Kazigare Dark Forest

This world has five places that were considered forbidden places where the places were weird and seemed illogical which make not every living being could live there.

Kazigare Dark Forest was one such place. Based on an old history of how the Zanuki first came to Hargan after being a nomadic clan around a few hundred years ago.

It was said a demonic clan was living in the Kazigare area due to the demonic energy there. It was said that the Demon God bestowed them the second demonic realm for them to live. However, those demons were not living peacefully and Hargan Empire at that time which was currently expanding its territory wanted Kazigare to be included into its territory.

The emperor asked the Zanuki who was popular as the demon hunter clan to purge all the demons and make Kazigare their territory. That's how the Zanuki main family started to settle down in one place while some of them still wanted to travel around.

The Demons were purged and driven out from Hargan. Some accounts even said that none of the Demons survived since the Zanuki were so violent when meeting with Demons.

"But why did the original Ares work with the Demon King?" Ares still couldn't find the answer.

There was no problem with his family other than the overprotectiveness. But his mother was kind of suspicious. His father? Even more suspicious since nothing is known about him.

Ares had try to track at least a clue about his paternal family but he found nothing. Even no one knew his father's real age or whether his name was even real or not.

"Is that even possible?" Ares muttered.

Ares had started to have these kind of questions since he met Tuah and became the new master of the Tree of Life since Tuah said he was the rightful heir. The details of it, Tuah never explained anything to him.

Ares was currently gearing himself up with weapons and protective equipment since he would start his first hunting inside the Dark Forest today.

"Good morning young master," the guards guarding the entrance of the Dark Forest greeted Ares.

"Can I enter now?" Ares asked after receiving their greetings.

"Yes of course. May you have a pleasant hunting"

Walking into the forest, Ares looked at the special navigator given to him. The navigator would help him to wander inside the forest without getting lost.

At first, Ares wanted to take Tuah along but he could sense Ron started to become strange, maybe because the way Ares treated Tuah was different from how he treated the Moran twins. Since he could guess that his grandpa might already set his eyes on Tuah, Ares decided its better for Tuah to remain in Herza City for the time being.

As for Tuah's interrogation, he managed to confirm that Johnny was only a low-level subordinate that didn't know much and luckily Tuah managed to find a special curse put on Johnny if he tried to reveal more about his master.

Johnny almost died but Tuah managed to retain his life andJohnny was critically injured internally thus nothing much could be interrogated from him. Because of that Ares just asked Tuah to remain by Johnny's side until he died naturally.

Beep beep

The navigator in Ares's hands started beeping, indicating there was at least one monster nearby. Ares decided to climb a big tree to get a better view of his surroundings.

Not far from him, a group of black demonic ants, the size of a bike each, were moving in a straight line into a cave which looked like an ant nest but on a much larger scale.

"Our first target has finally show up," Ares already decided that the ants might be the best way to start warming up.

Since those ants were moving in groups, attacking them head-on alone wasn't a good idea. Prof Joseph requested him not to damage the monster's body too much by burning them with fires or lightning.

That was why Ares couldn't fight them with his utmost abilities. 

Since he couldn't burn the ants, he just burn the trees around their nest to lure the ants out.

When the trees were burning, a gush of blackish and purplish smoke was formed and it was demonic gas.

"How interesting. You can get demonic gas just by burning the tree," Ares said while taking a few tree branches and leaves before putting them into his spatial bracelet.

The more specimen he could get the better since he was also kind of curious about how the forest could become the second demonic realm.

Krrik Kreek

The ants started making sounds to each other as if warning each other of danger. However, their Queen was nowhere to be seen despite a lot of the ants have already come out of their nest due to the rising temperature.

"What if I add more chaos and make them more chaotic? Will they leave the nest faster?"

With that Ares took out a few large war hammers and made them float in the air. With the surrounding filled with fire and the numbers of ants too much to count, Ares thought he could just sneak attack them by smashing their head using the hammers.

Ant monsters usually had a hard exoskeleton that was capable of defending them from being attacked by sharp weapons like swords and daggers. Thus it's easier to just smash their head, especially the area between their big eyes because it was the softest area on an ant's body.

Ares did just that. His hammers violently struck down every ant as much as possible. The other ants couldn't detect where their attacker was and they tried to just attack the floating hammers since that's the only thing they saw hurting their friends.

Kwukk kreek

Unpleasant shouts started to echo throughout the area and more ants were moving faster and faster trying to find ways to escape from the fire and mysterious massacre.

Before long they managed to find a narrow path Ares left for them to flee. Ares purposely didn't burn that particular area so the ants could move away from the nest using it.

More and more ants moved through the path and some of them even bring along white pupas on top of their heads. Those were the eggs laid by their Queen and not long after that, the Queen showed up.

The big red ant the size of a car was striking among the black ants that were one size smaller than it.

The Queen shrieked as if ordering the other ants to quickly moving. The fire slowly started to engulf parts of the nest's outer layer.

Sensing that the ants might try to move away all its eggs, Ares decided to fire arrows to drive away the ants quickly. 

Taking the eggs was easier than a live demonic ant. Plus the fetus inside the egg was considered alive and Prof Joseph might be elated if he could get a living specimen.

The ants became more and more disorganized. The Queen started to run frantically and it even crushed the other ants that disrupt its movement.

The ants moved away from their nest to another place to build a new nest since the current one was currently engulfed in fire. Those ants despite having become mutated due to the demonic energy weren't resistant to fire.

Most insects-like monsters had a weakness with fire thus using fire was the best way to defeat them or drive them out.

Ares purposely didn't let the nest area burned down, so he could take as many eggs as he could. 

After he finished collecting the ants' corpses that weren't burned or destroyed along with the eggs. Ares decided to move on to another monster.

Rustle

Ares suddenly heard a rustling sound. However, it wasn't on the ground but instead from above him. Looking upwards Ares felt like he wanted to curse out loud.

**************************

There was a purplish liquid dripping from the monster's body. The black and white body was wriggling on the ground before it became motionless.

A few moments ago, Ares saw a huge grostegue mouth just above his head, oozing out greenish liquid with a pungent smell that made people dizzy.

Instinctively Ares quickly slashed the monsters using his Katana and it was dead. Just like that.

Ares looked at the corpse with mixed feelings. It was a ruined specimen but he still feel he needed to take it so he just took all the liquid leaking and oozing out from its body. 

At first, he thought it was poison but when he used the syringe to take the sample, the metal syringe corroded and became rusty after coming into contact with the liquid.

"Acid? Acidic worm but why is a worm on a tree?" 

Ares was confused since he didn't know what type of monster he just killed and even after flipping through the list he brought with him, he didn't find the answer. There were indeed worm-like monsters inside the Dark Forest but their description and pictures didn't match the one in front of him.

He took some pictures of the corpse to compare and still couldn't find the answer.

Thus he just used a box made from mithril, a really expensive metal to scoop and secure the acidic liquid from the monster. He had no other equipment other than the metal box that he was confident could properly store the acidic liquid.

"I have to ask Prof Joseph to at least give me some of his notes about rare monsters as compensation for all this hard work I'm doing," Ares muttered after he stored the corpse inside his spatial bracelet.

Even if the corpse was kind of destroyed but most of its internal organs were intact thus it might still be of use somehow.

The reason why he wanted to learn how to dissect monsters was that he came out with a theory that humans could learn from monsters and applied it to themselves. The idea came out during his discussion with Kara to perfect the mana card they created.

He suddenly thought of how monsters' meat and blood usually all contain mana including their bones and teeth which is different from humans since humans who are capable of using mana usually only focus their mana on their hearts before making it flow all over their body.

Most of the mana was stored inside the heart. But what if humans could store mana in their organs just like monsters? Problems like mana depletion could be resolved and monsters never experience mana depletion. 

That's why Ares wanted to know how monsters utilize their mana and to do that he needed to know how to dissect them properly. 

The only thing he had ever dissect is a frog, during his biology class in high school in his previous life. In this life as Ares, he had tried to dissect a lizard-like monster once but the corpse looked like it was randomly butchered instead.

Tuah said he could teach him about monsters but he didn't know why mana utilization in monsters and humans were different.

After walking for a while, Ares encountered a weird-looking black cacoon hanging below one of the tree branches. The tree trunk and branch along with the leaves were all black thus if Ares didn't look properly, he might have missed the cacoon.

All the trees inside the Dark Forest were black, some plants that have flowers would have grey or dark purplish flowers instead of black.

Ares stared at the cacoon before a conjuncture dawned on him, 'Caterpillar pupa. Isn't a caterpillar basically a worm living on trees before it turned into a pupa?'

The monster he previously killed might be a caterpillar and the list given to him only describe a Demonic Butterfly the size of a cat that spreads poisonous dust on its wings.

The pupa in front of him had almost the same size as the worm he previously killed. He immediately cut off the white strings tying the pupa to the tree branch and put the pupa in his spatial bracelet.

Prof Joseph might felt elated with just the pupa and the ants' eggs. 

Sensing that he has spent a few hours inside the forest, he decided to went home and decided to come again after a few weeks.

However, his back journey wasn't as smooth as his starting journey since a monster suddenly chase after him out of nowhere like an angry bull.

He was just taking a few samples of puddle water on the ground of the forest before suddenly he found a fluffy furry black ball on the ground. 

He wasn't sure what kind of monster it was thus he didn't touch it recklessly despite it looking harmless. The fluffy furry ball was all black and he couldn't discern where were the eyes and mouth.

However, when he was checking the monster register, suddenly the ground trembled as if there was a minor earthquake suddenly happened.

Ares just managed to take the black ball's picture before a huge black one-horned rabbit appeared not far from him. Looked at him with a pair of red fiery eyes.

Thus when the rabbit came at him, Ares just swing one of his hammers towards the rabbit's body, making it to sway to the side.

Taking advantage, Ares started running away since one horned rabbit was a middle-tier monster because they could breathe out fire.

A gush of fire almost burned his back but Ares continued running. While running he started to think about countermeasures and what he should do.

Sensing that he might get injured, Ares decided to just use magic that wouldn't cause much damage to the monster, water.

However, there was no water source around him at the moment and it wasn't enough to just use his drinking water since those amount of water couldn't affect the monster which was as big as a car the slightest.

Using the navigator he quickly ran towards a medium size lake. The lake was black and bubbles kept on popping on top of the water surface as if something was going on below the water.

However, when he saw the monster was getting closer to him, Ares decided to just use it and thought about it later.

Using the water spell he had learned from Tuah, wide strings of water started floating around Ares before they whipped thebone horned rabbit over and over again which caused some injuries. 

However, the monster became more enraged. It acted more aggressively. It tried to approach Ares but out of nowhere the roots of the nearby trees suddenly elongated and plunge towards the monster and tied it up. 

The roots were so sturdy that the monster was instantly restricted.

"What?" Ares was confused.

However, he didn't have to think too far when he felt a warm sensation on his left arm.

'The Tree of Life fragments. So this is the power but how?'

Ares quickly formed a huge water bubble and put it to surround the monster's head to make it drown.

After 10 minutes had passed, the monster had remained motionless for a few minutes indicating it might had die due to the lack of air and incapable of breathing properly due to the water surrounding its head.

Ares tried to cut the tree roots using a dagger but the roots were too sturdy that his dagger was even stuck into the roots he had stabbed.

"If I focus on thinking about releasing the monster, will the roots follow my instruction?" Ares thought.

Tuah still didn't get the chance to properly thought Ares thus Ares had to try and experiment for himself for the time being.

Focusing his mind to control the roots to release the monster, it didn't take long for the roots to slowly moved and made the monster fall to the ground.

After a few moments, the roots completely reverted to normal.

However, Ares continues standing there in deep thought.

"This power is entirely different from magic," that's the only thing Ares could feel.

He didn't know what it is but he knew it was something different.

Sensing that the sun would set in about two hours, Ares quickly went out of the Dark Forest. He didn't want to spend his night inside the forest since more vicious monsters would emerge during the pitch-black night. 

[Master, the Shadows with me informed that your grandpa had started putting a few Shadows to monitor Henova as per your request. Is it really fine to let them be?]

Suddenly a water string appear in front of Ares. It was Tuah's ability to communicate with him despite being far away from each other.

"Just let them be"

Ares never really worried since he knew his grandpa wouldn't do anything drastic.