Chapter 5: Kings of the Forest
The core of the Star Dou Great Forest was a place of absolute, reverent silence.
Here, at the edge of the crystal-clear Lake of Life, ordinary Spirit Beasts did not dare to tread. The air itself was thick enough to suffocate a low-level Spirit Master, heavy with the combined auras of the forest's two undisputed kings.
Resting half-submerged in the tranquil water was a creature of myth. Its body was that of a massive, dark cyan python, thick enough to crush a fortress wall, but its head was that of a terrifying, majestic bull. This was Da Ming, the Tianqing Bull Python.
Sitting on the shoreline, idly chewing on a tree trunk like a toothpick, was his brother. Standing over a hundred meters tall when fully erect, covered in dark, granite-like muscle, was Er Ming, the Titan Great Ape. He was the pinnacle of physical strength on the Douluo Continent, a hundred-thousand-year beast whose very footsteps caused earthquakes.
For centuries, nothing had dared to challenge their territory.
Which was why Da Ming's massive bull head suddenly snapped up from the water, his cyan eyes narrowing in profound confusion.
"Brother," Da Ming's deep, telepathic voice echoed in Er Ming's mind. "Do you feel that?"
Er Ming stopped chewing on the tree. He stood up, his colossal frame casting a shadow over the lake. His golden eyes locked onto the southern tree line. He felt it. It wasn't the refined, natural Spirit Power of a high-level beast. It was wild, chaotic, and terrifyingly dense. It felt like a walking sun, burning with an ancient, primal rage.
And it was coming straight toward them, fast.
BOOM. A flock of thousand-year spirit birds violently scattered into the sky miles away.
BOOM.
The ground beneath Er Ming's feet shuddered. Whatever it was, it wasn't trying to sneak in. It was completely ignoring the territorial warnings of a hundred-thousand-year beast. It was charging blindly into the center of the world's most dangerous domain.
With an earth-shattering crash, the ancient trees at the edge of the lake violently splintered apart.
Er Ming let out a low, warning growl, expecting to see a rogue dragon or a desperate, mutated behemoth. Instead, as the dust cleared, the Titan Great Ape blinked in genuine shock.
Standing at the edge of the lake was another ape.
It was smaller than Er Ming—only standing about fifty feet tall—but its appearance was completely alien. It was covered in thick, dark fur, its face pushed out into a brutal, predatory snout. But what caught the kings' attention was the aura. The beast was surrounded by a blazing, golden-white outline of raw Ki, and its eyes were glowing, blood-red voids devoid of all reason.
"What kind of mutation is this?" Da Ming murmured, his massive coils shifting in the water. "It has the shape of a macaque, but the density of a true dragon."
Er Ming narrowed his eyes. As the king of all ape-type beasts, he felt a strange, infuriating challenge radiating from this intruder. He thumped his chest once—a sonic boom that shattered the rocks around him—warning the strange creature to bow or be destroyed.
The Oozaru did not bow.
Deep within the beast, the newly fused soul of Mame was entirely unconscious, completely submerged in the Great Ape's primal instincts. And a Saiyan's primal instinct, when faced with the strongest creature in the forest, was not to run.
It was to fight.
The Oozaru threw its head back toward the sky and let out a deafening, psychotic roar that tore the clouds apart. It beat its own chest, the sound mimicking a war drum, answering Er Ming's warning with a direct, unapologetic challenge.
Er Ming's golden eyes widened in disbelief. Did this fifty-foot runt really just challenge the Titan Great Ape to a fistfight?
Before Er Ming could even process the disrespect, the Oozaru vanished.
The ground where the beast had been standing exploded into a massive crater. Er Ming barely had time to cross his massive, granite-like arms in front of his chest before a fist coated in blazing golden Ki slammed into his guard.
CRACK!
The shockwave from the impact flattened the forest in a hundred-yard radius, whipping the calm Lake of Life into a violent tsunami.
Er Ming, the undisputed king of physical strength, was actually pushed back half a step. The Titan Great Ape looked down at his arms, feeling a genuine, stinging pain radiating from the impact zone.
"Incredible," Da Ming whispered from the lake, his tone shifting from confusion to awe. "Its physical force is entirely disproportionate to its size."
The Oozaru didn't stop. Driven by pure battle lust, it flipped backward off Er Ming's arms, opened its massive maw, and began gathering a blinding, concentrated sphere of red and gold energy. The air pressure around the lake instantly dropped as the Ki condensed.
Er Ming's disbelief vanished, replaced by a surge of territorial fury. The Titan Great Ape let out a roar that shook the very foundations of the Star Dou Great Forest. Black, gravitational Spirit Power flared around his massive fists as he stepped forward to meet the challenger, eager to crush this arrogant upstart into the dirt.
The clash of the titans had begun.
The Lake of Life boiled as the two titans clashed.
The Oozaru was a force of absolute, untamed destruction. It hurled itself at the Titan Great Ape with zero regard for its own safety, its fists cloaked in blazing golden Ki that left scorching trails in the humid air. It fought like a feral demon, biting, scratching, and unleashing devastating point-blank energy waves from its maw.
But Er Ming was not just a beast; he was a hundred-thousand-year king.
For the first few exchanges, Er Ming merely defended, genuinely curious about the limits of this strange, golden-flamed macaque. But as the Oozaru's energy began to violently spike, threatening to damage the sacred lake and the surrounding spirit herbs, Er Ming's patience ran out.
The Titan Great Ape let out a low, rumbling huff of annoyance.
As the Oozaru lunged forward, jaws unhinged to fire a concentrated beam of crimson and gold Ki, Er Ming's eyes flashed. The air around the smaller ape suddenly warped, growing impossibly heavy. Er Ming had activated his innate Gravity Control Domain.
The sheer, crushing pressure slammed the Oozaru into the earth, interrupting its attack. Before the feral Saiyan could break free of the gravitational hold, Er Ming stepped forward. With terrifying speed that defied his massive size, the Titan Great Ape brought a colossal, granite-like fist down squarely onto the top of the Oozaru's head.
It wasn't a lethal blow, but the force was perfectly measured to rattle the skull of a mountain.
BOOM.
The Oozaru's eyes rolled back. The blinding golden aura flickered wildly, like a candle caught in a hurricane, before instantly snuffing out. The deafening roars ceased, leaving only the echoing silence of the inner forest.
Er Ming pulled his fist back, expecting the strange beast to be embedded in the crater.
Instead, right before his golden eyes, the fifty-foot monster began to rapidly shrink. The thick, dark fur hissed and dissolved into the air like steam. The massive fangs receded, the muscles violently compressed, and the monstrous skeletal structure warped back into a humanoid shape.
Within seconds, the terrifying behemoth was gone.
Lying unconscious at the bottom of the crater, completely naked and covered in a mixture of mud and dried snake blood, was a small, eight-year-old human boy. His hair was a wild, striking mane of black, purple, and dark red, and curled securely around his waist was a long, furry brown monkey tail.
Da Ming's massive bull head lowered toward the crater, his deep cyan eyes studying the unconscious child.
"Well," the Tianqing Bull Python's telepathic voice echoed, rippling with profound intrigue. "This is new."
Er Ming grunted, scratching his massive chin in confusion. A human? A human child had just traded blows with him? He sniffed the air. The boy smelled like a human, but that tail... and the lingering, dormant energy inside him... it felt identical to a high-tier Spirit Beast.
Without a word, Da Ming exhaled a breath of cool, cyan mist over the crater. From the depths of the Lake of Life, a glowing, crystalline lotus floated to the surface. Using a gentle wave of Spirit Power, the great serpent extracted a few drops of the lotus's glowing nectar and guided it through the air, letting it fall onto the boy's bruised and battered chest.
Er Ming huffed dismissively, pointing a massive, granite-like finger at the destruction the boy had caused just moments ago.
"Yes, he is chaotic," Da Ming acknowledged, his massive bull head hovering just above the unconscious child in the crater. "But he is also incredibly strong. A foundation unlike anything I have ever witnessed." The great serpent's cyan eyes narrowed as he focused on the boy's chest. The physical wounds from the Ghost-Marked Viper and the clash with Er Ming were severe, but it was the internal state of the child that concerned Da Ming. The boy's meridians were practically boiling. The sheer volume of raw, explosive Ki that had forced the Oozaru transformation was now violently expanding and contracting inside his small, eight-year-old frame, threatening to tear his heart apart from the inside.
"His body is tearing itself apart trying to contain that golden energy," Da Ming stated, his deep voice vibrating the surface of the Lake of Life. "He needs to be stabilized, or his heart will rupture."
With a gentle pulse of his vast Spirit Power, Da Ming reached into the depths of the sacred lake. A cluster of faint, glowing blue lotuses floated to the surface—Gentle Water Lotuses, known for their soothing, restorative properties, perfect for cooling overtaxed meridians.
Da Ming crushed the lotuses with his telekinesis, extracting a sphere of pure, glowing blue nectar. He guided it through the air and let it wash over Mame's chest.
For a normal human child, or even a low-level Spirit Master, that concentrated dose would have instantly stabilized their core and put them into a deep, healing sleep.
For Mame, the nectar hissed as it touched his skin, evaporating instantly like a drop of water on a hot iron stove. The boy's body violently rejected the gentle healing, his muscles spasming as the golden aura under his skin flared angrily, consuming the blue energy in a fraction of a second.
Er Ming let out a low, confused grunt.
Da Ming's eyes widened in genuine astonishment. "Impossible. His biology is actively devouring the Spirit Energy. It is not just healing; it is aggressively feeding."
The Tianqing Bull Python did not hesitate. He reached deeper into the lake's hidden reserves. This time, he pulled up three stalks of Crimson Yang Grass—a violently potent herb that most Spirit Masters wouldn't dare consume without months of preparation.
Da Ming crushed the herbs, mixing them with the water of the Lake of Life to dilute the burning heat, and forced the mixture into the boy's slightly parted lips.
Mame's back arched off the ground. A terrifying heat radiated from his skin, turning the mud beneath him to cracked clay. The Crimson Yang Grass clashed with the golden Ki inside him, fighting for dominance. But within seconds, the boy's biology adapted. The golden energy swallowed the violent heat of the grass, integrating it, making his aura burn even brighter for a moment before demanding more.
"He is a bottomless pit," Da Ming murmured, entirely fascinated. "His body is a furnace. It breaks down and assimilates energy at a rate that defies logic."
Er Ming watched, scratching his massive chin, as his brother began pulling up herb after herb from the edges of the sacred lake.
Da Ming used Star-Moon Blossoms to soothe the boy's violently expanding mindscape. He used Iron-Bone Bamboo sap to reinforce his skeletal structure against the crushing weight of his own power. He used profound, thousand-year medicinal roots that would have caused any normal human to explode from Spirit Power overload.
Herb after herb, the boy absorbed them all. His Saiyan biology—the legendary Zenkai boost—was actively using the near-death experience and the massive influx of high-tier Spirit Energy to permanently rewrite his physical limits. His muscles grew denser, his bones harder, and his dormant Spirit Power finally began to break through the microscopic bottleneck that had held him back at Level 3.
It wasn't until Da Ming had nearly depleted a small patch of his most precious, fast-acting medicinal herbs that the terrifying heat radiating from the boy finally began to cool.
The violent spasming stopped. The wild, unruly mane of black, purple, and red hair settled into the mud. His breathing, previously ragged and desperate, smoothed out into a deep, steady rhythm. The brown monkey tail curled securely around his waist, entirely at peace.
Da Ming let out a long, heavy sigh, his massive coils relaxing in the water.
"He is stable," Da Ming announced, sounding both relieved and profoundly weary. "But I have never seen a vessel so greedy for energy. He consumed enough medicinal power to push a normal Spirit Master to the Soul King realm, yet his internal reserves still feel... empty. Like a dry ocean waiting to be filled."
Er Ming grunted again, pointing a massive finger at the sleeping child. So why save him? He's a monster.
Da Ming's cyan eyes turned toward the distant horizon, looking far past the borders of the Star Dou Great Forest toward human civilization.
"Xiao Wu is out there," Da Ming murmured, his voice softening with worry. "She chose to walk amongst them, disguised as one of them. The human world is cruel, Er Ming. Full of deceit and powerful Spirit Masters who would kill her if they discovered her true identity. We cannot leave this forest to protect her."
Da Ming looked back down at the boy with the monkey tail.
"But perhaps... he can. If we nurture him, if we earn his loyalty, this child could be the perfect guardian for Xiao Wu in the human realm. A human who fights with the heart of a King Beast."