When the sun rose, dozens of corpses were scattered across the blood-stained ground. Between all the members of the merchant guild and the mountain bandits, only five people were still standing.

These survivors seemed a little less shaken than they had been the night before.

Jian woke up after a few hours of unconsciousness and tried to console Feiyan for her loss, but he didn’t have much success.

“Liu Feiyan, your father was a great man. I worked with him for many years, and I’m certain that he loved you more than anything. I’m sure that no matter where he is now, he would want you to be strong enough to move forward.”

Zhou Lan hugged Feiyan, and she cried while leaning on him.

When Feiyan finally left her father’s body, Tristan took the opportunity to retrieve the Mid Red crystal from the beast he had killed.

With a touch, a golden light enveloped the red gem, and it disappeared.

Now he had six fragments of red cores, which greatly improved his mood. He was smiling inside, though on the outside, his face remained as expressionless as ever.

Tristan searched the other corpses for anything useful. As he did, he noticed that Wang Liao’s body was nowhere to be found.

He thought, ‘Liao must still be alive.’ But he didn’t care much about it; the cowardly cultivator was none of his concern.

When his gaze passed over the dead caravan horses, he sighed, ‘I’ll have to go back to traveling on foot again.’ The comfort he had experienced over the past few weeks was about to come to an end.

Then Tristan thought about another important issue.

He looked at his group; of the five, only two had real combat abilities.

‘Should I go off on my own?’

He thought about it, then looked at his injured arms and slowly shook his head.

‘In my current state, it would be a headache to cut the meat from animals, and I’d have to eat raw food since I wouldn’t be able to make a fire.’ Now that Tristan was able to eat decent food again, he refused to give that up so easily.

Tristan saw Yue walking toward him.

She then said shyly, “Um… Dusk… I just wanted to thank you for saving my life and my grandfather’s. You were courageous… thank you!”

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Tristan looked at her and shrugged, then said, “Alright.”

She smiled.

“Why didn’t you say you were so strong?” Yue asked curiously.

Tristan remembered his past and thought about what he wanted to do, and the people he would need to face in the future.

“I’m not.”

image [https://i.imgur.com/CJALaUN.png]

A few weeks later.

Tristan and the remaining members of the merchant guild caravan were moving eastward. They took all the resources they could from the caravan, but what each of them could carry was very limited.

But if Tristan had to choose the hardest thing about surviving in this region, he wouldn’t say it was the difficulty of obtaining resources; he would definitely say it was the geography of this place that made traveling here hellish.

Since the guild’s guide was dead, they had no fixed route and had to find their own way through trial and error.

This place was like a maze of hills and mountains. Sometimes they would walk along a path for kilometers only to find, at the end, that it was blocked by a steep land formation that would force them to climb. And of course, carrying Feiyan, Yue, and Lan up a climb in a region that could house a magical beast would be very risky.

“Ahhh,” Feiyan sat on the ground, exhausted, drops of sweat dripping from her beautiful face. She looked at the top of the hill, wondering when this would end.

Zhou Yue and Zhou Lan worked on their family’s farm, so their physical condition wasn’t bad. But Feiyan, who had lived as a rich girl without ever having to exert herself, was having trouble keeping up with the others.

“Are you okay, Feiyan? Here, have some water.” Yue offered her water bottle to Feiyan.

“Ah, thank you, Yue,” Feiyan said with a smile.

Jian also approached timidly and handed Feiyan a handkerchief. She took the handkerchief from him, but before she could thank him, Jian quickly walked away.

The drops of sweat seemed to make her skin glow under the sun, and the fact that her now sweat-soaked, thin clothes clung more to her slender body was a sight Jian couldn’t bear.

After a while, the group managed to reach the top of the hill. When they got there, they saw something unbelievable.

All the group members had perplexed expressions on their faces.

“Um, what is that?” Feiyan was the first to speak.

But no one had an answer.

“That’s… a cave, I think,” Jian said.

“Isn’t its shape very strange? How could a cave be like that?” Yue said.

Hearing her question, Tristan made a guess, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted such a thing to be possible. The thought of being more insignificant than an ant in this world was terrifying to him.

In front of Tristan’s group was the largest mountain they had ever encountered. It was kilometers high, and its peak couldn’t be seen, disappearing into the sky.

But what really frightened the group was the hole in the mountain, more than 1000 meters high, shaped like a diamond. If someone were willing to consider the existence of unnatural powers on absurd scales, they might assume that the hole looked like the mark of a sword strike.

‘Who or what could make something so massive?’

‘This is almost divine.’

With all the knowledge Tristan had of this world, he could only imagine one possibility.

‘Could it have been them who did this?’

If that were the case, it would mean that Tristan had found the second demonstration of power from those beings.

Tristan wondered if one day he would be able to comprehend that power, which for his current self was something unimaginable.