The marching gorge of Sunlight Valley had been used as a pass in the previous era.
Even now one could still find war relics of the old world here.
This place lay on Mokoto’s western border.
Once one crossed this stretch of desolate mountains, one could reach Klijin.
The marching gorge was heavy with fog all year.
This fog was not ordinary fog, but suspended crystals formed from a great quantity of elemental energy deposited here.
These crystals were not material entities, and thus would not be drawn into the lungs of people or creatures and cause illness, yet they could be limitedly interfered with by certain magics.
This substance seemed unique to this world, a little similar to what Eve’s world called a “soul.”
Combined with the claim that this was an ancient battlefield, this entity that occupied no spatial volume yet could be seen really did seem like something transformed from the souls of numerous dead.
It was because of this fog that Mokoto had been forced to abandon garrisoning this place.
Due to multiple extreme environments of climate and geography, both attacking and defending here were difficult.
Severe obstruction of vision would lead to instability in the situation of war and randomness in the fruits of battle, so no one wanted to start a war here.
The dual factors of treacherous terrain and rich elements had caused a flood of vicious wild species locally, making both garrisoning this place and periodic logistical support cost enormous manpower, material resources, and even lives.
If this cost were totaled over the years, every five years it would be enough to build a medium-sized fortress.
Therefore this place was desolate to the extreme and fraught with danger.
Although the marching gorge was flat, few convoys dared pass through here.
Even relic seekers who claimed not to fear life or death rarely visited—because the mountains of Sunlight Valley were more dangerous than relics, and there were more corpses than ancient artifacts.
Bowenros had indeed had a bit of the meaning of showing off at the beginning, but he was truly curious about this side.
If there could be a personage of supreme strength backing him, he certainly could not resist the temptation of wanting to come investigate.
Yet because of this fatal misunderstanding, the confident crowd now dared to go deep into this vicious and dangerous land without making much preparation.
But this was not his fault.
If Harvin had not made a fuss and used the Black Feather Seal, if Cregov had not asked about the relationship between Eve and Harvin, if Eve had not given the two of them a mage salute belonging exclusively to high-ranking mages, if Barnbaros had not recognized that she wore a hide of the Xiongbai beast that ordinary people could only hear of in mythic stories, if old steward Mova had not mentioned the Sunlight Valley road, if… there were no ifs.
Everyone’s choices were based on their own considerations and purposes.
The accumulation of countless choices was what was called fate.
Fate could dominate the present and sway the future.
Yuche Ero was likewise a person driven by fate.
His family had originally been in Elfland, a place called Efranto in the Third Era.
Twenty-five years ago Elfland had suffered an enemy country’s invasion and occupation that lasted to this day.
His parents had become exiles.
Yuche had been born in the exile procession advancing north, then entrusted to a somewhat famous swordsman of Hatan.
This swordsman was an old acquaintance of Yuche’s father.
Yuche had grown to adulthood under the swordsman’s teaching.
The swordsman regarded him as his own and taught him knowledge and martial arts.
When he was seventeen, the swordsman, according to the agreement of those years, told him of his origins and left the road thereafter to his own decision.
So he considered seriously for several days, packed his bags, and set out north, inquiring all the way after the whereabouts of his blood kin.
According to his foster father’s words, his parents had ultimately been going to a place called Andu City.
That was Klijin’s territory, but most of the residents were foreigners, most of them exiles from various countries.
Yuche inquired for news near Andu City and also lived here for more than three years.
Later he did indeed hear some news—most of those processions that had fled from the south that year had been robbed by newly risen bandit gangs on the border.
They killed all the men, then carried off the somewhat good-looking women and children—exile processions usually had little treasure to rob, so these skin-and-bone women and children were the most valuable things.
It was said Yuche’s mother had been killed by his father’s own hand.
At the time the bandits’ horse troop had howled across the front of the exile procession, a situation that forced his father to make a choice.
He killed very cleanly, and also very painfully.
At that time his mother had only been nineteen.
This man first cut his beloved wife’s throat with one stroke, then thrust the blade still carrying hot blood into his own body, and finally also died.
“Although in others’ eyes your father seemed to be fleeing by death, a coward, the true situation is that only those present have the most say.”
At the time this informed person was drunk, yet his speech was not confused.
“Your mother was too beautiful. Even if she was so thin only a layer of skin remained, in the eyes of the border bandits she still counted as a beauty. That exile that year was very desperate, especially when the things in hand that could be exchanged for grain grew fewer and fewer.”
“Those pampered nobles had no choice but to rely on eating tree bark and even corpses to hang on by a breath. Some people even took reaching the destination as the last goal of their lives. Really, don’t disbelieve it. Many committed suicide or died of depression only after living in the city a year or two. When your father saw the horse troop he was certainly desperate to the point of mental collapse. His method was rather clean…”
The aged informed person drank the wine the young man treated him to and laughed loudly.
“You ask who I am? I was the one riding a horse that year…”
Before this old man finished speaking, a knife struck his chest.
The young man’s eyes were bloodshot as he glared at him.
With a clatter a pile of people stood up in the tavern, all holding sharp weapons, wanting to take him down on the spot.
But the stabbed old man drank them all back.
He pulled that knife out and threw it on the table without even wrinkling his brow.
He smiled and said to Yuche, “You’ve never even seen your own birth father and mother. How can you get so angry over this?”
“Even if what I heard was a stranger’s encounter I would be equally angry, let alone that it was my parents!” The young man’s chest rose and fell, his whole body shaking with anger.
There were two trails of tears on his handsome face.
Facing the surrounding gazes that watched like tigers, he still feared nothing at all.
“That’s right too.” Blood flowed without stopping from the old man’s chest.
He stopped the woman who wanted to bandage him.
That woman was very old.
At this moment she stood weeping beside him, not knowing what to do.
Under the stool, blood had already spread across the floor.
The old man seemed about to fall asleep, then opened his eyes again and said in a calm tone, “My grandfather was a butcher. My father was too. When I was young I was too. When I was little I felt afraid even killing a mouse. But once my drunkard father came back drunk and said to me—go slaughter that pig. If you don’t go, I’ll slaughter you—I believed him.”
“When he was drunk he really could do it. At that time I was about eleven or twelve. I took a pointed knife into the pigsty, chased the pig through muddy water mixed with urine and dung, stabbed this black pig a good hundred times, made blood everywhere, and at last that pig stopped moving. I cried silently, and my father squatted on the wall laughing without stop. I don’t know which of us two was more like a madman.”
“From then on I started learning the butcher’s craft from my father, killing chickens, killing sheep, killing pigs, killing cattle… And when I was in my twenties, because of a quarrel I killed a person in the street, and in my heart there was surprisingly not a bit of guilt. I fled the city, and it was around that time I became a bandit. Because I loved killing I was feared by others, then became the leader. The travelers and convoys I robbed that year never left a single living mouth. Later even those subordinates of mine feared me and fled one after another…”
The old man knocked on the table.
The woman beside him poured him a cup of wine, hesitated, and sent it before him.
He drank a mouthful and continued.
“At that time I truly loathed myself. Why was I a butcher’s son? Later I came here, still being a bandit, and my temperament also restrained quite a bit. Because I was a veteran, plus I didn’t care about my life, I quickly gained a foothold here. Going to rob exile processions was also my idea. I admit there is no one in this world more base, more cold-blooded, more disgusting than I. Look at these people around you. Some are children snatched from the arms of exiles that year.”
Yuche looked around.
Quite a few people lowered their heads.
They were all young people of an age similar to his.
“You are different from me. The first day you came to Andu City I noticed you. Good skill, learned, upright. Once, before the old leader died, he advised me—even thieves have a way. I said to him, what way? Does killing a bloody way count as a way?”
“The result, heh, he rolled his eyes and died of anger. Now I’m old and have begun to understand a little. Just now I said that to provoke you, so you would kill me on the spot. The result is you still deliberately avoided the vital spot… Young man, when you strike the knife must be clean and sharp. Killing pigs and killing people are the same.”
Having said these things, the old man’s head tilted, and he breathed his last.
The tavern instantly burst into an uproar.
The old butcher before death neither sought redemption nor received anyone’s forgiveness, but he successfully dragged Yuche into the shadows.
Yuche was coerced into becoming a bandit.
This was a matter the old leader had instructed earlier.
Also under the support of such a background and strength, he used only a year and a half to mix into being a headman, quite prestigious among the young people.
Later Klijin’s border army began a large-scale purge of bandits within the territory.
After Yuche heard the rumor he took his group of people to Mokoto and set up camp in the fraught-with-danger Sunlight Valley.
Yuche’s mother was of the Xuemo people.
This kind of people was relatively common in the eastern coastal regions of the Black Feather Continent.
Yuche’s appearance mostly inherited from his mother.
His skin was fair, his limbs slender, his face handsome as a woman’s.
His sun-like golden long hair was straight and glossy.
His nose bridge was high and straight.
His ears, translucent white like fat, were a little pointed, inheriting some of the Xuemo people’s features, but not obviously.
Clearly he was a man easily fallen for by others.
In his camp more than ten women had insisted on coming along sitting on treasure chests during several robberies.
Together they served his daily living, seeming to wait for him to favor them, yet he had always been like a modest gentleman, never approaching female beauty by a hair.
Compared with the former old butcher, this new leader’s perverse temperament seemed not to yield much either, yet the two were two extremes, one excessively indulgent, one extremely abstinent.
No matter what he wanted to do, the people below never dared to disobey.
In the bandits’ eyes their leader was the god of this world, the only faith.
They could rob the rich, rob nobles, even rob mages, and had always been invincible.
This relied on Yuche’s daring and wisdom.
For these people who had grown up from childhood in a den of thieves, understanding the reasoning in it was too hard.
They even could not figure out how this group of theirs actually lived so comfortably in such a dangerous place as Sunlight Valley.
Until this day, when Yuche sat on a hillside near the marching gorge and observed the convoy below with a telescope found from a relic, he saw a young girl, then felt his heart beat fiercely, as if spring had come.
The convoy he observed was naturally Eve’s party that had rashly barged in.
The one who made him fall at first sight was naturally Eve.
It was hard to say what about Eve at that time could draw his notice.
If one had to say, it might be that he smelled the aura of his own kind.
But on the other hand he could not say where this sense of familiarity came from.
This was Yuche’s intuition, a sharp perception born in solitude.
This surprise of discovering his own kind did not completely interfere with his judgment.
He observed that although this convoy did not have many people, every one of them was an expert.
If people like this were only two more, Yuche would probably have to ponder carefully whether to make a move.
He decided to act in a wide mountain hollow ahead.
A white bird the size of a sparrow flapped its wings from his hand and flew far, conveying the master’s decision and orders toward the camp.
Few people would think that there were actually bandits long stationed in Sunlight Valley.
Yuche precisely used travelers’ psychology of only guarding against beasts to give these people some great surprises.
Although the mountain hollow’s terrain was wide, because it was shrouded in dense fog it would make people who arrived here instinctively produce uneasy emotions, especially—when turning from a stretch of road where both side cliff walls could be observed into this mountain hollow, the narrow road became open, and openness meant dense fog everywhere, crisis seeming to hide in every place, as if the next second a man-eating beast would leap from the fog.
Thus people on the road began subconsciously to pay attention to the surrounding movements.
At this time Yuche would have people from time to time make some sounds near the mountain hollow imitating beasts appearing, greatly increasing the arrivals’ vigilance.
They might lighten their footsteps, might think of passing through quickly, but would absolutely not think of stopping to look.
Thus they only minded guarding against beasts that did not exist, and in the end stepped into layer upon layer of traps right in the middle of the main road.
The white bird flapped its wings back again, almost without making any sound.
Yuche drew a slip of paper from the small cloth bag on the bird’s leg.
On it was written only one word: “Ready.”
Yuche pressed his lips and smiled a little, that expression like a gambler about to become a rich man.
He lowered his head and checked the quiver and sword at his waist, glanced at the blurred outline of the convoy that had already walked far, and his figure vanished into the mist.