Night fell.
Moonlight painted every corner of the Silent Forest, and the whole world shimmered with a dim silver glow, like decaying pearls. Bathed in restless magic and moonlight, this forest had become the most dangerous region on Puji Island.
No wizard was willing to enter the Silent Forest at night.
But that did not mean the forest was silent and lifeless.
Summer insects droned in the grass, vines crept between tree trunks, and hungry eyes prowled through the woods beneath the cover of darkness, searching for something to fill their bellies.
Such as a pack of Huodou.
Under normal circumstances, these magical creatures lived in the volcanic crater at the end of the forest, surviving by devouring the heat released by the volcano. Huodou rarely appeared by the river. The damp moisture left them weak and exhausted, like merfolk stranded on land. Encountering an enemy in that state was practically courting death.
No one wanted to walk down a dead end, but often, that road with its end clearly in sight was the only direction they could go.
Buck gazed gloomily at the silver moon overhead, sniffing the dampness in the air, constantly fighting the urge to sneeze. Yet whenever that itch rose to the tip of his nose, the sense of danger drifting from deep within the forest made him force the sneeze back down.
It left his eyes brimming with tears and his vision somewhat blurred.
Buck was a male Huodou, three years old, with a fine coat of long black fur and a slender forked tail. In this small Huodou pack, someone his age counted as half a fighting force.
That was why the pack had assigned him night watch tonight.
As for why the pack had left the comfortable volcanic crater, Buck no longer knew.