Military Formations Stretch from Camp to Camp

As mentioned earlier, the Beastfolk faced discrimination from humans in the Northern Frontier.

And for their part, the Beastfolk were unwilling to live alongside humans, partly because of their physical differences.

After all, no intelligent being wanted to offer a warm face to a cold backside every day, then spend their life surrounded by contempt.

Only when their homelands could no longer provide enough to sustain them would Beastfolk leave their territories to look for work.

At that point, discrimination was no longer the question. Survival was.

In the interior, the equivalent was the so-called savage tribes deep in the mountains.

"Savage tribes" was merely a slur used by nobles looking down from on high. These were communities that lived as tribes, with their own distinct cultures and ways of surviving.

Nor were they entirely cut off from the outside world. When slave-catching parties came to their doors, they traded pelts and other materials from the Magic Beasts they hunted in the mountains.

That was the thing about slave-catching parties: they were also traveling merchants, bringing necessities such as salt to powerful mountain tribes.

At the same time, they were villains who massacred villages, wiped out clans, and trafficked people.

The deer Beastfolk woman and her companions came from just such a territory, one that could no longer support its people.

But in the Northern Frontier, humans discriminated against Beastfolk, and Beastfolk were naturally stronger than ordinary humans.

So recruiters could not use force against tribes like the deer Beastfolk woman's. Instead, they lured the women away with offers of work.

After the women had worked for a while, someone willing to pay a high price would come to take them away. Once they left the Northern Frontier, they were slaves in all but name.

Moved by pity, Chen Cheng