Returning to the Soul Hunting Forest
Just as Grant had said yesterday, Sean had lived in Wealth Village for many years. He was an old hand in the village, and its only Soul Master apart from Grant.
As it happened, Sean had also left Wealth Village in his younger years. He had awakened an Iron-Spined Cheetah Beast Martial Soul at Spirit Hall, with level-five Innate Soul Power. After cultivating past level twenty, he had spent several years roaming the world. Later, as he grew older, he had returned to the village to work under Grant.
Unlike Soul Masters recruited from elsewhere, Sean felt a sense of belonging in Wealth Village. He did not consider the villagers beneath him, and he was dependable and hardworking.
It was not as though Grant had never considered recruiting outside Soul Masters through the guild to bolster the guards. But most of those he recruited had an inexplicable sense of superiority, ordering the villagers around like servants. Their imperious manner was repulsive, and over time, he had abandoned the idea of recruiting outsiders and focused on nurturing his own people.
Now, the entire guard force consisted of villagers born and raised there. He knew their backgrounds inside out and could put them to work with greater peace of mind.
"Uncle Sean." Su Lin tilted his face up and greeted Sean with a smile.
"Young Master Little Lin." Sean smiled and nodded, his gaze resting on Su Lin with genuine concern.
Like Grant, he had long since come to regard this child as Wealth Village's hope. In accompanying him this time, he had already resolved that if they truly encountered danger, he absolutely could not allow any harm to come to Su Lin, even if he himself was injured.
Before long, the convoy slowly set off. The wheels rolled over the blue flagstones with a steady rumble as they headed northwest.
That afternoon, the convoy arrived at Rhode Town outside the Soul Hunting Forest.
Neither large nor small, Rhode Town sat on a gentle slope southeast of the Soul Hunting Forest. Gray-white stone walls followed the contours of the slope, and a watchtower some thirty feet tall stood beside the town gate. A flag embroidered with an emblem of the Soul Hunting Forest flew at its top, snapping in the wind.
The streets were narrower than Nuoding City's, but livelier. Shops catering to Soul Beast hunters lined the roads-weapons shops, herb shops, hide merchants... Their signs came in every variety, offering everything one could need. Soul Master hunters carrying hunting bows on their backs or swords and sabers at their sides passed in twos and threes, and the entire town had a rugged, practical character.
For an ordinary person, finding a residence to stay in within such a densely populated town would take at least three or four days. Grant, however, went straight to Rhode Town's mayor and found a courtyard residence in an excellent setting in less than half a day.
The residence stood on the eastern side of town, not far from the entrance to the Soul Hunting Forest, yet it offered peace amid the bustle. Beyond the black-painted gates lay a neatly tended garden planted with cold-hardy perennial flowers and grasses, with a stone table and stools standing in one corner.
Farther inside stood two brick-and-timber buildings. The main building was three stories tall, with spacious, bright rooms fully furnished and even the bedding laid out neatly. The slightly smaller secondary building was just large enough for the guards to live in and stand watch. The stables, storeroom, and kitchen had all been cleaned thoroughly; they could move in with their bags.
"A retired Soul Grandmaster used to live here. He was in a hurry to move to the provincial capital to join his son. The price was right, so I bought it outright." Grant led the two upstairs, climbing the wooden staircase to the third-floor balcony.
As he pushed open the balcony door, a crisp winter wind swept inside. Looking out from the balcony, they could see over the town's rooftops to the rolling, dark-green canopy of the distant Soul Hunting Forest, stretching beneath the thin afternoon clouds to the horizon like a frozen sea.
"Do you like it here?" Grant rested a hand on the railing and turned his head to ask with a smile.
Standing beside him, Su Lin gazed at the distant sea of trees, gilded pale gold by the winter sun, and nodded. There was no politeness for politeness' sake in his voice. "I do."
He meant it.
When he first read the novel and watched the animation, he had thought characters at the Soul King or Soul Emperor level were merely symbols marked on a map, nothing more than slightly higher-level extras found everywhere.
But only after actually transmigrating here did he discover that the protagonist's perspective and an ordinary person's perspective were two entirely different things.
The influence, resources, and connections a Soul King possessed in this region were things an ordinary person could never come into contact with in an entire lifetime.
For another orphan transmigrator with no backing who wanted to train in the Soul Hunting Forest, never mind having a personal guard force-finding a cheap inn to stay in would already be a good outcome. More likely, they would have to eat in the wind and sleep under the open sky, matching wits and courage against Soul Beasts and Soul Masters harboring ill intentions.
Grant had many village affairs to handle and could not stay long, so he departed early the next morning. After seeing him off, Su Lin entered the Soul Hunting Forest with Xiao Wu, escorted by Sean and the other guards.
Su Lin took out the map he had prepared in advance and unfolded it for a look. Ink lines traced the rough outline of the Soul Hunting Forest across the parchment, dividing it into an outer fringe, a hundred-year zone, a three-hundred-year zone, a five-hundred-year zone, and a deep zone, with boundaries marked by dashed lines in different colors.
Most of the sections on the map also listed the common Soul Beast species and their approximate population densities.
Of course, a map was only a map. The information on it was merely a rough outline, something to consult rather than trust entirely. After all, Soul Beasts were not crops planted in the ground. They migrated and changed their ranges with the seasons.
Some carnivorous Soul Beasts, in particular, often left the locations marked on the map to hunt and seize new territories.
For that reason, the map was updated periodically by surveying Soul Masters dispatched by either Spirit Hall or the Heaven Dou Empire's authorities. Its last update had been a year ago.
That was the date marked in the map's lower-left corner: winter of the year 2636 of the Heaven Dou calendar, exactly one year before.
Fortunately, they were looking for fights, not particular species of Soul Beasts. As long as their ages were about right, they would fight whatever they encountered.
"Young Master Little Lin, which way are we heading next?" Sean adjusted the broad-bladed short saber at his waist and followed half a step behind Su Lin, his eyes vigilantly scanning the surrounding bushes and gaps between the trees as he maintained a habitual state of alertness.
"We need to go a little deeper." Su Lin glanced at the map and pointed ahead.
Sean nodded without saying anything more, then turned and gave the guards an instruction. They spread out more than twenty meters away, maintaining a formation that allowed them to provide support promptly without interfering with the central area, leaving the battlefield to Su Lin.
Just as they had agreed beforehand, he was only responsible for guarding the perimeter. Unless Su Lin encountered something he could not handle or explicitly asked him, he would not intervene.
He could not speak for anything else, but as long as a Soul Beast was not over eight hundred years old, he was confident he could put up a fight.
As for the guards he had brought along...
In truth, they knew better than anyone that if they really encountered danger, they would be of no help at all.
They had come along for only two purposes: either to serve as human alarms, helping Su Lin avoid risks lurking in the shadows, or to buy him enough time to escape when real danger struck.
"Let's get going too." Su Lin beckoned to Xiao Wu, and the two walked side by side toward the area marked on the map as the Hundred-Year Soul Beast zone.