The night wind swept sand and grit across the jumble of rocks that had just witnessed a brief, bloody massacre.
As Cui Ciyou and Elinalise mounted their horses to leave this troubled place, he instinctively glanced back.
The surviving adventurers were mourning their fallen companions in silence, their faces heavy with grief.
Yet Cui Ciyou keenly noticed that they had no intention of tending to the two bodies.
They dug no graves and stacked no firewood.
They merely offered the simplest of farewells.
Then they left those two once-living bodies exposed in the cold wilderness.
A curious thought surfaced in Cui Ciyou's mind.
He remembered reading about the peculiar customs of the Begaritt Continent in certain ancient books.
This continent's funeral traditions were entirely unlike those of any other place he knew.
They were cruel and primitive, yet carried a distinctive philosophy of becoming one with nature.
A return to nature.
The people believed that, after death, a person's body should return to the land that had nurtured them.
It would become food for wild beasts and nutrients for the sand and soil, continuing to exist in another form within the world's ecological cycle.
This custom bore such a striking resemblance to the "sky burial" of a certain highland people in Cui Ciyou's memories of his previous life.
Both reflected an open-minded acceptance of humanity's harmonious coexistence with nature, viewing death as a return rather than an end.
This was something unique to the Begaritt Continent.
Cui Ciyou could not help comparing it to the other continents he had visited.
On other continents, however great their cultural differences might be,
people shared traditions of laying the dead to rest and erecting monuments in their memory.
The differences lay only in how they handled the bodies.
For instance, several major epidemics