Zaki and his group continued running until nightfall, and their numbers had dropped from seventy-three to forty-five.

He slowed down gradually along with the group behind him as the sun had set and they could barely see around them.

" We'll rest here and continue when the sun rises".

Zaki sat under a tree and went deep in thought.

When he had been knocked out by the uniformed men in the town, he had a strange dream.

He dreamed of a stone that gave out a small stream of energy every several seconds, with each stream of energy, his body would feel warmer and more comfortable.

It went on for hours until in the last stream of energy, as if a fog had cleared up in his mind, Zaki woke up, but as a 1st level body tempering realm cultivator.

When he awoke, he could sense his body had grown much stronger than it had been before, and even more shocking, he could feel a foreign thing in his body.

It was the stone that transported him to the middle of nowhere.

When Zaki first felt the stone within his body, it issued a stream of information; it was the stone's basic functions and a language.

The language was dubbed "universal Language" because it combined the speaking styles of all the major races into a single language that anyone from any race could use.

Nobody knows who created the language or when it was created, but everyone agrees that it was one of the reasons the chaos era ended.

The human leader had kept a copy of the language in the stone because it was useful, and because the language wasn't as common back then, there were many locations that didn't speak it, and the human leader saw it as a valuable asset for his successor, in case he/she lived in one of those locations.

Despite the fact that the humans who colonized Earth used this language, the language used by people in different parts of the world changed and evolved into other languages over time as Earth's cultivation civilization deteriorated, simply because the person using the language needs to use internal energy or any other higher energy to get the pronunciation right.

Zaki heard a "puff" sound, he looked around and noticed one of the deserters sitting beneath a tree, she is a girl in her teens with a small ball of fire in her hand, which she tossed towards the meager firewood she had collected.

Unlike Zaki, who cultivated both the body refining and the energy refining path, she was just an Energy refiner in the fourth stage of Meredian tempering.

Meridian tempering may not make the cultivator as good in close combat as body tempering cultivators, but they can harness their internal energy to throw modest non-battle spells like the fireball used by the girl to start a little campfire.

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Internal energy is a sort of biological energy produced by the cultivator's body after it has been tempered to some level.

Body tempering cultivators utilize it to boost the potency of their attacks in battle, while meridian tempering cultivators use it to cast minor spells and, to a lesser extent, increase the power of their physical strikes.

The girl then skewered a badly cleaned bird to the tip of a knife and began roasting it over the fire; because they had never stopped moving, she had most likely snagged the bird from a tree branch while on the go.

Some of the deserters ate fruits plucked from trees, some, like the girl, began cooking a bird over a fire, and still others obtained rodents or small snakes from wherever they got that from.

It's been two weeks since the large scale battle, and the survivors are the most powerful, strong-willed, and, most importantly, resourceful of the twenty thousand conscripts.

The weak have already died, fallen behind, or simply starved as a result of their inability to get food on the go, which forced them to fall behind or die in battle.

Zaki began munching on a plum while staring at the nearby crackling fire; at first, he and the other deserters were afraid that lighting fires at night would attract hunters, but as the night grew colder and colder, they couldn't take it any longer and lit fires to warm themselves up.

Though they were lucky the guards weren't paid enough to travel through a danger infested forest at night while enduring the cold.

The true risk at night is not the cold, but the occupants.

Even though there are no spirit animals or magic beasts in this part of the forest, which is highly lucky for Zaki's squad, since even the weakest spirit or magic beast can wipe out the entire group with little to no effort!

Other less dangerous but still lethal residents include snakes, scorpions, spiders, and other animals that are virtually invisible to the naked eye at night.

Unless they had a death wish, no rational individual with little cultivation would travel the forest at night.

Zaki spit out the plum seed and turned to face a man who had just sat down near him, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

"what do you want Dimitri?"

"nothing, just wanted to be near my friend"

"You mean acquaintance, because we barely know each other"

"Yes, but we're comrades in arms, so we're friends," Dimitri smiled.

"Whatever, anyway, how much do you know about the free city?" With a solemn expression on his face, Zaki asked.

Dimitri sighed, "not much, all I know is from hearsay in the tavern I used to work in."

"So, basically, nothing?" So, why did you suggest, 'We could travel to Free Ci-"

Dimitri interrupted

"I didn't know you'd use it to boost morale among deserters! I only know its general location is to the east."

" then where are we supposed to go, what am I supposed to tell others? Just where are we headed anyway?" Zaki said in an angry but hushed tone.

"whoa chill man, once we cross the kingdom's border, the hunters will stop bothering us, and those regions are dominated by random families, clans, sects, gangs, and other organizations contesting for territories, we'll be basically free, I don't think it's much different than free city."

"So, what should we say to others?" Zaki calmed down.

"Oh, that's simple, when we cross the border, we can just say we don't know where the city is and split up; the whole free city thing was to keep morale up, and after crossing the border, it won't matter anymore...probably."

"Hopefully," Zaki said, frowning slightly.

"Calm down, man, we'll cross the bridge when we get there, and look what I found" Dimitri smiled and reached into his pockets for two pear-shaped fruits.

Zaki arched an eyebrow, "just some frui- wha?"

Zaki grabbed one of the fruits and twisted his torso away from the fire's light to create a shade; sure enough, the fruit was glowing, albeit softly.