[A.B.P.P.E.] Bk 2 - Chapter 69 - Lack of War

Yin Hu had expected a lot more once they cleared the initial areas surrounding the Bleak Forests. There should have been people, anyone at all. Cultivators flying around in groups with weapons at the ready and ‘attack and then apologize’ commands. Everyone had told him about the thousand year war and how all the cultivators would be up in arms at anyone or anything that looked remotely different or unrecognizable. 

He had expected sirens to blare the moment they arrived. 

Armies moving to check out their location. 

Sects to move. 

Yet, nothing of that nature had occurred at all. If anything, this forest was more tranquil than the Bleak Forests were. It was bright and vibrant. Filled with little baby birds that chirped from their branches, critters like squirrels racing up trees, bumblebees and other bugs flying around but not bothering them at all. They even saw a white tiger cub run off into bushes a distance away and vanishing from their sights. 

Jun had to grab Shui after her attempt to charge through the forest foliage and after the cub.

The plan had been simple and it required them to stay together until it was time to split up and separate into groups. With a primary focus on stage one being a preparation to engage in a massive battle against more forces than they could count until Zhong Da somehow convinced whoever attacked them that they were in fact not Demonic Cultivators trying to sneak in behind the frontlines and cause chaos. Not that it would have been an easy task. 

The hope was that after bodying the weaker forces, someone strong would eventually come. Discussions would end up happening and the confusion cleared up. 

Where the hell is everybody? 

Yin Hu stopped at a tree larger than the rest, a basic Spiritual Tree that was neither greedy nor Demonic like a certain bothersome tea companion. His eyes roved through the forest and perception skill tried to find anything at all to lock onto. 

Yet, there was nothing. 

He wasn’t really sure if his ability locked onto illusions or not. 

It hadn’t caught whatever was around the mansion that had the rest of the party imagining things, but he caught a whiff of the palace and dead race’s home. 

The whole thing had begun to confuse him to no end. Did it work or not?

“Patriarch?” Rong approached him from the side. The Spirit had been wanting to leave for a few minutes now and the lack of danger only made it easier to acquiesce to his suggestion. “I don’t sense any cultivators worth their salt anywhere around this area. There's a caravan a few miles ahead, large numbers, but I doubt they could do anything to Jun and Shui, much less Zhong Da or his wife.”

He could sense people?

Yin Hu reached out with his senses only to get a blank response. He turned and met Jun’s gaze from a distance, waving her to come toward them. “Alright. Jun will make sure to give you proper guidance on where you should head toward. In the meantime,” Yin Hu pulled out a few cultivation resources, namely purifiers and body cleansers to prepare him for the same process his girls had gone through to finally get a mutation. “...take these.”

Rong’s eyes bulged out of their eye sockets. “I… I can’t. This is far too valuable–”

Yin Hu raised his hand and pressed the items into Rong’s chest without saying another word. Rong was a member of the Hu Clan. They would get nothing but the best resources he could find within his bag and put through the same grinding process that Jun and Shui had gone through. If they weren’t the peak of their cultivation realms, then they needed help boosting their strength and power. 

That reminds me… I need to figure out how to increase the girls’ mutation rank. C+ is not good enough in a world that could potentially have a Void Blob appear again now that I opened the bunny cultivators city and palace up.

Jun walked up to them with a wide smile. “Yes, Ancestor?”

“We’re splitting here,” Yin Hu turned to look in the direction Rong had pointed at. Trying to get anything of the entire caravan of people that were supposedly only a few miles away. “Just as planned, Rong and his group will head out and gather intelligence.”

“You want me to give him directions, right?”

He nodded.

Jun hesitated for a few seconds. “I was still a child when we escaped. My memory is foggy, but I’ll do the best I can,” she paused for another few seconds, eyebrows scrunched in thought. “Well, we came out from thick forests at the mouth of the Spiteful Mountains. The Hu Clan has a massive cut down tree that is about dozens of meters wide. We were on a plateau with all of the structures close to each other. Umm… I don’t really know where we exited relative to the map either honestly.”

“Zhong Da!” Yin Hu shouted for him to come help. 

The whole process involved in drawing maps from the one armed man’s memory, Jun adding bits and pieces into the totality of the directions, Shui taking part in beautifying it for Rong in order to help make it more presentable when reading it, and even the dragon hatchlings forcing their way into stepping on the black chalk that was used to draw and stepping all over the edges of the drawn map like some border. 

Yin Hu had a sneaking suspicion they had been acting under Shui’s orders to cause the massive mess. 

Both Jun and Zhong Da did not escape until they had a minimum of five dragon hatchling prints on their faces and cheeks. 

That had been the perfect time to finally give everyone their unique Hu Clan robes. Self-cleaning and awesome to look at. Wu Xui had nearly cried as she accepted her own, needing to be held by her husband to steady her sickly form. Hopefully the new clothing would also help them cultivate like it had done with Jun and Shui. 

A stronger outer court would only make their entire Hu Clan that much more fierce. 

Primarily, Zhong Da, the face of the operations while Yin Hu would be the hidden hand puppeteering the operations without anyone knowing. 

They eventually broke their camp and waved until Rong and his crew were finally out of sight. 

Mr. Cupcake’s hideous face would be missed based on the way Shui had cried. She had gone from peak joy, laughter, and happiness to sobbing her eyes out seeing the massive thing skip away in joy.

Yin Hu waited for a few more moments before he pointed in the direction Rong had noticed the caravan. “That way is our first interaction. Be ready Zhong Da.”

“I won’t fail you, Patriarch."

“Good.”

They pushed without stopping until they grew close enough to hear voices. People speaking with one another. Boisterous laughter filled the general buzz that followed a group of loud people that did not believe they could be bothered or attacked by anyone. They were too comfortable and it bothered Yin Hu for some reason. 

Weird. Haven’t even met them yet and I already hate them.

Yin Hu made them keep going until they broke out of the foliage and directly onto a wide road.

A massive train of wagons being pulled by horses and oxen stretched further than he could see at two abreast. Stuffed to the brim with foods of all kinds. Wheat, rye, corn, potatoes, and everything else that could have been acquired from farms. 

On every single one of them was a blue banner with a stretched out white palm and nothing else. 

The reaction of the guards was near instant. The moment they broke out of the clearing was when the people surrounding the wagons and walking in groups of tens all stopped and turned. Hundreds of them, with each person armed to the teeth.

“Halt!” a knight with almost western plate armor ran toward them, still strapping his open helmet. It would have been something Yin Hu would’ve expected in a renaissance fair had it not been for the eastern robes underneath the breastplate and chainmail in the colors of the banners. “In the name of the Numb Hand’s Pavilion, I said halt!”