Chapter 8

Several more days passed. One morning, when the first rays of dawn fell upon the earth, the vines—now as thick as a child's wrist—suddenly trembled. Their leaves rapidly changed color, withered yellow, and rustled down. Before long, the fields surrounding the village were covered in fallen leaves.

As the leaves withered, the green vines began to change as well, turning golden and gleaming as though they had condensed all the sunlight they had absorbed over time. Just looking at those golden vines made one feel a faint warmth in the heart.

After cheering, the villagers began harvesting. They cut the vines about a palm's height above the ground, then sliced them into sections, each about half an arm long. Golden-white powder fell from the cut surfaces, and quite a few villagers took bites while harvesting. It seemed this was their staple food.

However, Sui Xiong noticed that none of the children picked up and ate the cut vines. He silently gave their flavor a poor review—children were the purest creatures. Even wild fruit that was eighty percent sour and only twenty percent sweet would have them happily picking and eating it. Since they showed no interest in these vines whatsoever, they must have tasted terribly bland.

Harvesting the vines was clearly hard labor, and the lumberjacks sweated profusely. The children and women busied themselves gathering the withered yellow leaves, grinding them with stone mills into a grayish-yellow slurry, then carrying barrel after barrel into the stone house. Who knew what it was for.

There were many vines around the village, and the harvest took a full three days. When only the final ring closest to the village remained, the villagers stopped harvesting and began preparing for other things.

They gathered the elderly and children who lacked fighting ability, dressed them in clothes soaked in the grayish-yellow slurry, and had them stay inside several relatively sturdy wooden houses. Before them stood statues similar to the one on the stone house roof, and several barrels of slurry had been placed beside them. Again, who knew what they were for.

Meanwhile, the young and strong, men and women alike, were busy stuffing themselves. This time, they were not eating their usual porridge, which seemed to be made by boiling powder ground from vines. Instead, they ate dried chicken taken from the stone house. The chicken did not look very tasty, and everyone ate with troubled expressions, yet each person tried their best to eat more. Perhaps they were stocking up on strength.

"Looks like that battle is close at hand." Sui Xiong nodded to himself. He had already decided that when the time came, he would make his entrance as a friendly Giant Beast Mountains creature—powerful, but not outrageously so. He might need to deliberately suppress some of his strength, but that was far more worthwhile than frightening the villagers by being too powerful.

Suppressing his strength was simple. He merely had to make slight adjustments to the fine structure of his muscles and lower their efficiency a little. He was not worried about danger, either. After spending so long in the Black Forest, he had yet to encounter anything truly dangerous. Besides, his greatest weapon was not his powerful body, but Frost Magic. With Frost Magic as his trump card, it did not matter if his physical strength was a little weaker.

Once everything was ready, the sky gradually darkened.

The villagers shut the gate in the wooden fence tight. Several especially strong villagers waited near it with weapons in hand. Some agile villagers climbed onto the roofs to keep watch. Inside the village, bonfires had been lit around the fence every few steps, and nearly every fire had a villager guarding it.

The blazing flames illuminated the surroundings and brought ample warmth, along with something even more important: a sense of safety.

The Black Forest was cold and dangerous at night. For the Watcher, fire was indispensable.

As the moon slowly rose, Sui Xiong, hidden deep in the woods, sensed a strange presence.

Beneath the clearing near the village, chaotic and murky magic was gathering. Magic condensed into black fog in the Black Forest every night, but he had never seen magic this powerful before.

In the Black Forest, condensed magic could turn bones underground into mobile skeletons. Then what would such powerful magic do?

The answer came quickly. He could clearly sense countless skeletons slowly taking shape underground. Before long, they would break through the earth.

"Strange... Why are there so many bones buried around the village? Where did they come from? I didn't notice them before..."

Sui Xiong muttered in confusion. He was not worried that the skeletons would pose any threat to him; he simply could not figure it out.

Could the bones of the dead actually move underground?

This world was truly bizarre!

After a while, the skeletons had fully formed and slowly rose toward the surface. This, too, completely defied physics. Soil was not water, and skeletons were not fish, so why could they pass straight through the earth as though swimming?

Sui Xiong watched the situation develop as he pondered.

When the skeletons approached the surface, the roots of the vines left in the fields emitted a faint golden glow, forming a protective barrier that stopped them.

The barrier could not last long. Dense magic soon gathered from all directions and canceled it out. In less than an hour, the golden barrier was completely eroded by the magic, and all the vine roots withered into black wood chips.

"No wonder they left a ring of vines near the village. So they were for defense." Sui Xiong nodded to himself. "These villagers truly deserve to be called a people capable of living in the Black Forest. They were prepared."

Thinking of this, he could not help feeling a little worried.

If the villagers crushed the enemy with ease, would he not lose his chance to make an entrance?

If he could not find a suitable opportunity, making contact with the villagers would become rather troublesome...

But Sui Xiong soon discovered that his worry was unnecessary. The magic gathering around the village grew denser and denser, and more and more skeletons rose from underground. Their numbers gradually reached into the thousands and tens of thousands. Seeing such a terrifying number, one could tell that no matter how thorough the village's defenses were, they would inevitably face a hard battle.

His chance to enter the scene would come soon.

Thousands upon thousands was a very curious phrase.

When it appeared in a book, even children would not feel much about it. Yet when it became reality and stood before one's eyes, even powerful warriors would be shaken.

And if the word "enemies" was added after that number, it became something enough to drive people to despair.

Dense magic continued to gather, eroding the protective barrier formed by the ring of vines nearest the village. Though the barrier created by intact vines was far stronger than the one made by roots, it still quickly fell before the endless magic backed by the entire Black Forest, turning into black wood chips.

It lasted even less time than the roots had.

Perhaps that was why the villagers had left only one ring of vines. The speed at which magic gathered would only increase. No matter how many vines they left behind, they could not hold out for long. Even if they left every vine in the fields unharvested, they would only be wasting more food.

For people who were not well-off to begin with, such waste was clearly unacceptable.

Though losing a battle would most likely mean death, lacking food in this bizarre Black Forest would also mean death. If death was inevitable either way, dying in battle rather than of hunger seemed more satisfying.

If one had to choose between the two, most people would probably choose to eat and drink their fill, then die gloriously in battle like a true warrior, rather than slowly exhaust their life amid hunger and cold before finally drawing their last breath in despair.

The ancients said, "When the people do not fear death, how can death be used to frighten them?" When ordinary people could only choose between starving to death and dying in battle, the deterrent power of the state's machinery of violence ceased to work on them. What followed would be upheaval.

Things like that were probably much the same in any world.

Lost in wild thoughts, Sui Xiong was distracted for a while. When he came back to himself, he discovered that the battle had already begun.

Countless skeletons surged toward the village like a black tide, surrounding it completely. They continuously attacked the wooden fence protecting the village, seemingly trying to destroy it. Though each blow was negligible against the sturdy fence, with enough accumulated strikes, its collapse was only a matter of time.

The villagers kept attacking the skeletons with burning firewood. The firewood itself had almost no offensive power; it was the flames that truly harmed the skeletons. Whenever flame touched them, they recoiled slightly as though burned. If they could not avoid it, their bodies trembled faintly, and the parts scorched by fire faded slightly in color.

It was like being exposed to sunlight, though the effect was far weaker.

A closer look revealed that a thick layer of bones had already accumulated on the ground around the fence. The bones were light gray, which meant the force that had driven them to rise as skeletons had dissipated. At least for the time being, they could no longer become those terrifying things.

Judging from the number of bones, the villagers' desperate efforts had been quite effective. But when Sui Xiong surveyed the entire battlefield, he could not help feeling pessimistic about their situation.

The number of skeletons did not seem to be decreasing at all.

Using his mental senses to observe underground, he discovered that skeletons were still continuously forming and rising from the earth. Supported by inexhaustible dense magic, the only thing limiting their numbers seemed to be the size of the open ground available for them to stand on.

What the villagers had to fight was not "thousands upon thousands of enemies," but "thousands upon thousands of enemies that could be replenished without limit."

To put it more plainly, they were fighting endless enemies. There was simply no possibility of victory in this battle.