The Vanished Army

An eerie silence fell over the room.

Everyone was stunned.

That was fifty thousand people! Marching in two columns, they would have stretched for miles from end to end. How could they simply vanish!?

"Maybe they didn't take the road through Huangtu Town... maybe they headed south from Baili Town and entered the mountains directly?" Shanhui said after a long pause.

"Impossible." Jiulin immediately rejected the idea. "Only at our current location do the southern mountains form a sunken gap. If all the trees were uprooted, you'd see that Jiuyao Mountain is actually a towering wall. Trying to cross it anywhere else is harder than scaling the heavens. A great demon like Sister Li might be able to do it, but for fifty thousand people, it would absolutely be a road to death."

She had lived at Yuetai Villa for several years and was quite familiar with the outskirts of Baiyao Mountain. Any herb gatherer or hunter who wanted to enter the mountains took the route through Huangtu Town without exception. Even those seasoned mountain folk chose that path, let alone anyone else.

"What about the site where they were camped? Did you find anything?" Li asked.

"There were no signs of fighting or unrest. Those people withdrew of their own accord." Mu Youhong shook his head. "No footprints could be left on the dry ground, and there were no wagon ruts to be found, which was why the report described them as missing. But they didn't come up completely empty-handed. They found some scattered wild fruit at the site, likely sour jujubes from Ganzhou's shrubs. They taste extremely astringent, and the flesh is bitter too. People generally wouldn't willingly eat them unless..."

"Unless their provisions were running short, and they had to use wild fruit to fill their stomachs,"