? How many more impossible challenges lay ahead?
And the creatures...
Zhao had managed to avoid terrestrial predators by staying in the air, but soon realized that the sky wasn’t the all safe refuge he had hoped for.
A network of Flying Cats patrolled the airspace in the "fence" where the density of "trees" was greater to pass to the next ring. It seed that the dense mana in the vicinity of Platinum 2 could feed more trees so they were no longer so scarce.
The problem with the fence were its inhabitants that moved constantly flying between the trees.
"Not exactly flyers," he corrected himself, observing their movent patterns. "Gliders."
The felines had developed extensive mbranes between their extremities, allowing them to glide enormous distances between the massive trees. But what really made them dangerous was their constant attention, their eyes continuously scanning the air for their favorite prey.
Drill Moths.
The ecosystem beca clear when Zhao saw the first moth being intercepted.
The creature was the size of a small house, with wings that generated camouflage similar to his Raptor’s scales and an extendable drill that protruded from its head like a living spear. It had erged from the right side of the territory, flying from a completely different ecosystem separated by a giant lake that stretched as far as the eye could see.
Born from Golden Wood Larvae, expelled from the earth by Deep Nightmares and expelled from the sky by Fire Wyverns in the skies of that place.
They found their only viable food source drilling the enormous trunks of the Platinum Noses.
The moths were refugees in their own ecosystem, creatures displaced by forces too effective against them to resist. Their entire existence had beco a desperate search for resources that could help them evolve without attracting the attention of other predators.
"That lake," Zhao murmured, analyzing its enormity. "Begins in gold ring 2 on the right side of Yano’s triangle and occupies a third of the territory."
The geography was simple if one took the fundantal divisions as reference. The world was thought to be divided into four by the two great chasms, and Yano occupied a quarter, one of the pieces of that division. The lake occupying a third of that space was so massive it completely redefined the ecology of the region.
The moth tried to reach one of the now lush massive "trees," its drill spinning with accumulated energy. Zhao could see its objective: the center of the trunk, where mana concentrated like "liquid sap." But before it could get close, three Flying Cats launched from different directions.
The way the Platinum Cats, 5 tis larger, tore it apart was spectacular and brutal.
The moth fought valiantly, its drill cutting one of them, but the cats had perfected this hunt. They worked in coordination, one on each wing while dominating and separating the creature together.
Each cat knew exactly what role to play. The moth, despite its size and weapons, never had a real chance.
When it was over, the cats threw the remains toward the base of the tree, and at the top they were rewarded with small dense mana fruits that detached like paynt for their services.
"Total symbiosis," Zhao realized. "The trees now pay the cats to protect them and the sprouts share food with the tree."
The 3 creatures that were previously fighting to live now lived in harmony against the moths.
The problem was that, from a distance, Zhao probably looked exactly like a camouflaged moth until they were close.
His size wasn’t similar, his flight had a different pattern, but the cats, as he had experienced, would hunt anything smaller than them that moved... and his direction of travel led him directly toward the fence of massive trees.
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