In the deep forest, the white wolf became far more conscious of his dangerous surroundings. He moved slowly and deliberately, using all of his heightened senses to scout carefully in every direction. A few kilometers in, the wolf spotted a demonic rabbit chewing on thick roots that it held tightly in its front paws. The creature had extremely long ears that pointed toward the sky, crimson eyes, and a fluffy tail. At just five meters long, it was a surprisingly massive variant of its kind. The rabbit was constantly looking around for threats, but the wolf, with his far superior sight, could see it clearly from two kilometers away.
"Let's start with you," the wolf thought before unleashing his unbelievable speed.
When he was still one kilometer away, the rabbit's long ears twitched, and it immediately shot away as if it had been storing all its vital energy in its legs. Its explosive speed surprised the wolf for a moment, allowing the prey to gain some distance. The rabbit was highly intelligent; it chose a narrow escape route that favored smaller body types and severely hindered the movement of large predators. These thick obstacles slowed the wolf down, but they weren't enough to stop his momentum. The white wolf plowed violently through the trees and heavy rocks using pure brute strength until he caught up to the rabbit, plunging his front right claws deep into its fat stomach.
The rabbit let out a piercing shriek that made the wolf's ears ring and stop working for a few seconds. The dying rabbit looked at a dark hole in the ground with a longing gaze. It had been preparing to accept death, but then it remembered that it had accidentally led this terrible predator straight back to its home where its family lived. The look in its crimson eyes changed to one of great sorrow, knowing its entire family would soon follow it in death. In that dark moment, the rabbit felt a burning anger toward this creature that hunted others for no apparent reason, as it wasn't even large enough to fill a predator's mouth. What it didn't know was that the wolf was not hunting for food at all, but for raw cultivation materials.
The wolf began circulating his cultivation technique, and white qi quickly started leaving the rabbit's body and entering his own. The energy flowed directly into his source core before spreading throughout his body. The wolf circulated the qi and directed it into his bones, purifying and strengthening them further. The rabbit lost weight rapidly, and soon nothing was left but a hollow skeleton covered in fur and the fading echoes of its final screams.
The wolf sat down on the forest floor, bracing himself for the agonizing head pain that usually came after absorbing another being's qi, but the pain never came. The wolf was highly pleased by this discovery. When he had absorbed the human cultivator from the Huang family, he had experienced great, near-fatal torment. The wolf hypothesized that the previous pain was due to the massive difference in their cultivation levels. In some of the books he had secretly read, it was written that a being's soul naturally becomes stronger with higher cultivation. The wolf's new theory was that if he were to absorb a creature with a stronger soul than his own, he would experience great pain and possibly even die from the backlash. This was the exact reason he had chosen to come back to the Endless Forest, where he could hunt weaker creatures of his own level without any hindrance.
The wolf also felt that the cultivation obtained by stealing qi from other living beings was a bit unstable, so he decided to stabilize its quality through sheer quantity. This is why he used the qi he absorbed from the demonic rabbit to cultivate diligently, as though he were still in the standard Bone-Forging Realm. In this vast forest, there were countless powerful beings, making it the perfect playground for the white wolf to hunt for his cultivation materials.