At the edge of a continuous mountain range, at the foot of a small hill.
Chen Mu watched Bai Qing lead more than a dozen auxiliary soldiers into the mountains until they disappeared, then withdrew his gaze.
Over the past two days, he had already sent out five or six search parties like Bai Qing's.
He did not require them to find anyone. Finding even a few clues would suffice; he and Shen Yan would handle the actual tracking.
But the teams had only been out for two days, and there had been no response yet.
Coming back to himself, Chen Mu merged into a breeze and arrived atop the small hill in the blink of an eye. A mud-plastered single-story house, square as a box, stood before him.
Shi Dechun was leading several people in pulling weeds and moving stones, repairing and leveling the open ground before the house.
Chen Mu did not intend to wander around recklessly. He had chosen this small hill as a temporary base, and the box-shaped house was the observation post he had prepared.
Camp Hai's sudden collapse still left him somewhat bewildered. He had no idea what exactly had happened.
Having learned his lesson, he planned to have Old Man Shi lead several sharp-eared, keen-eyed auxiliary soldiers to remain stationed here. They did not need to uncover much useful information; they simply could not afford to miss any major changes.
Chen Mu turned to look down the mountainside again.
Several hundred Yinlings from the Yuan Gathering Department were cutting trees and digging earth there. They had cleared out an open area nearby, where neatly trimmed logs stripped of their branches were piled into small hills, alongside half-man-high mud bricks arranged in orderly rows.
There were three thousand Yinlings. Chen Mu did not have