"We're back. We finally made it back alive. Wuwuwu..."
A group of youths, none older than twenty, looked at the familiar city gates, tears welling up in every pair of eyes.
The two little girls in particular wept as though a dam had burst.
Their loud crying immediately drew the attention of countless curious onlookers.
The City Lord's Mansion guards responsible for defending the gates noticed the commotion as well.
A middle-aged man in chainmail, clearly a squad captain, said to the others, "Keep an eye on things here. I'll go see what happened."
He hurried toward the group of children.
The children were only a few hundred meters from the city gates.
The squad captain was an old resident of Tianbei City. Logically, he should have recognized those children at a glance.
Yet the problem lay precisely with the children themselves.
They were filthy from head to toe. The outer garments of the three boys had all been removed and turned into the fabric of a stretcher.
The two little girls were not quite as miserable.
But after more than ten consecutive days of trekking through mountain forests in search of a path, their once luxurious clothes had long since become tattered beyond recognition.
Mud, grime, dead branches, and rotten leaves made them look as if they were dressed in beggars' rags.
Combined with the dirt on their faces,
even if their parents stood several hundred miles away, they probably would not dare acknowledge them as their own children.
The squad captain took three steps as two and swiftly arrived before them.
When he saw the youths, he first felt that they looked somewhat familiar.
But everyone he remembered had been almost obsessively clean.
How had they become like this?
Especially that little girl crying the hardest—she was actually