The Star Destroyer flew slowly, skimming the ground.
With Diting tracking the trail, Chu Mu and the others set out from the Blaze Tribe and headed south.
They soon came across the first tribe.
There was no one alive here, and scorch marks covered the cave's inner walls.
Someone seemed to have lit a large fire at the entrance. There was even coal residue on the ground.
Sand Sea Planet had coal deposits, but like all its other ores, they had been shattered and scattered evenly through the sand and gravel on the surface.
After surveying the tribe, the group concluded that it had been attacked and its entire population abducted.
This place was only about a hundred kilometers from the Blaze Tribe.
The Blaze Tribe's organizational structure made it incapable of waging a war, and it had no incentive to do so either.
After all, they could trade a little mining work for tasty packaged food. Why bother abducting people?
The aggressor in this tribal war therefore came from the south.
Sure enough, as they continued south, they soon discovered a second tribe, then a third.
The inhabitants of these tribes had all been abducted, leaving only scorch marks behind.
The attackers seemed particularly fond of lighting a large fire at each tribe's entrance.
A fire of that size was not enough to consume all the oxygen inside the caves, so it served little tactical purpose.
Instead, it had a strong ritualistic significance.
Fire was associated with some kind of ritual.
Chu Mu gave an order:
"There's no need to investigate the other tribes. Head straight for the Ember Tribe."
Ember was a tribe far larger than the Blaze Tribe.
If a war had begun in the south and swept through so many tribes, the aggressor could only be