Chapter 83 — The Origin of the Monsters
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Deep within the Dark Mountains.
The pioneer corps had been operating here for a month now. Once they had gained a preliminary foothold, Gao Yang began dispatching all manner of scouting parties every day—to the southern range, the western forest, the eastern mines, or the wilds across the Whitewater River—to search for supplies and survey the terrain. The route the serfs had taken into the mountains was one of the natural mountain paths discovered only in recent days. Yet though newly found, it had already been traversed several times by scouting teams and soldier patrols, and never once had any trace of monsters been spotted.
Those aberrations had without question appeared only recently.
The mountain road was hard going. Gao Yang and Amber moved with astonishing speed on their feet, but the two serfs, ordinary men both, could not keep such a pace; it took them nearly an hour before they finally drew near the fork where the monster attack had occurred.
As they drew closer and closer to that place, even Amber—usually so carefree and flighty—could not help growing tense. Clutching her small dagger, she lowered her voice: "I mean, it's been so long—those monsters ought to have wandered off by now..."
"Not necessarily. You don't understand the 'habits' of aberrations," Gao Yang said, studying the jagged, rock-strewn mountain path ahead and the dense growth flanking it on both sides. His gaze lingered a long while on a steep cliff face that looked liable to collapse at any moment, then he dropped his voice. "They aren't normal living things. In a mana-rich environment they don't need to eat. Apart from their instincts to attack intelligent life and to gravitate toward mana sources, they have no clear purpose of action. If a human or a mana reaction enters their sensing range, they lunge at it; if not, they wander aimlessly, or simply stay where they are. Of course, once their numbers reach a certain point, their behavior becomes hard to predict."
"So what the hell is an aberration, anyway..." Amber muttered, her eyes constantly darting among the shadows between the trees—not watching for enemies lurking in the dark, but searching for escape routes.
Gao Yang shook his head. "Hard to say, honestly. One theory holds that humans corrupted by chaotic mana become aberrations; another claims that during a mana tide, passages to other worlds open, and aberrations come through from elsewhere. But neither theory has ever been proven."
Amber pursed her lips, thinking to herself that if even a man like Gao Yang—who in his last life had fought monsters for twenty years—couldn't say where the monsters came from, then the so-called experts and scholars back in the heartland of the kingdom were surely even less reliable on the subject.
And just as her eyes swept their surroundings, a mark on the ground suddenly caught her attention: "Hey, hey—there's something over there!"
Not far ahead, on the rock face, the stone could be seen gouged and clawed apart, and in the crevices of the rock there were still traces of dried blood.
At the sight of those marks, the two serfs serving as guides began to shake like leaves in the wind.
"Looks like we're close," Gao Yang said, tightening his grip on the Pioneer's Sword and focusing his senses on any faint change around them. "Stay sharp."
Amber swallowed and followed behind Gao Yang, cautiously rounding the other side of the fork as though facing a great enemy.
Suddenly Gao Yang stopped short. A primal wariness, an instinct belonging to this body, spread through him; guided by that sense of alarm, he swiftly ducked behind a boulder and peered toward the other side of the mountain path.
Four enormous humanoid creatures, like giants of flesh and bone, came into view. They swayed and shambled along the path, their faces—streaming with red mud—devoid of any features, while from between their chests and bellies came a ceaseless, chaotic, blasphemous, indescribable murmuring.