There was no sound from the roadside brush, no footprints on the ground, and no reek of Monster Beasts in the air.
He continued onward for a while and saw bolts of cloth and ironware scattered beside the road. It was the batch of goods Boss Wu had abandoned. The cloth was stained with mud, while the ironware was still piled in the handcart, untouched by anyone.
He crouched down and examined the cloth. The mud on it had dried; it had been left there several days ago. The brush around the goods bore signs of having been struck—several shrubs had snapped, their broken ends still white, meaning they had only recently been broken.
He examined the ground again. There were several paw prints in the dirt road. They were not large, roughly matching the wolf Boss Wu had described. But when he saw them, he noticed something—the prints were too orderly.
Three paw prints lay in the middle of the road, neatly arranged, with almost exactly the same distance between each one. They did not look like the natural tracks of a wild beast. They looked as though someone had deliberately pressed them there.
Lin Taichu rose and continued onward. After roughly a hundred paces, he saw something crouching beneath an old locust tree ahead. It was not large, just as Boss Wu had said. It had the build of a wolf, its body covered in black scales that glimmered dully beneath the moonlight.
The creature crouched in the middle of the road, its yellow-green eyes fixed on him.
Lin Taichu gripped the Iron Sword and faced it from more than a dozen paces away.
The creature watched him for a while, then rose and took two steps forward. Its pace was slow, its head slightly lowered and its