Chapter 223: Dante.
"Good afternoon, Sir! Is there a place a traveler could stay in the village?" Lee asked a middle-aged man, currently occupied with stretching a wolf hide over a fleshing beam.
The man looked back at him in confusion, then glanced around, and said, "Are you crazy, boy? Go back to where you came from!"
The old woman turned out to be right. It actually took Lee over three months to find the first human settlement. It turned out to be a small village, no more than twenty families.
Before entering it, he took out a large stack of hides from his spatial ring. He prepared them on the way to play the role of a lost hunter, but apparently something was off.
Initially he thought that his ragged looks would work well in this situation, but the villager shooed him away after barely glancing at the tired traveler. This was not how usually people in the country behaved.
"What’s wrong? Are there trouble?" He asked the man, but the latter murmured too late! instead of answering.
And a moment later Lee realized why. Five people, apparently soldiers, dressed in elegant leather armor with swords at their sides, walked over with quick steps.
Lee considered whether he should run, but it was unlikely there were any elemental lords here. He could deal with one or two elemental masters, thus there was no need to panic.
In fact, he didn’t want to fight at all. After spending months in the wild, battling beasts on every step, he was constantly tormented by pain day and night. He dreamed of spending few days, maybe even half a month in a peaceful place to meditate and recover.
From the never ending agony, his mind was short of collapsing, and arriving to a peaceful village was like a dream come true. He urgently needed to settle down the raging elemental particles within and stabilize the three sparks.
Every time he fought he felt like his Dantian might explode, and it was highly likely he was receiving internal injuries whenever he used any of the elements. Probably only the effect of the water spark kept patching him up, but it couldn’t last forever.