I Risked My Life to Save You, and You Go Thank God for Blessing You?

White bones lay exposed in the wilds; for a thousand miles, no rooster crowed.

Shen Le hiked up his trouser legs and picked his way cautiously through the mud. One step, one slip. Two steps, a splash of mud. Three steps...

By the third step, he simply let his trouser legs down, found a long branch to use as a staff, and struggled onward. So what if his trouser legs got dirty? So what if his shoes were caked in mud? To hell with it!

He was past caring!

At this rate, in ten steps at most, his entire shoes would be buried in the mud. Within a hundred steps, the lower half of his trousers—or perhaps the whole pair—would be coated in filthy, stinking sludge!

He had tried it already. Flight spells did nothing. Cleaning spells did nothing. All spells were useless. He should just honestly get through this part of the plot and stop struggling!

He gathered his strength and walked for half an hour before spotting a wisp of white smoke rising ahead. Was something on fire? Or was it cooking smoke?

Shen Le observed it carefully for a long while and roughly determined that it was smoke from someone's cooking fire. He headed toward it, stumbling high and low through the mud for over an hour before finally finding a small village.

The farther he went into the village, the heavier Shen Le's heart sank. Where there was cooking smoke, there were people. A village with cooking smoke should have at least dozens of households and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mu of farmland.

Paths should crisscross the fields, with chickens and dogs audible to one another.

Yet even as he neared the village entrance, he could only see a scattered dozen or so plots of land,