The little girl's words, "Where are we going to be sold?" reached Huo Yuhao's ears.
Huo Yuhao froze at first, then finally understood. He said gently, "You won't. None of you will be sold. The bad people are gone. You're all safe."
When Huo Yuhao finished speaking, the children did not react. They simply stood there quietly.
Seeing this, Huo Yuhao asked, "Have you all had enough to eat?"
The children nodded at his words. Huo Yuhao continued, "Then is porridge all right for dinner too?" The children nodded again.
Huo Yuhao had learned the bandits' location from those two men's memories, but their memories contained only the bandit leader's orders to transport the children, nothing about where the children had come from.
Huo Yuhao wanted to send the children home. After all, these children were not even ten years old. At their age, they should have been nestling in their parents' arms or attending a Soul Master Academy, yet they had been bound in iron chains and transported like cargo. They should go home, Huo Yuhao thought.
Huo Yuhao asked, "Can you tell me where your homes are? I'll take you back."
But once again, silence answered Huo Yuhao. All the children remained silent, offering no reply, their eyes filled with sorrow.
As Huo Yuhao looked at everything before him, that sense of helplessness enveloped him.
"Mommy's gone. Daddy's gone too. The village burned down too." The little girl who had questioned Huo Yuhao earlier spoke calmly. She neither cried nor made a fuss, as though what she described were something perfectly ordinary.
Or rather, all the children before Huo Yuhao were like this. They neither cried nor made a fuss, standing quietly as though nothing had happened. Only the sorrow in their eyes told of how it had