Chapter 84 — More...

Gao Yang, meanwhile, sought out Amber, who was making the rounds of the camp boasting, and dragged along this half-elf who had hoped to dodge work on the grounds of "helping with propaganda." The three of them entered the mountains once more and soon returned to the place where they had fought the monsters.

Those enormous blood-red bones still lay quietly on the mountain path, in a state of steady decomposition.

Amber frowned at the hideous remains: "By the way, how do you know there are more monsters? Did you see them?"

"You don't understand the twisted," Gao Yang said, and only then revealed his judgment. "Do you know that the twisted are a thing that grows more tenacious the more numerous they are, and more fragile the fewer—and will even self-destruct when their numbers grow too small?"

Not just Amber—even Hedy was unaware of this: "Self-destruct when too few? How does that work?"

"The twisted and the mana tides complement each other; they may even be two manifestations of the same phenomenon," Gao Yang explained. "The twisted have a numerical threshold. Once above it, the more numerous they are, the stronger the mana-tide corruption becomes, and the denser the corrupt aura, the more numerous and stronger the twisted grow. The mana pervading all nature is the soil that lets this process keep developing. Thus a group of twisted in sufficient numbers, merely by gathering together, can form a new mana-tide corruption point and rapidly expand and spread. But conversely, once below that value, the mana-tide corruption produced by the twisted not only fails to multiply but cannot even sustain themselves; they will steadily weaken and gradually decompose within the ordered world. The process is quick—twisted cut off from the main body will self-collapse within three days."

Amber glanced at the remains on the ground: "I remember you said that when the twisted sense no target, they wander blindly or stay in place—and in that state their movement speed is very, very slow..."

"Exactly. If there were only four monsters, they could never have wandered from the Gondor Wasteland to this place; at their speed, they'd have dissolved halfway," Gao Yang made no effort to hide his unease. "So these four broke away from a larger force... perhaps they got lost, perhaps the column was too loosely strung out—but a larger force definitely exists."

Hedy could not help gripping her staff a little nervously.

Gao Yang, for his part, gathered his focus and studied the mountain path where the monsters had wandered.

Aberrants were the spawn of the dark tide; their chaotic, disordered magic reeked in this world like foul, rotting sludge, sharp and conspicuous. The dissipation of such chaotic magic was swift, true, but these monsters had appeared only recently, so traces of that magic most likely still lingered.

Sure enough, after concentrating and sorting through them carefully, he sensed a faint disharmony in one direction along the mountain path.

And that direction happened to be one of the roads leading toward the southern foothills of the Dark Mountains.