Night shrouded the entire world.
All was silent.
Yan Hua stood silently on the high terrace of the Wizard Tower and looked down. Pitch-black darkness blurred the boundary between above and below, making it impossible to tell where the sky was and where the earth began. The scattered points of light across the wilderness mingled with the scattered stars in the night sky, also making it impossible to tell which were real stars and which were the monsters' flickering eyes.
Only a thin silvery-white line ran from one end of the darkness to the other, instead looking like this world's "horizon," separating one stretch of dense night from an even denser one.
"...There are even more of them now."
Yan Hua held the railing and sighed softly, wrapping her cloak tighter around herself.
Five days had passed since the last regular meeting. Every night, the number of monsters gathered outside the camp grew larger and larger, and she had already grown too tired to calculate how many times their numbers had multiplied.
Of course, part of the reason was that she could no longer count them clearly. Flying monsters had appeared outside over the past few days, and several of the Paper Cranes she had sent out to scout had suddenly lost contact during their patrols—not because they had been destroyed, but because their senses had been blocked by a stronger power, as if a hand had reached out from beneath the night and covered the Paper Cranes' eyes. By the time their senses recovered, they were already far from their original patrol areas.
A few had even wandered into Hermione's defense zone next door.
Under these circumstances, never mind counting exactly how many monsters were below; being able to scout out their general gathering and activity patterns and fly