Ronan and Lao Yao had already gone quite far.
Beneath their feet was an "Old Road" running east along the riverbank. It had only received rough repairs over the past few years, leaving potholes and cracks everywhere. Combined with the recent torrential rain, it had become unbearably muddy. Walking on it felt awful.
Lao Yao trudged along, one foot deep and one foot shallow in the muck. His steps were inevitably heavy, and the farther he walked, the colder his heart became.
Ronan did not need to say a word. Lao Yao was already reflecting on himself:
A road like this... he was already struggling just to walk it. Could he really hold out through the nearly hundred-kilometer route he had planned, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of existing or randomly appearing landslide sites ahead?
If they had gone with the original plan of traveling by water, he could at least have shamelessly hitched a ride on a boat to the next Supply Point... But this storm, this mudslide, had shattered the fantasy born from that sudden opportunity.
Dark-brown mud roared through the river channel just a few meters away, layer by layer scraping away the earth and stone along the bank's edge while also pushing up huge amounts of mud and water. Some of it flowed up the exposed roadbed slope and directly onto the inner road, mixing with the standing water and steadily blurring the boundaries between road, embankment, and river.
Some sections along the embankment's edge could no longer withstand the repeated scouring. They began collapsing and sliding down as a whole, opening gaps through which the mudslide could easily surge onto the road.
From that perspective, those adventurers and mercenaries who had retreated early had truly been experienced and accurate in their judgment. Perhaps in another ten