Of course, the Rotten Vale is indeed an extraordinarily great place for the New World, but for Logan at this moment, it was a bit unbearable.
The stench of rot had almost taken on physical form, forcing him to open the protective membrane inside his eyes so he wouldn't be smoked into tears.
Although the price was slightly weakened vision, in this already intricate and dim abyssal ravine, vision itself was greatly limited, so this slight weakening hardly mattered.
Only his sense of smell couldn't be helped; he still needed to breathe.
Rotting meat, the sourness of fermented tree roots, and the rancid fishy reek of spoiled conches and barnacles mixed together—one sniff, and it was gut-wrenchingly sour.
Of course, it's not that the Rotten Vale is full of disgusting things. Some monster corpses that have only just fallen into the Rotten Vale, after a short fermentation period under the special climate here, if you strip away the outer rot, the meat inside can be quite delicious.
Some large barnacles growing in the depths—if you ignore the strips of carrion hanging outside—the tender flesh within can even have a special wine-like aroma.
In short, setting appearance aside, in the Rotten Vale you can still find some decent food.
The only question before Logan now was whether, for a bit of curiosity, he should continue deeper.
It's not that he'd lost Kushala Daora in this intricate environment.
Given Kushala Daora's current state—unable to control its energy—he only needed to follow the energy traces it left behind to track it all the way down.
It was just that he found it hard to endure turning himself stinky.
"Forget it, I'm already here."
With that mindset, Logan forced himself to bear the stench and began pursuing along a broad roadway.
As for why he didn't activate the flame body… although there was no such thing as a marsh-gas explosion here, heating up a place already reeking like this—
Just imagining it was terrifying!
As the elevation grew lower and lower, heading down all the way, Logan suddenly discovered that he was actually walking along an incomparably wide snake path.
Yes, a snake path!
A passage formed over long years by the leftover bones of an ancient Dalamadur!
It is said that the Rotten Vale and the Coral Highlands were created by Shara Ishvalda atop a pile of Dalamadur corpses, and among them the most crucial was the corpse of an ancient Dalamadur whose predicted body length exceeded 2 000 meters.
You should know that, as the Dalamadur closest to the forbidden, its average body length is only about 450 m, whereas the ancient Dalamadur is fully 5 times that of an ordinary Dalamadur.
In his previous life, in the game, he had only felt that this snake path was large, but because it needed to serve the game, it didn't leave too strong an impression.
But now, in terms of Logan's height and length, he was still just a tiny thing within this snake path, and the curved snake ribs more than 30 m long on both sides had not greatly fractured with the passage of years; instead, like pillars holding up the heavens, they propped up the Coral Highlands platform above.
With such might and such a body size, could this really be a creature that could occur in nature?
Logan didn't know.
But thinking it through, the neighbor of the New World—the embryonic continent that would later be named the Guiding Lands by the Research Commission—derived from the corpse of a gigantic Zorah Magdaros.
Perhaps, in a certain sense, these super-giant Elder Dragons are the very cornerstones of the world.
With reverence in his heart, Logan continued deeper.
At this moment, a rumbling sound came.
Hearing this sound, Logan's eyes lit up, and he immediately turned his head to look toward the top of the passage.
Very soon, as the sound drew closer, a black-and-white "tire," using this long downhill stretch, rolled down at high speed.
Radobaan, an oddity among Brute Wyverns, a relative of the Uragaan of the Elder's Recess!
As a closely related species, it shares with the Uragaan the habit of curling into a ball and using itself as a tire to move at high speed.
Those white substances on its body are the remaining bone fragments of various monsters in the Rotten Vale.
The surface of the Radobaan can secrete a kind of heavy oil that tightly adheres the bones carpeting the upper layers of the Rotten Vale to its body; not only can they serve as a shield to enhance defense, they can also, via acceleration while rolling, turn those rather sharp bone spurs into the best means of attacking enemies.
And the things by its two legs that seem to be Diablos skulls exist not only as armaments, but are also the key to its steering and braking while rolling at high speed.
Simply put, this guy's center of gravity and braking capability are relatively weak and require external aids.
Therefore, compared with its relative the Uragaan, it is entirely the difference between Mazda and Rolls-Royce.
Watching the Radobaan draw closer and closer without the slightest intention of stopping, Logan knew that since he had not released his Pressure, he had been targeted by this speed-loving creature that also enjoyed hit-and-run.
Since that was the case, Logan was not about to be polite. The eyes beneath his protective membrane narrowed slightly.
Although he did not intend, as with the Uragaan, to use absolute power to forcibly halt the other, he also did not plan to kill it outright.
Timing it precisely, a fireball fell onto the Radobaan's inevitable path. Under Logan's precise control of energy, the explosion did not cause great destruction; it merely blasted out a modest crater—low in the center and high on both sides, a gentle slope overall.
From a distance, it looked somewhat like the half-pipe of an ice-skating rink.
Next, the Radobaan, unable to brake or steer in time, plunged headfirst into the crater, and then, propelled by its overspeed, shot out of the pit and soared high into the air, giving Logan a live performance of a flying motorcycle.
Only, this motorcyclist's mental composure wasn't very good. Once its body left the ground, it could no longer maintain its balance, and thus, under centrifugal force, it stretched out its body again in midair.
A Brute Wyvern that spends its life on the ground will always dream of flying in the sky.
And now, that dream had come true!
[Boom!!]
The Radobaan's massive body slammed heavily into the ground. Amid the sound of shattering bones, it rolled and slid quite a long distance further.
Yet this fellow was surprisingly enduring. At such speed, from such height, and with its body weight greatly increased by all those bones, after such a disastrous fall, it did not even let out a groan.
This was reality, not a game. At such acceleration, even Logan would have been injured, so he was quite astonished at the Radobaan's performance.
Only when he went forward to inspect did he find the Radobaan lying there in an extremely awkward posture, as if its body had completely twisted and its bones shattered.
The bone spikes that should have served as its armaments had, under the force of absolute impact, been driven straight into its own body.
A massive Diablos horn had pierced from its lower jaw through its head, forcing the skull outward.
It was truly a most horrific car crash scene!
Logan had not expected that with just a single slam he could actually smash to death a Brute Wyvern, a species known for representing the pinnacle of physical toughness. In Logan's estimation, at most it would be missing a leg or have a broken bone or something of the sort.
He truly hadn't thought of a scene where it died to its own armor, but it was quite reasonable—looking at that whole coat of bone fragments, nothing about it seemed safe.
Going out to speed around without even having proper protection—even without today's incident, trouble was bound to happen sooner or later.
Logan thought this to himself and left the scene of the accident in a slightly cheerful mood.
As for whether to use Radobaan's corpse to treat himself to an extra meal—sorry, in an environment like this, Logan really didn't have much appetite. What's more, given Radobaan's habit of lounging in piles of bones, if Logan ate it he would probably have to worry whether his digestion could handle it.
However, Logan's lack of interest in this carcass did not mean other creatures would feel the same. As one of the most resource-scarce places in the New World, this area never lacks all kinds of carnivores.
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