Chapter 8 (1/2)

Translator: Nyoi_Bo_Studio  Editor: Nyoi_Bo_Studio

Several days later, when the first morning light touched the ground, the vines that had become as thick as the length of a child’s wrist suddenly trembled. Their leaves began rapidly changing color, yellowing, and falling. For a brief moment, the farmland circling the village was full of fallen leaves.

As the leaves fell, the green vines began to change color. They began glittering as if they had been absorbing and condensing the sunlight for a long time. Just looking at these golden vines brought warmth to the heart of anyone who saw them.

The villagers cheered and began their harvest. They cut the vines into pieces as long as half an arm, leaving only a root the size of a palm. Golden white powder fell from the cut section of the vine, and many villagers bit into them when harvesting. It seemed this was their staple food.

However, Sui Xiong noticed that there were no children picking up and eating the cut vines. Because of this, he assumed the vines didn’t taste very good—since children were the most innocent, normally they would happily eat wild fruits even if they were 80% sour and only 20% sweet. Since the children had no interest in these vines, they must taste extremely boring.

Obviously reaping vines required a lot of labor: the lumberjacks doing the harvesting were exhausted and covered in sweat. The women and children were busy collecting the yellow leaves, grinding them with stones, turning them into a pale yellow starch, and moving them into the stone house with buckets. Sui Xiong didn’t know what this was for.

There were many vines around the village, and the reaping lasted for three days. When only the last row of vines near the village remained, the villagers no longer reaped but began to prepare for other things.

They brought together the elderly and children who lacked combat effectiveness, dressed them in clothes soaked in the grey-yellowish starch, and gathered them in a few relatively strong wooden houses. In front of them were statues resembling the unsettling statue on the roof of the stone house, and around them were a few barrels of pulp with an unknown purpose.

However, the young adults, men, and women were busy eating and drinking. This time they didn’t eat the batter made from the powder of ground vines, but the dried chicken that had been taken out of the stone house. It seemed that the chicken was not delicious, as all were scowling while eating, yet everyone was trying to eat more. Perhaps they did so in order to ensure their physical strength.

“It looks like the battle is close,” Sui Xiong told himself secretly. He thought it over long and hard: he would have to present himself as a huge friendly monster that wasn’t unbelievably powerful. In order to do that, he needed to deliberately suppress his might, a more practical approach compared to scaring the villagers by appearing excessively powerful.

Suppressing his might was simple as long as he subtly changed the structure of his muscles to decrease his maximum power. He wasn’t afraid to run into danger: so far in the black woods, he hadn’t encountered anything that could be considered dangerous. Not to mention that his most powerful resource wasn’t a strong body, but the ice magic. With the ice magic as his last resort, it didn’t matter if his body was a bit weaker.

After everything was properly prepared, it began to get dark. The villagers closed the gate of the wooden fence, and some particularly strong villagers held weapons, waiting near the gate. Some eager villagers climbed up to the house and took charge of keeping watch there as well. Inside the village, at every step, there were bonfires burning around the fences. Next to every one of the bonfires, there was a villager guarding it.

The blaze of the burning fires brightened the surroundings, giving the village ample warmth and, more importantly, a sense of security. At night the black woods were cold and dangerous, and for the villagers fire was indispensable.

When the moon slowly rose, Sui Xiong, who was lurking deep in the woods, felt a hint of strangeness. Beneath the vacant space near the village, the chaotic and turbid magic was gathering. Although a dark fog formed by the magic would gather in the black woods every night, tonight was the first time that he had seen such powerful magic. In the black woods, the magic of cohesion would transform the underground bones into skeletons that could move. So, with such powerful magic at hand, what might happen?

The answer soon revealed itself, as he sensed that countless skeletons were slowly forming underground. It wouldn’t take long before they broke through the ground and emerged.

“Strange… how could there be so many bones underground around the village? Where did these bones come from? I didn’t find them before,” Sui Xiong said to himself suspiciously. He wasn’t worried that the skeletons would pose a threat to him. He just didn’t understand.

Could it be that the bones of the dead could still move underground? This world really was weird!

After a while, the skeletons had taken shape and floated slowly toward the ground. This was also completely contrary to physics: the earth was not water, and skeletons were not fish, so then how on Earth could they pass right through the soil as if they were swimming?

Sui Xiong watched the situation develop and thought for awhile. As the skeletons approached the ground, the roots of the remaining vines in the farmland started to give off a faint golden light, forming a protective shield that stopped the skeletons in their tracks.