Book 3. The Long Journey. Chapter 32. Obey or Suffer.
“Well…” Kalan began with a smile. He didn’t expect it to go so easily so he hadn’t really prepared any specific demands. “There are two things we would like you two to help us with. Ritual can wait, we have six more days until the eclipse and your friend still needs to finish his breakthrough. For the time being… how about you spend some time with the girls from our village? Or women perhaps, if you enjoy the company of those who are more mature?” he suggested, purposely choosing to remain fairly careful in his demands.
The look on Yin’s face in response to his words made Kalan’s lips tremble slightly, but when he saw Yin sighing resignedly he secretly breathed with relief. He had Yin in a hard spot, but he was still scared of him; the fear had sept deep into his bones and would remain there whether he liked it or not.
“Don’t bother bringing anyone from above,” Yin said sourly. “That Marie at least seems to be a nice person,” he added, in his mind empathizing the word ‘seems’ more so than in his words. He had been somewhat innocent with regards to those matters before meeting Laien, but how could he not realize what this ‘request’ of Kalan’s truly meant? Just the thought of it was making him feel sick inside. There was no way he would do what they wanted, but he also needed to give Laien more time… so there was only one choice left.
“Great, I will let her know,” Kalan said with a smile, not too surprised by Yin’s choice. If Marie was one of the village’s women he himself would have probably tried to woo her, but she was an exception. For the sake of Holy Priests, the women taking care of them were never allowed to have their own children until they were relieved of their duty. Marie was a daughter of one of the villagers and of a noblewoman they had kidnapped from the outside, though more importantly, she had both good looks and warm character. She was a perfect fit for the role of a caretaker.
“Anything else?” Yin asked rather angrily, causing Kalan to chuckle nervously. Just because a tiger was temporarily restrained it didn’t mean he wasn’t a tiger anymore.
“For now that will be all,” Kalan responded and nodded at Yin, then headed back to the High Priest’s sanctuary to report that everything had gone well.
“Shameless bastard.” Yin shook his head with an ice-cold look on his face. He eyed Kalan’s back hatefully for a bit, then when the man disappeared from his view he glanced at Laien. Sighing to himself, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the spiritual bond between the two of them. “I don’t want to rush you, but it would be great if you could hurry…” he sent the thought, knowing that Laien would understand what he was saying even without hearing the words.
Sensing Laien’s strong hesitation Yin began to worry whether it was a good idea to make Laien speed the process up. On the other hand, he didn’t know how long he would be able to fool those villagers. The prospect of fathering a child with some random woman he didn’t like at all filled him with a great amount of disgust; just the thought of it was incredibly repulsive. Additionally, he didn’t want to be forced to a point where he would need to fight against multiple opponents to protect Laien. His skills and abilities lacked any area-of-effect techniques and even with the aid of the different aspects of the Principle of Energy, his lightning remained at most a close-mid range weapon.
Suddenly, a scarily powerful surge of Qi and spiritual energy was expelled from Laien’s body. Yin held his breath momentarily but calmed down when he saw Laien’s aura retract and stabilize. He could tell that whatever Laien was doing, he was now hurrying as much as he could; his gut feeling and the vague idea he got from their spiritual bond was telling Yin that Laien would need three days to complete his breakthrough as long as nothing went wrong and nothing disturbed him.
“That’s much more manageable,” Yin thought with relief. The village should be able to hold on for three days against some uncoordinated bandits and he should be able to avoid doing anything he would hate for that long too. As for what they would do after that… they would figure it out together.
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“High Priest,” Kalan bowed, a slight smile present on his face.
“I see it went well,” the High Priest smiled, Kalan’s expression telling him everything he needed to know. “Bring whichever girl the boy wanted to him and go join your father in the forest. I need you to lead your unit and kill as many bandits as possible with everyone else,” he ordered briefly, without getting into the details by the force of habit. Uluan never asked him for explanations after all.
“Is it that bad?” Kalan asked in surprise. There were a few thousand bandits at first; could their numbers have swelled up so much so quickly that they needed to take immediate action?
“Your father went out to check the enemy numbers,” the High Priest explained offhandedly, feeling more annoyed by the question than he thought. “He is saying over twenty thousand people are already at the plains to the south of our village, and more and more pouring in,” he added, having noticed how the few words he said before weren’t enough to sate Kalan’s need for detail.
“Thank you, High Priest,” Kalan bowed respectfully and seeing that the High Priest wasn’t in the mood for more inquiries, left him alone.
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“Great Chieftain,” Black Lion called out from in front of the large tent Shade had set up for himself. He bowed when he saw the black-masked man come outside, waited two seconds to see if Shade didn’t want to say anything, then began reporting.
“What people say about the Forest of Dreams is true. Even though we had our men enter it from all directions, everyone still ended up walking out of it on their own. Nothing much happened apart from that until an hour ago or so. The teams sent in stopped coming back, or at least most of them. I estimate we lost around two thousand people so far.” After finishing, he bowed once again; he was a prideful individual, but it was a Great Chieftain he was dealing with, and the one who was feared the most in the Anarchic Lands. It was better to be overly courteous than happen to be not respectful enough.
“Interesting,” Shade mused aloud, sounding to be pretty amused. “It either means whoever lives there doesn’t like what we are doing and wants to send us a clear message…” he paused for a second, laughed and finished saying. “Or it means that whatever is keeping people out of their home has limits to how many intruders it can stop at once. If you asked me, I’d bet on the latter one,” he said merrily and tilted his head, his eyes turning to look directly at Black Lion.
“You understand what to do, I’m pretty sure?” he asked, his playful voice for some reason causing Black Lion to fear for his life.
“W-wait for more people to gather and send them all at the same time?” Black Lion said uncertainly. He was almost certain this was the right answer, but what if Shade was playing some kind of a game with him?
“Are you asking me or answering?” Shade asked with a smirk, though not like it could be seen from below the mask on his face.
“Answering,” Black Lion forced out of his throat, his voice trembling slightly.
“Good, then do as you said,” Shade said lightheartedly and gestured Black Lion to ‘shoo away’ with his hand, what the man obediently did.
“Number twenty-eight, you also know what to do, no?” Shade turned around ask asked, looking at the material covering the entrance to his tent.
“Yes, Master,” a man’s voice answered. If he couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to do in this situation he wouldn’t deserve to be one of the unit leaders under Shade’s command.
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“And there she is,” Yin thought to himself. He was a bit surprised that she came so late, but thanks to that he could spend his day training and for the past two, three hours chatting with the ‘Holy Priest’. That being said, he really hated this title and it wasn’t into thinking about that kid as ‘him’ or ‘the six-year-old’ either; should he suggest coming up with some kind of a name for him…? Probably not, at least not until this whole sacrifice thing was resolved one way or another.
“I think it’s the highest time for you to go to sleep,” Marie suggested amiably, but at the same time in a tone suggesting she wouldn’t accept any arguments or refusal.
“But it’s still early!” the six-year-old argued, obviously. Yesterday Marie didn’t seem to have this kind of problems; she had even let him sleep by the lake, so why did he need to go back so soon today?
“I can see you are already tired,” Marie explained patiently, knowing that being forceful wasn’t the best option to take if the Holy Priest wouldn’t simply listen to her. “The sooner you go to sleep the sooner you will wake up tomorrow. isn’t it more fun to talk when you aren’t tired?” she argued, getting the six-year-old to frown and in the end, to agree reluctantly.
“I’ve heard you’ve come to an agreement with the High Priest,” Marie said in a low voice, leading the Holy Priest away with her gaze. “I’m glad, to be honest. Taking care of those children is great, don’t misunderstand me… but watching them go is always so hard,” she brought up, then turned to look at Yin with a smile on her rosy lips.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“How many of them did you take care of?” Yin asked, the perfect looks of Marie having no effect on him at all.
“This boy is third,” Marie replied, keeping her voice pretty quiet. “First was a girl, then two boys,” she said with a melancholic smile. “If you were trying to ask my age in a roundabout way, then I can tell you I became a caretaker when I was sixteen and since then, it’s been more than fifty years,” she said with a wry smile, admittedly happy that a young boy was interested in a granny like her.
Despite himself, Yin was a little surprised by this piece of information. This woman looked like she was in her early thirties, but was around seventy years old? He couldn’t help himself and released a very, very thin strand of his aura and just to be sure, aided himself with the essence of the Aspect of Awareness. “Peak of the ninth mortal realm? Can she not break to the Realm of Heroes for some reason? Could it be… an effect of that curse?” he wondered silently.
If those people had the legacy techniques and arts of their ancestors, then it wouldn’t make sense for them not to produce a few experts in each generation. However, it seemed that they had only one Realm of Heroes practitioner; the High Priest of theirs. If he were to assume it was because of that curse… then it would make sense. During one of their talks the… boy, also mentioned this curse prevented them from getting too far away from the Divine Seal, as the further away from it the quicker the life force of the clan members would be drained away.
“What are you thinking about?” Marie inquired, seeing how Yin fell quiet and how his gaze wandered to someplace far away.
“Nothing important,” Yin said and suppressed a sigh. “I saw Kalan leaving the cave in the morning, do you know why he went up?” he asked, knowing that he was up for another chat about everything and nothing.
“He mentioned killing the bandits when I asked him,” Marie responded in her usual, calm and alluring voice. She sat down on the ground and waved her hand, taking out a variety of dishes, alcohols and liqueurs from her interspatial ring. “I’ve prepared a lot for us to enjoy ourselves,” she said with a smile, encouraging Yin to go ahead and try something while it was still hot.
“She brought a lot of drinks, as expected,” Yin thought quietly. “There’s even wine. Laien would have loved to try the sweet ones,” he mused, grabbing one of the chicken legs at random and picking one of the liqueurs to have a taste of. There was a long night ahead of him… and if this woman kept using her Qi to clear the alcohol from her body, the ending could very well end up being unpleasant.
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Uluan swung the black staff in his hand, smashing the head of another intruder into pieces. He looked around, struggling to catch a breath. Everything had calmed down yesterday in the afternoon, but the next morning tens of thousands of bandits began pouring into their forest all at once. Even though they had an enormous advantage due to the High Priest controlling the bewildering formation as so to allow them to ambush vulnerable groups of enemies every time, he and his men were already on their last breaths.
Their village had around one thousand people capable of the coordinated fight and they had killed nearly five thousand intruders in the last two hours, but they were already too tired to keep that up. Yet, if they backed off now the High Priest would be forced to endlessly control and support the formation to prevent those bandits from breaching it through sheer numbers. With as much of invaders as there was now, the High Priest could probably handle it for a few days… but what after that? And what if even more of those bandits came from all over the Anarchic Lands?
To make the matters worse, they had actually lost contact with two of their fifty man teams. Each time it had happened so fast the team leaders had no time to relay any information back to the High Priest; once it could have been an unfortunate accident, but twice? It was quite apparent that an elite unit of bandits was also roaming the forest. Under an assault of this kind… were they really capable of resisting?
“Enough, I’m turning into my son.” Uluan shook his head strongly. Until an order to retreat arrive from the High Priest he would simply continue to do as he was ordered. There was no need for him to concern himself with the broad picture; he had never been that good at making decisions anyway.
“Get moving, we need to get ready for intercepting another group!” Uluan shouted to his subordinates.
The men and women groaned but readied themselves nevertheless. The clashes on their own weren’t too hard to pull through; they had only lost two members so far, but the sheer amount of people they needed to fight against depleted their stamina and Qi faster than they could possibly regenerate. Yet, none of them complained and they all obediently followed the village chief.
After just a minute of walking, Uluan raised his staff, signaling them to get ready to battle. A few seconds later around one hundred bandits emerged just in front of their fifty man team, as if a curtain of illusion was suddenly lifted from in-between their two groups. Taught by their experience, everyone in Uluan’s unit attacked without delay; the only real threat to their lives were the crossbows bandits sometimes used and their poisoned bolts. As long as they forced the clash into a melee and finished their job thoroughly, they were unlikely to sustain casualties.
And indeed, the unorganized bunch of bandits collapsed in an instant. Those in the front were mostly killed in the first seconds while those in the middle were so terrified they began backing off. There was no teamwork and no order in most of those bandit groups and this one wasn’t an exception. Against an ambush from a well-trained and well-organized unit of the village militia, they stood virtually no chance at all.
“The description fits, capture that man,” a calm order was given by a black-cloaked man, the number twenty-eight, unbeknownst to Uluan and his team.
Instantly, over thirty blurry shadows moved and began appearing all over the battlefield seemingly out of nowhere. Each of them struck once and after a mere heartbeat, an equal number of militia fell to the ground. It didn’t matter that the strength of the villagers in Uluan’s unit averaged at mid-eighth mortal realm; they all fell as easily as single blades of grass under a strong gust of wind.
“W-what?!” Uluan only had enough time for this single thought to cross his mind before the leaders of the leader of the unit of Shadows appeared behind him and delivered a strong blow to the back of his head, at the same time applying a dose of paralyzing poison into his body.
“We have what we came for, let’s go back,” the number twenty-eight said contentedly, surrounded by many dead bodies of bandits and villagers and by his thirty-five subordinates. There was no need to have anyone be witnesses to their fighting methods, so it was better to simply kill everyone involved just as they had done. The only one they kept alive was Uluan, for whom they had a further use.
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“I can’t believe it,” Yin thought helplessly. He really didn’t expect this kind of development to the night he had spent with Marie… but at the moment, she was happily dozing off on a large piece of fur. In fact, she had been asleep for quite some time now as just after a few drinks she had gotten so drunk she no longer thought or cared about anything. It was simplicity in itself to suggest she should lie down for a bit; having had eaten a lot of food too, she had fallen into a deep slumber almost instantly.
“Does she not know you can use Qi to suppress the effects of alcohol in your body?” Yin shook his head with a smile. This woman was more innocent than he had thought too, at least based on the kinds of silly things she was talking about while drunk. How much she wants to have a husband and children, how sad it was she needed to live in this small place, how much she wanted to see the world… how good it would be if the curse was lifted.
Yin himself didn’t trust Kalan’s words about the ritual, but he saw that Marie wasn’t actually evil; she was simply… incredibly good-hearted and even more than that, ridiculously naïve.
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“Looks like we got out safely,” the number twenty-eight murmured with relief. He had been a bit worried that they would be unable to leave the forest while carrying one of the villagers with them, but nothing unexpected happened and after walking just for a bit they were expelled from the forest.
They had long ago figured out that the inhabitants of this place had a way to control their defensive formation, so to be on the cautious side they had stripped the village chief off of all his possessions and put him into some rugged clothes. They couldn’t have been sure if that would be enough or not, but it proved to be fine.
Per the twenty-eight’s assumptions, whoever was controlling the formation was probably too overwhelmed by the numbers of people trying to breach it to pay attention to every minute detail. The battle and the killing had happened so fast they most likely had failed to notice what was going on before it was too late. Good for them, bad for whoever was trying to stand in their way.
“Leader, do you think Master will let us have some fun with interrogating this man?” one of the Shadows asked with a very scary smile on his face.
“Master likes those things, so I can’t see why not.” The number twenty-eight nodded, smiling ever so slightly. He couldn’t wait to hear the pitiful screams of that village chief as he would be begging them for death. He didn’t want to brag, but amongst the unit leaders, he was better at torturing people than even most of the single-digits.
“Wanna take bets how long it will take to make him speak?” another Shadow spoke up, licking his lips with a malicious smile. “I give 10 gold coins that he will break before the moon completely disappears from the sky,” he said with a smirk, not expecting the man to last for more than three hours.
The Shadows in the group laughed and chuckled, then someone else brought up. “You are giving him too much credit. I stake ten coins he will break before one hour passes.”
“Hold your horses, we need to set up betting properly,” another Shadow mentioned. “We have so many people here, so why not make use of the opportunity to earn some gold?” he suggested, the idea immediately proving to be to everyone’s liking.
“You guys can go play your games,” the number twenty-eight said with a smile. “I will set up the altar and prepare our honor guest for all the fun that is coming for him,” he added, smiling in a very frightening way.
The declaration was met with a strong approval from his unit which quickly separated into smaller groups and headed into the huge camp the bandits had set up on the plains.
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“You captured their village chief, good,” Shade praised happily, glad to see his men were as capable as he wanted them to be after all the training and resources he had poured into bringing them up. “Did you learn anything else in the meanwhile?” he inquired in a playful tone. He was planning to join everyone in the spectacle and thus he wanted to know what kind of questions he doesn’t need to ask.
“A few simple things like the number of people in the village in that forest, eight thousand,” the number twenty-eight replied, by now feeling much more relaxed compared to before finishing his task. “We also know that the village is controlled by a ‘High Priest’ who is the supreme authority there. There is also a village chief, Uluan. He’s the man we brought. The chief’s son, Kalan and seven village Elders are below the chief in their hierarchy. There was also a lot of rambling about their bewildering formation being unbreakable, but nothing worthwhile,” he reported and bowed his head to sign that he was finished.
“Unbreakable, huh,” Shade laughed merrily. “Let us see if your skill makes our dear village chief reveal the method to get past this formation,” he said with a happy smile and gestured the number twenty-eight to come with him to the altar.
“Heeey!~ Whatever your name is!~” Shade called out along the way. “Bring everyone back, we are throwing a party!” he said with a laugh, very much hoping the village chief wouldn’t break too soon. It would be no fun if he started speaking in the very beginning; it would be best if he held at least for five or six hours before revealing everything he knew.