Chapter 185: Slave Hunters (1/2)

Gou Dan was hidden above the trees and carefully peering at a nearby sight through the dense foliage.

A group of people were having a conversation around a fire, all of them carrying unusual weapons.

There were some carriages parked nearby. Some were carrying loads covered in sackcloth and could not be seen, but the other carriages were clearly carrying empty cages where the coach should be.

In other words, those people were slave hunters.

And like their name would suggest, a group that captures slaves.

Such an abnormal group mostly appear amongst humans only—aside from humans and orcs, other species did not possess the concept of slavery.

That being said, orcs would only enslave the tribes of foes whom they had slain and found worthy of respect in the battlefield.

After all, orcs were not like humans—they live in barren lands and were lacking in fertility. Considering their crudely straightforward behavior and their lack of detailed craftsmanship meant that they would only ever hold faith in the God of War or the God King of Beasts, and never the God of Harvest.

That was also why their kind were always short of food, and even the flesh of the foes they defeated became one of their most important sources of food. Without industrial revolutions and no lack of labor, they naturally wouldn’t want to enslave beings as humans would.

In fact, having slaves was a meaningless waste of food for their own tribe, yielding no benefit in relative to its cost and no function at all.

But humans were different.

Even under circumstances where they need manual labor to develop land, most nations and nobles saw slaves as a form of property akin to livestock.

Moreover, owning slaves of other rare races were a symbol of personal influence and wealth.

Amongst those, the rarest was the wood elves.

In terms of human aesthetic values, wood elves of either gender were elegant and beautiful in appearance, a rare humanoid race that could exist in harmony with nature. As such, they had an indescribable spirituality to them.

Moreover, most of their individuals lived up to three thousand long years, possessing talents no human could hope to reach in many aspects including magic, archery, and the arts. If anyone could get their hands on one, with a little discipling they could be passed down like an heirloom…

Nonetheless, it has been a long time since humans get to capture any real wood elves, and it was even rumored that the price on one in the black markets now was Illum Crystals, ten times the weight of said captured elf.

And since those slave hunters had shown up here at the Trinia Forests, their target was naturally the wood elves whom the legends claimed were living in the heart of this place.

“Are those guys crazy?” Gou Dan muttered quietly.