Chapter 25 - Out of the Woods
Benton intently studied the walled village before him. Neither he nor Su had any experience determining population just from looking at one from the outside, but his best guess was something in the low thousands. It definitely wasn’t a tiny flyspeck, but he wouldn’t classify it as big enough to be a town, either.
He didn’t want to draw any conclusions until he’d gathered more information, but the state of the surroundings was beginning to paint a picture. For one thing, there was the proximity to the qi-filled mountain, about a week’s hike to reach the valley that circled it if he ran flat out. If Su’s memories were in any way accurate, that resource stood out enough that it should have attracted the attention of a sect, yet rank one and two spirit beasts roamed with impunity. An active sect should have kept them culled.
The condition wasn’t new, either. On the outskirts of the village, farms lay abandoned, many showing rotting decay from years of neglect. Others that exhibited less deterioration but more damage had walls around them, walls with gaping holes bearing signs of beast attacks.
To the west of the village, his senses picked up a source of qi or, possibly, a grouping of many sources close together that all emitted qi. Logically, it made sense for such settlements to spring up around the location of a resource, especially if there was a sect nearby that acted as the customer base for whatever the town produced.
Another thing that struck him as strange was the presence of cultivators inside the village, a half dozen of them. That number was way too few to constitute a sect but was relatively large to be wandering cultivators. And if they lived here, why weren’t they doing anything about the high numbers of spirit beasts plaguing the area?
The tug from the System had guided him to the village, though, and every fiber of his being told him that it was the fulfillment of his Advantageous Starting Location perk.
It had taken more than two months skirting the mountain to get to the village, and they’d only been able to move that quickly because they’d stopped hunting, increasing their movement time to seven hours per day and only fighting spirit beasts when it either couldn’t be avoided or would have resulted in too great a detour. Having chosen to concentrate on getting their primary weapon techniques to mastery, neither of the kids had advanced much on that front, but both were close to breaking through to the next cultivation realm.
He turned to his disciples. “I have high hopes for this place.”
“It looks run down, Senior Brother,” Yang Xiu said.
“Don’t look at what it is. Look at what it can be,” Benton said. “We need people for our sect and think about how life must be for those villagers. A rank one spirit beast can kill a mortal, and there are plenty of those and some rank twos nearby. I bet they’re mostly afraid to leave the walls. For proof, look at all the abandoned farms. If we can cull the beasts, they’ll surely be exceedingly grateful.”