Chapter 307 — The Upheaval of Typhon

Suo Jilin leveled his short bow at the elven girl standing not far ahead of him, as though he had not heard her greeting at all.

"So cold," the elven girl said, wearing her usual smile—though it now carried a heavy edge of mockery and something uncanny. "All through our journey you kept playing the elder and protector."

"Words won't buy you time," Suo Jilin said calmly, arcane radiance already gathering along the bowstring. "Who are you?"

"Me?" Belna's lips curved slightly upward. "Just a druid... wandering far from home."

As the elven girl's last syllable fell, her figure was abruptly swallowed by a whirl of dead leaves that had appeared out of thin air, dancing wildly around her!

Suo Jilin released the bowstring without a moment's thought. An arrow brimming with arcane energy tore through the air, splitting mid-flight into more than a dozen dazzling streaks that blanketed that whirling storm of leaves with no blind angle. The deadly radiance pierced the leaves without the slightest obstruction—yet Suo Jilin did not relax at all. His sense of crisis drove him to leap high almost by instinct, and in the instant he left the ground, countless black thorns dripping with deadly poison erupted from the earth and ground the boulder where he had stood into dust!

A peculiar floral fragrance spread through the air; an unnatural wind of magic stirred the surrounding trees, and leaves and branches trembled with a rustling clatter. A hoarse, warped female voice, clearly disguised, came from every direction: "I'm curious—when exactly did you begin to suspect me?"

Suo Jilin landed on the ground, and a ring of emerald light spread out from beneath his feet, halting the growth of those venomous thorns and cutting off the pervasive fragrance. Frowning, he watched the figure re-form in the distance—still wearing Belna's face, but her lower body had become an eerie form propped up by roots and vines. The enemy's bizarre shape put him on guard; watching carefully, he said, "I truly never noticed. But just as I was about to leave the courier hall, I suddenly realized that my state of mind and my judgment these past few days had been off. So I went and asked Master Thornheart about her apprentice records over the past two centuries—she has taken no new apprentices at all in two hundred years!"

"To shake off the effects of the confusion pollen so quickly..." The half-woman, half-tree druid laughed softly, while the fragrance around her grew ever more cloying. A great many uncanny flowers were blooming at her feet, spreading their mind-clouding scent through the entire woodland. "I thought that, having been with me all this way and dosed with low levels of pollen the entire time, you would never recall those lapses..."

"You underestimated someone who survived the wastes of Gondor..." Suo Jilin drew his bowstring back again. "Save your effort. With me prepared, those pollens are useless. Without your mind-confounding tricks, you're no match for a high-ranking ranger. You'd best come clean—who are you? What did you infiltrate the monitoring station for?"

"Belna Lightwind truly was Thornheart's apprentice... only that was three hundred years ago," the sinister female druid smiled. "She was an elf who had finished her travels and wanted to go home, but she fell on the road home. And I merely gave her a hand..."

"Besides—proud high-ranking ranger, do you really believe you have the victory in hand? You can resist the confusion pollen, true. But those ordinary rangers and sentries you brought and stationed nearby... can they resist it too?"

Suo Jilin's expression shifted slightly, but his eyes sharpened at once: "I alone am enough to keep you here."

"What a coincidence—I was thinking the same thing. Withering Treant!"

"Grenade, throw!"

"?"

The imperial capital of Typhon, Oldernan, the noble quarter.

Duke Pei Yi stood in his study, where the portraits of the family's ancestors hung on the wall (and none of them had risen from the dead), quietly gazing at the capital's streetscape outside, steeped in mist like smoke. Those buildings—some tall and magnificent, others gilded and resplendent—now wore a layer of hazy gauze. The unending fog concealed many details of the capital; only the grandest noble and royal structures, the ones with the brightest lights, stood proud within it, their lamps and vast silhouettes tracing many a spectacular outline still clearly visible through the mist.

The scene was like the empire's own ideal: nobles and royal house burning bright as lighthouses, guiding the ignorant people onward.

Once Oldernan entered the Month of Fog, it was frequently shrouded in dense mist—a trait typical of the continent's central regions and parts of the north. The calendar's name for the "Month of Fog" had first arisen from precisely this.

In days past, Pei Yi had loved such foggy weather. He loved the bearing of this ancient city once sunk in mist—hazy, yet still betraying hard, angular edges. It reminded him of this empire that had weathered countless storms and still stood proud and upright; it also reminded him of the first time he had taken the field, ambushed by the enemy in thick fog and yet fighting his way out through a trail of blood—the battle that had made his name. But today, he had no heart to admire the scenery in the fog.

The intelligence from the empire's frontier lay on the desk behind him. The specially enchanted parchment had already been unsealed, and the contents written upon it surfaced clearly on the page—a few brief lines in a woman's delicate hand:

Winterwolf Keep has been attacked by an enormous humanoid monster. The creature resembles a giant of flesh and blood, possesses immense strength, is nearly impervious to blade and sword, and can easily corrode and embrittle our walls and steel armor...

The defending troops have suffered severe losses. Fortunately, the fortress has not fallen.

The monster came from the direction of the Dark Mountains.

This was the intelligence An Luo had sent back. Along with it lay another note, whose contents were even simpler—a single sentence: The southern frontier of Ans is under attack by flesh giants; casualties in the Cecil domain are unknown.

That report had come through other channels of the Wendell family.

Duke Pei Yi withdrew his gaze and turned around. His eyes swept across the intelligence on the desk, then settled on the portraits of the Wendell family's first ancestors hanging on the opposite wall. Softly, to himself, he murmured, "Are those truly the monsters you faced in your day?"

He could not help but recall, decades ago, when he was still an ordinary knight-captain, the wandering monk he had met at the empire's frontier—and the warning that man had given him.

He was a rare elven monk. When young Pei Yi Wendell first met him, the monk was wandering the empire's frontier, and it was the Month of Fog, just as today, with dense mist everywhere, just as today. To this day, Duke Pei Yi still remembered the scene: wounded on the battlefield, he had been saved by the mysterious elven monk, and the two had found a hollow tree in the fog-drowned forest to rest in for a while. The monk's head gleamed bright in the mist, and his words remained fresh in memory even now:

"Young human warrior, you speak endlessly of your ideals and aspirations, as though so long as you can lead troops and crush the nation across the way, you will have won glory. But do you know? Your true threat was never your human kin...

"Two nations of the same origin, fallen into such a state—has none of you spared a glance at that wasteland so close at hand? Those monsters were sealed away seven hundred years ago, but are you truly not afraid they will return to this world?"

Duke Pei Yi drew a soft breath, his expression turning resolute. He shook the copper bell that summoned the steward and murmured softly to himself, "Master Delin, you were right.

"They have indeed returned.

"Humankind must change."