"This..."
After hearing Murphy's concern, Maxim's expression turned grim. As someone born and raised in Transia, he'd seen more than his fair share of horrors.
This isolated, rugged land was never short of ghost stories.
There were ghouls that crawled out of their graves at night to steal and eat the dead, vengeful spirits that would seize some poor fool's body without warning and tear apart and devour his soul, and vampire midnight visitors who always arrived quietly on some ill-omened night, among other things.
Compared with such horrors, gnoll bandits roaming the hills and gullies to rob and pillage, and kobold thieves forever coveting every candle they could find, seemed downright gentle.
In other regions, gnolls and all manner of wild beasts were considered dangerous. In Transia, this godforsaken place, they weren't even worth a second glance.
They were at the very bottom of the dark-creature food chain. Even children barely into their teens weren't afraid of them.
That wasn't a bad thing.
At the very least, it had honed the famously thick-skinned, tough, and savage nature of the people of Transia. It had even made local farmers bold enough to fight ghouls stealing their livestock with nothing but a pitchfork.
The problem was, if there were thousands upon thousands of these things, it would be an out-and-out catastrophe—one that couldn't be solved with pitchforks.
"My lord, I think we might want to camp somewhere else."
Maxim watched Murphy place the ebony stone among the corpses, preparing to absorb their death energy and complete his advancement ritual. He made his suggestion in a low voice.
"First of all, I'm not afraid!
My lord, if you give the word, I'll stay here and kill every ghoul and vengeful spirit I see. But I'm only unafraid because I'm used to death.