Chapter 44 - Journey
They ate till late in the night and everyone enjoyed the dinner quite a lot. Even in the hands of an amateur, the meat would taste delicious let alone in the hands of these seasoned soldiers with proper training.
They all had a very good impression of Hao Xuan after the incident at the village. He had stood up against the king even though he was much weaker and protected the villagers and even fed them with the highest quality meat they would probably ever taste.
The next morning they all woke up as soon as the sun came out, although because of the thick canopy of the trees the sunlight was sparse, it was enough to get them going.
They all had their own mounts which were their contracted beasts, but obviously, none even came close to Bai's level.
The journey was several hundred thousand kilometers long and would take several days even with their speed. They would only stop once a day to rest their mounts and would continue until the sunset. After darkness fell it was more or less suicidal to step out of the camp when nothing more than a few meters was visible.
The Mad Saints stayed away from all the main roads and only followed the much less traveled paths and even cut through some forests. It was winter and they were headed up north, so the weather kept getting colder and colder, with thick fog at night on some days and snowfall on others.
At one such an instance something strange happened. The scouts reported that there was a small town a few kilometers ahead but it was abandoned.
This caught Lt. Kuo's eye because it was supposed to have a Red Legion forwarding post there and they were supposed to check in through it.
The town's population was a little more than seven hundred and a platoon was posted there as well. It was about 1 p.m when they reached it. All the streets were empty, all the inns were closed, there was absolutely no one on the roads.
Lt. Kuo sent a party of five in to investigate and they found all the buildings empty. There were no signs of a fight or struggle in any of them, there was some food on the tables which seemed to have been cooked within the last 12 hours in some of them left untouched.
They found the Red Legion forwarding post and it was empty as well, but there was a note a letter left there.
"We have been cut off from the outside world for a few days now, no one can leave the town or enter it. People are acting strangely, no one seems to notice anything wrong with this and they all continue to go about their businesses as usual."
"Several people have gone missing one by one but no one bats an eye. Even their loved ones forget about them as if they never existed. I don't know how long I can keep my sanity, I can feel myself slipping. I am all alone here, still trying to continue my mission. I am afraid my training didn't prepare me for this. If you find this, please pass this letter to the military, my Identification number is 3756289 and I am a soldier of the Red Legion."
Lt. Kuo and Hao Xuan read the letter which left them with even more questions than answers.
Hao Xuan turned towards Kuo and found him with an even bigger frown than usual.
"How long was this soldier posted here? Maybe they all lost their minds?" Hao Xuan turned towards him and asked. Kuo shook his head in response.
"That's the problem. We never send out a single person for any job, there always has to be a partner. That means there were at least two people in this town, but the letter doesn't mention anything about the second soldier," he replied taking the letter from Hao Xuan's hand.
When Hao Xuan heard him he suddenly got a very bad feeling. It was normal for entire towns and villages to vanish overnight if they were unlucky enough to be caught in a beast horde, but nothing ever like this.
"Relay my orders, no one is to set a single foot in this town. Put down warning glyphs along the roads leading to it and close down the paths," he ordered to the soldiers that were standing not far from him and they went on their way.
"Captain, should we leave?" Kuo asked quietly once they were alone.
"How can we? Hundreds of people vanished into thin air, we have to find out why and how and report back, it's our responsibility," Hao Xuan said shaking his head.
"Has anything like this ever happened before? Maybe it was a beast with some special powers," he followed.
"Never. And even if there was a beast, there are warning formations and glyphs all around the town. If a beast stepped within a 500-meter radius of the town all the guards would be alerted and an SOS would be sent to the nearest city automatically. The fact that none of that happened is proof that it wasn't a beast," Kuo replied after thinking for a few seconds, and he was right. All bigger human settlements had something along those lines. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to survive a month with all the beasts running around.
"But..."
"But what? Just say it."
"When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell me stories, stories about people vanishing into thin air. Sometimes even entire villages would be lost without a trace. She called it "spirited away". When someone in the settlement had done something very bad, so bad that the heavens opened up and swallowed everyone whole," Kuo said with a strange look on his face.
His breathing was getting faster and heavier and he himself was getting quite nervous just thinking about it.