Primordial Expanse: I have the Strongest Talent! - Chapter 117

Chapter 117: Drawing near
With his theory of there actually being a pack of beasts killing adventurers and travellers in this forest, Alex made sure his sword didn’t leave his hand at any time.

With the advantage of numbers now stacked against him, he didn’t want to take any chances and get sneak attacked by a group of beasts and end up as the next victim.

He knew he couldn’t underestimate them as well, as they clearly had some skills in hiding and staying out of sight.

But they still weren’t smart enough to cover their tracks, otherwise Alex would end up like the mercenaries — clueless and probably dead soon enough.

‘Where could these beasts be hiding then? The trail of blood ended at the food of the tree, but there’s no branches sticking out of it until at least 50 metres up, no ordinary beast could climb such a thing unless it was-‘

While considering his options, Alex suddenly stopped dead on his tracks and looked like he had some sort of brain wave.

‘Unless they have appendages like humans. I only know of one species like that — monkeys!’

The moment he thought about this idea, it was like a floodgate opened in his mind.

‘Those handprints I saw earlier!’

Alex followed the trail back to where he dismissed those handprints, and took a closer look at them.

‘Aha! Yes!’

When his eyes drew close, he spotted the same type of fur he had seen dotted across the dead branches and some tree bark earlier.

‘Those mercenaries must have thought the same thing as me, that these handprints were the result of the victim clawing at the ground and nearby environment to get away from their attacker. But no, we were both wrong! It’s actually monkey type beasts that caused this!’

Alex was reinvigorated with energy as he finally figured out the clues to what type of beast it was that caused these mysterious deaths and disappearances, but that left him in a new type of predicament.

He looked up towards the canopy, and only saw darkness.

In the dead of night, he couldn’t see anything above 70 metres in height, everything above that was faded into darkness.

And his spatial perception only stretched for 15 metres around himself so that was even less helpful.

He could try to launch himself off the ground and jump up a couple hundred metres until he reached the canopy, but that would just create a ruckus and alert any living being within miles of his presence.

Assuming the beasts were like chimpanzees and made their habitat high up in the canopies of the trees, they could be anywhere in this forest right now, but Alex had a good starting point.

The tree where the trail ended.

The pack of beasts had clearly used this particular tree to drag their victim up to their usual habitat.

So considering all of the other options were crossed out, Alex was forced to take the long route.

‘This is going to be a long night…’

He had to climb the tree himself, making as little noise as possible.

Alex took off his boots and stretched his feet a little — he’d need them to be in their best condition considering the trees in this place were abnormally tall, reaching up to 500 metres at their peak.

***

Three hours later, 400 metres off the ground.

“Huff… Huff…” Alex took in some deep breaths as the exhaustion of the endeavour up the tree was taking its toll on him.

He didn’t have the dexterity of the monkey type beasts so he was forced to dig his hands and feet into the bark of the tree to make footholds for himself, which was quite tiring considering the bark was as tough as the skin of an Ordinary class E- rank beast.

‘What the hell is up with these trees?? All this time I’ve been searching for these abnormal beasts, but these trees are clearly the abnormal ones in this forest…’

By now, Alex had already reaffirmed that this was the right decision, otherwise he would have just given up and made his way back down.

Around half way up the tree, he spotted some blood once again, so the beasts had clearly stopped carrying the corpse and instead opted to drag it up, as the blood trailed upwards along three, until the trail thinned up until the point where there was none anymore.

It wasn’t like when Alex followed the blood trail to the base of this very tree — no, it was more like the body they were dragging had run out of blood entirely…

It was from this that Alex knew he made the right move of following the trail up the tree, but he hated himself for it at the same time.

It was the most boring and exhausting thing he had done during his time in the Primordial Expanse, and that was quite something, considering he had literally spent days walking through an empty desert before he fell into this godforsaken place.

‘Finally!’

After another gruelling half an hour of climbing, Alex finally reached the top of the tree, which also happened to be the tallest tree for miles, and took a good glance around him.

There were clear signs that the beasts were here as well at some point, as some branches had been munched on, and others had been disfigured from them jumping from branch to branch.

‘They headed off in this direction.’

Alex searched in a circle around the whole canopy of the tree until he found the spot with the most deformed branches, where the monkeys had clearly used it to jump from this tree to the next.

With this approach, Alex followed their tracks into the next tree, where he carried on the same process as before and carried on…

And on…

And on…

Even more hours passed and Alex was still doing the same thing — jumping from one tree to another, looking for the spot with the most deformed branches, rinse and repeat.

He had covered at least 15 kilometres with this process.

‘Wait!’

Until eventually, he spotted some movement nearby.