41 - A single shot

Su Tao then went back into the forest without getting anything from the market. There was no use getting a larger sled since it was a forest and anything bigger than the current one would be far too hard to move around not only in size, but also weight.

Weirdly enough, there was no one following him this time. As such, he made sure to leave no physical trails behind since it was possible that he was being tracked based on the trail he left behind by a skilled tracker.

Normal people would find it impossible to see these details, but a skilled tracker could find him if he left behind clues carelessly

But he moved on after making sure to not leave a trail behind.

What he decided to do from now on was to pelt the beasts and take their valuable parts and discard the meat. This would give less value per beast, but it would allow him to collect more at once.

As he got to a place deep in the forest, he climbed up into a tree and went to sleep.

When he woke up, he got to work. He had decided that the basic lightning refinement technique was too slow, so he decided to make his own.

He had looked through the entire second floor of the martial arts library already. He was sure that there was no higher level refinement technique. After all, there were not many who cultivated the power of lightning.

With his level of control, he figured that it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to make a technique to refine it faster. After all, all these techniques were made by people and were just refined by other people to have less flaws.

With this in mind, he started with the basic lightning refining technique as the base, and he experimented with different ways of manipulating Qi to better refine his lightning inner energy.

After another fifteen days, he was quite happy with the result. He had no clue just how crazy his feat just now was compared to other people making a technique.

He had managed to bring the speed at which the lightning refining technique refined at up to a speed equivalent to the flowing essence technique. However, he had not actually made much progress in his refining endeavors.

This was because he had finally reached the limit of what he could do in the low tier. Any further and he would break through to the middle tier.

His inner energy was now comparable to a top middle tier in quality and purity, and it had reached the high tier in terms of density.

He then went out and hunted beasts again.

Within a few hours, he had a pile of more than sixty dead high tier beasts and a couple peak tiers as well. He was completely clearing out this area of the forest of high level beasts, so he naturally had to kill a few peak tiers as well, and he just used the power of his right eye for that.

He then took a beast out from the pile and stabbed into it with his knife. He then proceeded to pelt the beast and took all the valuable parts of its body before throwing the rest to the side.

He did this for every single beast that he killed.

It took him the rest of the day to finish this, and by the time he was done, he was quite tired.

He then put the pelts and resources all on the sled and dragged it to another part of the forest before going to sleep in one of the trees.

When he woke up, he did the exact same thing, gathering the same amount of sixty beasts and pelting them.

After that, he did that the next day as well.

Then, he went back to the City of Silver Sparrow once again. This time, when people saw the massive pile of pelts, they were even more astonished.

"That's?! That has to be almost two hundred pelts! How did he manage to kill so many beasts so quickly?!" Someone from the crowd yelled out.

When Su Tao got to the shop where he sold his beasts previously, the attendee nearly fell over when he saw the number of beast pelts on Su Tao's sled. It was clear that he ran out of room for beast bodies and had to take the precious parts of them instead.

Ignoring the attendee's shock, Su Tao spoke. "There are one hundred seventy high tier beasts as well as ten peak tier beasts that I killed. I took their most valuable parts and their pelts. You can determine the value, and I will wait while you do so."

The attendee nearly fainted from shock when he heard this. Only a peak tier one star silver rank could possibly hope to kill this many beasts and pelt them in only half a month.

Just how had a kid managed to do it? Even if he was the best archer in the Su family, he couldn't kill so many while only being a low tier one star silver rank.

The attendee would surely have a heart attack if he knew that Su Tao had killed them all in just three days.

About an hour later, the attendee and another person from within the shop had sifted through all the pelts and resources and determined their value.

"Because each beast only has the pelt and resources, some of the value is lost. However, it is still worth about half of the original value of the beast.

To save some time, the value of all these beasts is about eighty gold pieces."

Su Tao was surprised with this price, but he gladly accepted it. He didn't expect so much of the value to be shaved off, but he was still happy with this amount. He gladly accepted the money under the greedy eyes of others.

The others were able to contain their greed before because Su Tao had to be quite strong for him to be able to kill all these beasts, but now that they heard the amount of money that Su Tao held on him, they could no longer contain themselves.

Many of them followed him to the martial arts library and watched him walk in with greedy eyes.

However, they were flabbergasted when they saw Su Tao take out a hundred gold pieces all at once just for a single book.

All of them became angry, because a book with a skill was useless to them if it wasn't suited to them, and by now everybody knew that Su Tao used lightning to kill the beasts, which meant he would get a lightning skill that nobody here could use.

Everyone that was previously planning on taking action left in an angry huff. It wasn't worth it to attack and rob him when he now only had about fifteen gold pieces. Even if they took the book and tried to sell it, they would be hunted down by the family for profiting off of their skill.

This meant that although he had such a high level skill, it was useless to them, and unless they could learn it themselves, there was no point in having it. This meant that the only actual value of the items Su Tao had with him was the fifteen gold pieces he had.

Even though that was a large amount for them, it was proven by the beasts he brought back that Su Tao was strong enough to defend himself, and they would likely end up dying instead without a big group.

The peak tier attendee for the martial arts library was even more surprised than they were, because he knew of the flowing bolt arrow skill. It was extremely strong and deserving of its reputation as a limit peak tier rank four skill. If it was any bit better, it would be a rank five skill, and perhaps it could already be compared to one.

Su Tao then went back to the market and bought some water and lightning elemental resources. The amount he bought was enough to make any middle tier one star silver rank go broke.

He spent all fifteen gold pieces on high quality resources on the level of the water moon lotus and the piece of charred wood. They were extremely expensive, and he only got both of them because the lightning one was cheaper due to the lack of lightning cultivators.

The water elemental resource was ten gold pieces while the lightning resource was five gold pieces.

With these in his bag, he went back into the forest once again, leaving the market in total chaos.

People still hadn't settled down from how fast he broke through into the silver rank, and now he had once again thrown stones in the lake, agitating everyone once again with this stunning record.

It was certain that there had never before been a low tier one star silver rank with a record of killing one hundred seventy high tier rank four beasts and ten peak tier rank four beasts in only half a month.

This news quickly spread through the entire city, bringing chaos to it. After all, there were still many many people that believed that Su Tao was guilty and wanted to kill him.

Weirdly enough, no one followed him this time as he left the city.

As such, he just went into a new part of the forest once again. By now there were several areas that Su Tao had singlehandedly cleared of strong beasts.

However, the forest was simply far too massive, and it didn't effect the actual forest itself in the slightest. More powerful beasts just moved in later to fill those spots and the cycle of repopulation happened.

As Su Tao went to the new part of the forest, he climbed up into a tree like he always did, and he scanned around. Nobody was there, so he opened up the book in his bag and read it.

Not only was this his first peak tier skill, it was also a limit peak tier skill, so he had no clue how hard to memorize it would be.

As such, he put breaking through until after he memorized it, just to be safe.

After about ten days, he had managed to fully memorize the skill. It was far more complicated than he imagined. However, he didn't know that flowing bolt arrow was one of the best rank four skills that existed. It was many times more complicated than other skills of the same level.

As for how the Su family got it, that was unknown.

But regardless of its value, Su Tao had memorized it in ten days, which nobody had managed to do before.

After reading it, Su Tao started to practice with one of the extra arrows he had bought that didn't go into his quiver.

On his first try, the arrow ended up burned and scorched.

However, on his second try, it managed to halfway work before it failed.

On the third try, he succeeded in forming the technique, but it was unstable.

On his fourth try, he succeeded in forming it, and it was completely stable. Of course, this was merely the first level of the technique, which was meant for those at the low tier. Otherwise, he certainly wouldn't have grasped it so fast.

Without hesitation, Su Tao nocked the arrow onto his bow and shot it out.

As the arrow flew through the air, it looked like it had four lines running down all the sides of it, and these lines were yellow. The arrow went through the air extremely quickly, with these four lines seeming to pull the arrow through the air, going extremely fast as well as reducing the drag from the air around it.

On the tip of the arrow was where the four lines converged, forming a sharp point on the tip of the arrowhead.

Then, this arrow, at seemingly imperceptible speeds, shot straight into a high tier rank four beast.

It then pierced right through the inner energy barrier and killed it in one shot.

The power was almost one and a half times what it was before!