The Frostfur Ape fled for several hundred meters and then stopped quite suddenly. Its panic was gone, and a smug, almost human expression had taken its place. It turned to face Li Yun and let out a loud cry.
"Screech!"
The answer came at once.
"Screech! Screech! Screech!"
More than a hundred cries echoed through the falling snow. Heads began to pop up from behind rocks, from under snowdrifts, and from among the nearby cliffs as one Frostfur Ape after another came out of hiding. There were over a hundred of them in total, and most were about the same size as the first one.
One beast, however, stood out immediately. It was nearly five meters tall, with broader shoulders, thicker limbs, and an aura that was clearly several times stronger than that of the apes around it. More than a dozen Frostfur Apes had gathered closely around this larger beast.
Li Yun’s eyes brightened at the sight. "A Commander-class Frost Beast."
His luck was not bad at all. He had only just entered the Frostbound Heavenly Range, yet he had already found one of the one hundred and eight Commander-class Frost Beasts.
A beast like this was worth only one hundred points, but more than eight hundred participants were competing for just one hundred and eight of them. On average, there was not even one Commander-class beast for every seven or eight people.
"Screech!"
The five-meter Frostfur Ape King let out a sudden roar. It bent down, grabbed a huge mass of snow, and quickly pressed it between its palms. In a moment the snow had become an enormous ball, and the Ape King swung its arm and hurled it at Li Yun.
The rest of the apes followed its lead immediately. Hundreds of hands moved at once as they scooped up snow, packed it tight, and threw it. In the blink of an eye, hundreds of snowballs filled the sky and came crashing toward Li Yun from every direction.
Li Yun’s expression stayed calm. "Petty tricks."
A wave of sword power spread out from him as he released his Sword Domain. The moment it appeared, the space around him seemed to fall completely under his control.
The snowballs had been flying fast enough to create violent sonic booms. Yet as soon as they crossed into his domain, they cracked apart as if they had struck an invisible wall. One snowball exploded, then another, and soon hundreds had shattered in quick succession.
Li Yun kept walking forward without slowing down. Inside the Sword Domain, not a single snowball could get within ten meters of him.
The sight only made the Frostfur Apes more agitated. The Ape King roared again and again, and the whole colony answered. They moved faster and made their snowballs larger, until some were the size of millstones. Still, nothing changed, and every attack broke apart the moment it entered Li Yun’s Sword Domain.
After a dozen or so breaths, fear finally spread through the beasts. The Frostfur Ape King gave another sharp cry, and the entire colony scattered at once. More than a hundred Frostfur Apes ran off in every direction.
Li Yun watched them for a moment and then shook his head.
"You threw thousands of snowballs at me, and now you want to leave?" he said. "Sword Control Art."
He opened his sword-nurturing gourd, and six thousand precious swords whistled into the air all at once. The swords immediately split into more than a hundred smaller sword formations, and each formation locked onto one of the fleeing apes before shooting after it.
Sword light flashed across the snowy wilderness. The ordinary Frostfur Apes fell one after another, and not one of them managed to escape.
Li Yun then turned to the Frostfur Ape King, and the Profound Origin Sword appeared in his hand. He did not use any complicated technique and simply swung once. A sharp streak of Sword Qi crossed the distance in an instant and cleanly separated the Ape King’s head from its body. Its enormous corpse crashed down into the snow.
Li Yun took a quick look at his Frosthunt Token.
"More than two hundred points," he said, and he calmly slid his sword back into its sheath.
Even the strongest beast in the whole colony had only had combat power somewhere between the perfection stage of the 2nd level of Spirit Manifestation Realm and the 3rd level of Spirit Manifestation Realm. At Li Yun’s current strength, an opponent like that was not worth taking seriously.
Just then, an earth-shaking roar erupted from somewhere nearby.
"ROAR!"
The sound shook the surrounding snowfields, and a terrifying aura rose into the sky like a pillar of smoke.
Li Yun turned his head at once. A few hundred meters away, a small snow-covered hill almost one hundred meters high suddenly split open. Snow and ice burst outward with a boom, and an enormous beast climbed out from under the shattered hill.
It was a Frostmane Lion, and its body stood nearly eighty meters tall. That size was not especially shocking for a beast at the Spirit Manifestation Realm, since there were plenty of demon beasts that were hundreds of meters tall.
What made this Frostmane Lion frightening was its aura rather than its size. Compared with the Frostfur Ape King that Li Yun had just killed, the difference was enormous, and the two were not even close to the same level.
The Frostmane Lion suddenly opened its massive jaws. Several cultivators nearby did not even have time to react before the beast bit down with a crunch. Blood sprayed across the snow as they were torn apart on the spot. One of them had reached the 3rd level of Spirit Manifestation Realm, yet he still died instantly from a single bite.
Screams quickly spread through the area.
"A Monarch-class Frost Beast," Li Yun said, and his gaze sharpened.
A Monarch-class beast was worth one thousand points. More importantly, there were only nine such creatures in the entire Frostbound Heavenly Range.
Li Yun moved without hesitation. He used Aurora Step, and his figure blurred as he shot toward the Frostmane Lion.
At almost the same moment, powerful auras burst out from several other directions. One rose in the east, another came from behind a distant ridge, and two more erupted from opposite sides of the snowy valley.
Each aura belonged to a powerful participant. Like Li Yun, they had all noticed the Monarch-class Frost Beast, and none of them intended to give up a thousand points without a fight.
Within moments, several powerful geniuses were closing in on the same spot. The Frostmane Lion lifted its head and roared at the sky, while killing intent and fighting spirit spread quickly across the surrounding snowfields.
The hunt had only just begun, yet the first real fight over prey was already about to break out.

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