Black Feathers Block the Sky! Crows From Afar

"As long as we move fast enough, as long as we can cross Caradhras before them, it won't be so easy for Dark Lord Sauron and Saruman to gather men and forces to pursue and intercept us. After all... we'll be close to Lothlórien's sphere of influence over there."

"As for Moria..."

"Unless there is absolutely no other hope left, then... I absolutely do not want to go through Moria!"

Gandalf pressed a hand to his pointed wizard's hat and spoke in a grave voice.

Especially when Gandalf mentioned Moria at the end, his already low voice dropped even further. The final sentence was so quiet that even the powerful experts of the Fellowship had to rely on their sharp senses just to barely hear it.

Hearing the Grey Wizard Gandalf's resolute words, Boromir and Aragorn, who had proposed the other routes, could not help sighing helplessly. Just as Gandalf had said, although the two paths they had suggested were far easier than crossing Caradhras, precisely because of that, they would inevitably be watched much more closely by Dark Lord Sauron and Saruman. As for the Moria proposed by Gimli, it was a gathering place of the Dwarves, something that could also be called an underground kingdom. Yet one only had to see the faint sorrow that flashed across Gandalf's aged, solemn face to know that Moria was definitely not the wonderful place with wine and roast meat that the thick-nerved Dwarf Gimli had described.

This discussion of their route forward did not really matter to Wang Zhen and the others, so they did not participate. Everyone else silently prepared for battle. The calm of the past several days was about to end, while Wang Zhen continued using Little White, the Eye of Observation, to monitor everything around them.

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