In Linked Mountains, winter had already arrived. A group of people trudged through the mountain forest, but from far away, they could see firelight coming from the distant mountainside.
The long journey had left Feng Shi exhausted, but when he saw that torchlike glow, it was as if he had been injected with chicken blood. His visions of the future instantly crushed the double fatigue weighing on both body and mind.
Feng Shi was a true mountain dweller. His ancestors had fled disaster and moved into the forests, barely managing to put down roots in the mountains. When they had first entered the mountains, the Feng clan numbered more than a hundred in all, but now, even counting all those related by blood or marriage, there were only a scant dozen or so left.
The stronghold where he lived was called Greenwood Stronghold, named after a greenwood tree nearly a thousand years old that stood at its center.
Long ago, Greenwood Stronghold had known glory as well. Like Cloud-Link Stronghold, it had been a large stronghold. Every year, or every year or two, traveling merchants would come from thousands of miles away to trade with it.
But as time flowed on, natural disasters and human calamities brought Greenwood Stronghold into decline. In the end, with too little profit to be made, the merchants stopped coming altogether.
By Feng Shi's generation, the entire stronghold had only a little over two hundred people, most of them elderly. There were few able-bodied adults and even fewer children.
Among them, children were the rarest. For mountain dwellers, it was nothing unusual for a married couple to have ten or so children over twenty years. But the mountain environment was harsh, and the child mortality rate was extremely high. Of those ten or so children,