"Oh, damn it..."
Shen Zuo froze, staring straight into the hawk's eyes with an intensity he'd never seen from it before. He didn't step out of his hiding spot right away, instead pulling back inside and sitting down again. He raised his hand steadily and used the drawing technique to pull the new Phantom and the Rock Mutation Phantom back into his Aether Field, where he could protect and control them more easily.
Very quietly, he poked his head out of the observation gap to check whether the bird had left...
But the surprise was jarring.
The hawk, its eyes glowing blue, was standing right in front of him, the distance between them no more than a few fingers' width. Shen Zuo couldn't move... that same heavy sensation that had paralyzed him before returned, but even sharper this time.
Before he could process what was happening, the bird began breaking through the branches in front of it, forcing its way inside the tree itself, closing in on Shen Zuo slowly.
"Why are you acting like some gangster right now?" Shen Zuo asked, staring at the hawk, suddenly noticing he could move his mouth this time, unlike before, then continued mockingly:
"And why are you shaking me down like this? Planning to eat another finger?"
The bird shook its head clearly in denial, then extended a wing forward in a way that suggested it was asking for something specific.
Shen Zuo sighed in irritation and muttered:
"Great... even the birds are bullying me now. Wasn't it enough that the old men already wrecked my nerves with their talking? Now you're sending in birds to finish the job? Are you here to rob me too? Damn it..."
Then he turned his head slightly, muttering with muffled sarcasm:
"Next you'll be asking me to sign some slavery contract..."
"Alright, I clearly saw plenty of Phantoms coming out of beast bodies..." Shen Zuo said sharply, staring straight into the hawk's eyes, then continued:
"Why do you specifically need to take mine? What makes my Phantoms so different from the others?"
But the bird simply raised its wing slightly in a gesture of indifference, as though the matter didn't concern it, or as though it had no answer to give at all.
Then, without any hesitation, it began closing in further... deliberately slow... every step carrying a clear threat, its glowing blue eyes still burning, its gaze sharp as knives.
Shen Zuo didn't move. He wasn't sure whether he should get ready to fight... or if this was just a show of force.
But it didn't look promising; every movement from the bird screamed one single message:
"Give me what I want... and I'll leave you your strength."
Shen Zuo pulled the pink Phantom from his belt, his eyes never leaving the bird, now only a few steps away. He calmly untied the Phantom's restraints, then extended it toward the bird without saying a word. The Phantom entered the hawk's body instantly, as though it had been waiting for this from the very start.
At that moment, the worst possibilities began spinning through Shen Zuo's mind, imagining the cruelest ways this insolent creature might decide to kill him.
But the hawk didn't give him time to think it through, closing in with heavy, calculated steps, then suddenly lunging, not at his neck or his heart, but at his foot. It bit off a chunk of flesh about the size of a finger, then pulled back, staring at him as if to say:
"That's the price of hesitation."
Shen Zuo clenched his teeth, biting down on the pain without screaming. Blood dripped slowly from his foot, but his gaze remained steady.
He thought to himself:
"Fine... if I'm going to die, I'll make sure I eat you first."
Once the bird pulled away, Shen Zuo sat down on the branch, pressing his hand against the wound until the bleeding slowed. He opened his small pouch, pulled out a soft cloth wrap and a bitter herbal medicine. He applied the medicine to the wound, wrapped his foot tightly, then took a deep breath, trying to steady his breathing and ignore the pain.
Night had fully settled in by now, the sky choked with smoke and ash from the battles, but an unexpected calm had settled over everything. He ate something simple, a piece of dried meat and a few roots he'd stashed at the observation post, then sat in a meditative position and began drawing energy, channeling it into his Aether Field.
His movements were precisely calculated; no light, no sound, as little movement as possible. All he did was slowly and steadily raise his rate of energy absorption, making use of every moment to build up whatever strength he could.
And the night passed...
No confrontations, no screams or nearby roars, even the tremors he'd grown used to over the past stretch of time had disappeared.
And when the gray light of dawn began to show, he couldn't hold back his curiosity any longer. He moved quietly toward the observation gap, pushed a few branches aside, and looked down...
Then he scowled.
A few scattered corpses of Level One or Level Two monkeys, some of them mutilated in strange ways.
And on one of the nearby branches, the bird stood there again, that blue-eyed hawk, looking at the monkey corpses as though... visibly preening at times, laughing to itself in its own cold way.
"Arrogant old bird, huh?"
Shen Zuo thought, staring at the guardian bird, watching its slow pecking at the monkey corpses as though it were an artist signing his own painting.
Then he quietly retreated back into his nest at the observation post.
Shen Zuo thought to himself as he pumped his energy into the new Phantom:
"I just hope this place doesn't get destroyed..."
At first, nothing obvious happened, no fire, no lightning, not even a glow of energy... the Phantom seemed dormant, which honestly felt like too much of a good thing.
But as he increased his focus and raised the flow of energy, he started feeling something different.
A faint ache... familiar.
His severed toe, the one the hawk had torn off, began to pulse. Something was moving inside it, then the first signs of regeneration appeared.
The wound began to heal... his old wounds along his arms slowly closing up too.
"A healing Phantom... huh?"
Shen Zuo smiled bitterly, watching the regeneration happen right in front of him.
"Clearly your doing, grandpa Zhou Ji."
Then he laughed mockingly, leaning back:
"This is straight-up author favoritism!"
Then Shen Zuo wondered again:
"Can I focus the healing on just one part of my body?"
He closed his eyes slightly and directed the flow of energy specifically toward his severed toe, trying to isolate the rest of his body.
The result didn't take long... he felt a hot tingling sensation concentrated only in that spot.
And sure enough, the toe began growing back a little faster than before, everything precisely directed.
"Hmm... the healing's slightly faster, but..."
He opened his eyes, looking at the toe, only a small part of which had grown back.
"The energy's being consumed way too fast, I won't even reach a third of the missing toe before my whole reserve runs out... I'll need more than three sessions to fully heal it."
He let out a deep sigh, then muttered quietly:
"Well... still better than living without a toe."
And so the entire day passed with nothing notable happening, except a long, silent battle between him and his severed toe.
Shen Zuo repeated the process with tedious precision: half an hour pumping energy until it fully ran out... then half an hour sitting still, recovering it all over again.
With every cycle, the toe grew back a little more... flesh, then bone, then skin, until it finally returned to how it was, though with a strange feeling to it, like a grafted-on limb.
By the time he finished with his toe, barely any of the day remained, so he moved straight into treating his wounded foot.
This time, focusing wasn't as easy; the wound was wider, and the energy wasn't quite enough to cover it fully.
But despite the exhaustion, he kept going.
Every pulse of energy crept beneath his torn skin, slowly pushing the healing forward...
And between each attempt, he
found himself staring at the orange sky through the leaves, waiting for night to fall, or maybe... for the bird to come back once more.