The Great Wilderness Marsh smelled awful—mud and fetid pools everywhere, along with all manner of strange creeping, slithering creatures. Elves, clean by nature, would never set foot in a hellhole like this. So the Cloud Emperor made a decisive choice, successfully wiping out nearly half the pursuers—the most troublesome portion among them, at that.
Time passed second by second. When a swath of red dawn appeared along the eastern horizon, the Cloud Emperor and his group, who had spent the entire night trudging through the marsh, suddenly stopped. Without a sound, they slipped into a clump of marsh shrubs and hid, peering cautiously into the distance.
A force of roughly a thousand men was huddled on a slightly raised patch of dry mud amid the marsh. A middle-aged man who appeared to be their commander was weakly barking orders, telling a group of cook's assistants to light fires and prepare food. This army ate rather well. Fresh butter sizzled merrily in huge frying pans, while thick sausages as fat as arms were fried in the butter until their rich fragrance wafted everywhere, effortlessly stirring the soldiers' appetites.
Several large pots simmered with a thick soup made mainly from beets, onions, and minced beef, while several other cook's assistants smoked and baked hard flatbreads in temporary ovens. Fresh bread was clearly impossible in this wilderness, but fresh flatbread was easy enough.
Soup, sausages, flatbread—being able to eat like this in the middle of a great marsh made even Yun Canglong feel a little jealous.
They themselves had been chased like starving dogs, fleeing in miserable disarray, while these bastards were camping in the marsh and feasting? If someone with a more vicious and eccentric temperament had been in his place, they might have flown into a rage and wiped out this