Wang An paced back and forth inside the cabin. Outside, shrill howls rose and fell one after another, punctuated now and then by two bloodcurdling death cries that threw his mind into chaos.
"Those trash who don't know whether they're dead or alive!"
He cursed under his breath. Things had gone too smoothly before; under the banner of Three Families Market, he had thought no one would dare stroke a tiger's whiskers. Yet he had forgotten that this was the Northern Wastes—an utterly realistic land that never lacked madness.
Outside the cabin, a chaotic battle involving at least a hundred people... no, a damned robbery was underway. Those desperate wretches, antlike as they were, had smashed through the Floating Cloud Ship's defensive barrier and crammed the enormous vessel full. Fighting had erupted in almost every corner.
Wang An was not too worried about his own safety. He still had that much confidence, and he also knew this was the usual trick of the Sand Bandits active on the surface of the Northern Wastes.
Sand Bandits rarely captured massive Floating Cloud Ships outright. Offending a force like Three Families Market while dragging around such a conspicuous target was simply courting death. What the Sand Bandits preferred was to launch sudden attacks, breach a Floating Cloud Ship's defenses in the shortest possible time, then swarm aboard. Some killed, some looted; before the shipowner's reinforcements arrived—or even before the ship's core defensive force could react—they would scatter like a flock, break into smaller groups, lie low until the heat passed, then repeat the same old trick.
In this process, the Sand Bandits' core force usually numbered no more than ten, but the desperadoes they gathered often numbered in the hundreds. Most of those outlaws were merely at the Spirit Communion realm and could