Chapter 102: Self-Rescue from a Plunge Through the Air!

The warm, pale light of the teleportation circle flashed.

A line of towering giants stepped out from within the formation.

At their head was a giant with a wounded eye, covered by a leather eyepatch.

“At last, we’re back. Nothing beats the air at home,” one of the giants in the group sighed.

“Exactly. The human world is far too filthy and chaotic,” another chimed in.

The others, hearing this, began to chatter among themselves as well.

“Good thing we got this batch of materials. We won’t need to go out again for years.”

“The next trip should be someone else’s turn. We won’t have to suffer this anymore, dealing with those sly human merchants.”

The one-eyed giant cut in. “There’s still one more errand. After we get back to the tribe and unload the goods, Yabo, take a few men and hunt fifty meat sheep. Send them to that human boy.”

Yabo gave a muffled assent.

At this, the giants all hurried to insist that Yabo choose anyone but them. None of them wanted to make another trip.

As they walked and bantered, venting the pressure of recent days, a short figure suddenly came into view.

He wore a courier’s uniform, marked with the words of a delivery company, and looked to be a parcel runner. Behind him, a yak-like beast was in hot pursuit, while the courier clutched a cardboard box and ran for his life.

Seeing this, the one-eyed giant gestured to Yabo. “Go stop the blue goat beast.”

Yabo strode between man and beast, suddenly thrust out a hand, seized the horns, and brought the creature to a halt.

Only then was the sweat-soaked courier finally saved.

The one-eyed giant stepped forward and asked, “Human! Why are you in our homeland?”

The courier was on the verge of tears. “Who’d want to come to a place like this? If I wasn’t delivering a package, you couldn’t pay me enough to come.”

“I waited more than ten minutes at the pickup address and never saw the recipient. You don’t even have a delivery station here, so I had no choice but to go in and ask around for someone who knew where the recipient was.”

“Who knew I’d run into this yak, chasing me the whole time. It nearly gored me to death,” he complained bitterly.

Yabo, still gripping the horns, explained haltingly, “That’s not a yak. It’s a blue goat beast. It chased you because it wanted to play with you.”

As he spoke, Yabo pinned the blue goat beast to the ground and rubbed its belly with a huge hand.

The beast let out a blissful snort.

The courier wore a look of utter disbelief. “That thing clearly looks like a cow. How can it be called a blue goat beast?”

“As for playing with it,” he said with a complicated expression, “big guy, only people your size could play with it, right?”

The one-eyed giant listened for a while, then said to the courier, “Give me the parcel. I’ll take it to the recipient. We only have one tribe here, so we’ll figure out who it belongs to.”

The courier’s face lit up. “That’s wonderful.”

He placed the box on the giant’s palm. “This one doesn’t use a real name, only an online handle. It’s called the Cold and Ruthless Wind-Hunting Envoy. Make sure you get that right.”

Yabo froze and looked at the one-eyed giant. “That’s Su’s online name.”

The one-eyed giant frowned and asked the courier, “What did that fellow buy?”

“All our deliveries are confidential,” the courier said, scratching his head. “But it ought to be some kind of material, right? I picked it up from the trading hall.”

The one-eyed giant’s face changed at once. “That little bastard... could it be...”

He flung the box to the giant beside him and turned at once, hurrying back toward the tribe.

The others followed suit. Yabo played with the blue goat beast for a while longer before finally getting up and leaving.

The courier stopped him, looking awkward. “Um... this delivery is cash on delivery, you see...”

Yabo looked at the courier’s hand gesture for money and fell into deep thought.

...

Wang Chen’s mind raced as he searched for a way to save himself.

Though he had a resurrection point, smashing into the ground with a slap and turning into a meat pancake was, however one said it, still terribly painful.

He quickly weighed all his means and began considering his options.

“What if I drink a couple of potions and fire off continuous Surging Dragon Strikes, using the recoil to slow my descent?”

After thinking it over, he rejected the idea.

Even if the potion let him refresh the skill’s cooldown, Surging Dragon Strike was still a single-shot technique. So long as there was a few-second gap between casts, the water bullets couldn’t remain linked together, and he would not get enough counterforce.

“Then what if I stack every shield I can and just let myself fall?”

He estimated that if he chugged potions now and set up a lightning barrier around himself, he could probably stack four or five layers.

But could four or five layers withstand the kinetic force of a fall from such a height?

Wang Chen imagined the moment he struck the ground: five lightning barriers, fifteen arcs in all, flashing and shattering at once, while he was flattened into a slightly charred meat pancake amid a burst of sparks and lightning.

And then he quietly ruled out that idea as well.

“Truly, one regrets not having read enough when the need arises. If only I’d stocked up on more Wind-Walking Spell Scrolls, I might even have been able to fly back to the summit,” Wang Chen lamented inwardly.

Suddenly, his eyes lit up. “Wait. This should work.”

“Even if it doesn’t, I’ll try anything, however desperate!”

Though Wang Chen had undergone a fierce battle of wills in his mind, only a brief moment had passed in reality before he came up with a means of self-rescue.

A flash appeared between his fingers, and Forest Breeze appeared in his grasp. He swung it toward the blurred cliff face ahead.

A point of light shot from the tip of the staff and embedded itself far off in the rock wall, whereupon a crystalline thread of light stretched out between the staff and the cliff.

When Wang Chen released the point of light, his body had still been on the same horizontal plane as it.

By the time the light thread formed, however, he was already below it, and the thread was pulled taut, swinging him toward the cliff face.

This was precisely why the immobilization spell came with its own built-in enhancement. If he had truly tried to save himself with an ordinary rope, leaving aside whether any rope could hold, the instant it went taut his hand would have been torn clean off.

Having stopped his downward plunge, Wang Chen still did not dare relax. He was now hurtling straight toward the cliff; if he took the impact with his bare body, he would likely be smashed flat against the rock like a fly.

He still needed skills.

He tucked Forest Breeze under his right arm and freed his left hand to cast.

Mist gathered in his palm. “Nature Totem!”

Threads of water surged from his palm and coalesced before him into a horizontal column of water.

This column had, of course, not been reversed. It shimmered with a gentle, healing aura, and Wang Chen intended to use it as a cushion.

The cliff face was upon him in the blink of an eye, and the water column in front of him was the first thing to meet it, standing across the rock wall.

Then Wang Chen plunged bodily into the water column, as if diving into the deep end of a pool.

Bubbles of all sizes rose around him, water splashed everywhere, and the kinetic force bearing down on him was softened and dispersed.

Whatever force remained unbuffered was absorbed by the deformation of the life-tree armor beneath his clothes.

He dispelled the water column, gasping for fresh air, and sighed at the luck of surviving by the skin of his teeth.