“These are sorcerer lords; they will conduct a thorough check on your bodies, so everyone needs to cooperate nicely,” City Lord’s eldest son Nelsey stepped forward and gently instructed to prevent any conflicts with the distinguished guests.
“City Lord, please spare our lives, we truly didn’t intend to hurt anyone, City Lord, have mercy on us.” Hearing his words and catching a glimpse of the apprentices in sorcerer robes, someone in the cell got so scared that they quickly began pleading for mercy, and the others followed suit.
Nelsey’s eyes widened in disbelief as he looked at the commoners kneeling on the ground.
City Lord Simmons also felt awkward, as if there were thorns in his back, almost wishing he could drag the ringleader out and flog them.
“All of you shut up!”
Simmons controlled the situation with a furious shout.
It was only under Simmons’s pacification and suppression that the group was willing to undergo the checkup and questioning.
Afterward, each person in the cell was checked and questioned one by one. The situations were quite similar; there were no distinctive patterns on their heads nor any other obvious features, but they had indeed shown signs of madness, attacking people or destroying things without cause.
Most had gone mad more than once.
When they were not ill, they appeared no different from regular people.
Heidi and her team conducted several tests on them, including alien particle identification and blood sampling, but still didn’t find anything abnormal.
Upon leaving the water prison, the apprentices checked the magicalized wild beasts that had been killed by Swamp Forest City, finding discontinuous line patterns that were more or less, longer or shorter, but it was hard to find useful clues among them.
Fearing that they would leave, City Lord Simmons proposed, “Lady Heidi, why don’t you stay in Swamp Forest City for a few days? Judging by past events, new situations will arise soon, what do you think?”
“No problem.”
Heidi glanced at the others and didn’t refuse the City Lord’s request.
At her insistence, the City Lord arranged two large adjacent houses for them, one for the Enchantment Group and one for the Hunting Team; although the two squads came together, their missions differed.
“Heidi, tomorrow I will lead a team outside the city to search for signs of energy leakage,” Wolban said, leaning toward the existence of an ancient lab in the vicinity. Finding it could not only solve the problem but might also yield additional gains.
“Alright, the city’s matters will be left to us,” Heidi agreed with a nod.
After the two team leaders agreed on the plan, both squads settled into the large houses prepared by the City Lord.
The next day, in accordance with their agreement, Heidi led the Enchantment Group to explore within the city, each person visiting a different area to see if there were any unusual energy fluctuations.
Ivan was assigned to the north part of the town, an area that clearly housed more of the poor; he didn’t have the escort sent by the City Lord follow him.
The houses lining the streets were short, a single story in height, with their lower walls constructed of bricks and stone rising only one to two meters, while the upper parts were made of wood, topped with roofs of bark, dirt, and dry grass.
The streets were not particularly clean, with wastewater casually poured in front of the houses, and excrement occasionally in sight.
Though Swamp Forest City had seen a string of calamities, there were still a few people out trying to earn a living. They, seeing someone in a sorcerer robe, didn’t dare to give a second glance and hastened to step aside.
Ivan didn’t mind this.
To be honest, searching for energy fluctuations like this was like looking for a needle in a haystack, unless one of them struck incredibly lucky.
He walked down the street at a leisurely pace. As he passed by a spot, he casually called out to an old man sitting at his doorway.
“Sir, I’ve always been well-behaved and haven’t done anything bad,” the old man, frightened, knelt down and kept kowtowing, which left Ivan utterly exasperated. Was he really that frightening?
“Old man, I just want to ask you a few simple questions. Has anyone gone mad around here?”
“No, absolutely not, there’s none here. I heard there were some on Bitter Water Street; they were taken by the City Lord to the water prison. They have nothing to do with me, truly nothing at all,” the old man replied hastily.
“Where’s the livestock?”
“Per the City Lord’s commands, we’ve killed them all. If you don’t believe me, you can search my home, sir. I’m telling the truth; please spare me.”
After asking several questions and failing to uncover anything new, Ivan gave up on the old man who hadn’t dared to look up at him.
He moved to another district and similarly found nothing out of the ordinary.
At the street corner, he noticed someone watching him. Following the gaze, he saw a scruffy little boy peeking at him, looking as if he wanted to approach but didn’t dare. It turned out to be a street urchin, about ten years old.
Ivan waved the boy over, and he came, hesitantly, with his head bowed, not daring to look up.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?”
“I am—a little scared, but I’m hungry.”
Hearing the boy’s words, Ivan was at a loss for words. Hunger had overcome his fear. With people on edge and prices rising in Swamp Forest City, it would have been surprising if he had managed to find anything to eat. Judging by his appearance, the boy probably hadn’t eaten for quite some time.
“That’s easy to fix,” Ivan said. “I want to ask you, why are people here afraid of sorcerers?”
The urchin thought for a moment, then plucked up his courage to reply, “That—that—I heard from the adults that a lot of people died.”
“Be more specific, how did so many people die?” Ivan pressed.
“Anyway, it was a very long time ago. Lots of people followed the sorcerer, and only a very few returned alive. Now all those people are dead,” the boy whispered.
Ivan continued to ask a few key questions until he had a basic understanding of the situation.
A sorcerer once conscripted a large portion of the city’s youth, two to three thousand people, for an unknown purpose, and only a handful returned alive, but those who did had lost all memory of that part of their lives.
Since then, information about the sorcerer’s brutality had been passed down in various subtle ways, even giving rise to many small tales of suffering caused by sorcerers, and adults often used the sorcerer to scare children, causing the commoners here to deeply fear sorcerers from the bottom of their hearts.
“So you’re hungry, huh?”
“Mhm, mhm.”
The boy nodded vigorously at the words, looking at Ivan with a mixture of hope and trepidation.
Ivan, feeling a bit mischievous all of a sudden, handed over a nutrition potion, “Here, take this. If you’re brave enough, take a small sip, and you won’t be hungry anymore.”
The urchin stared at the potion in his hands—this was the sorcerer’s evil concoction, rumored to contain human blood, snake venom, and the eyeballs of owls.
But it smelled so good!
Just then, his stomach made a loud grumbling noise, instinctively urging him on. Gritting his teeth and closing his eyes, the boy tipped a small sip of the potion into his mouth. It was like swallowing a mouthful of poisonous insects, but he fought the discomfort and swallowed.
The urchin smacked his lips; the taste was a little strange, as he had suspected it contained something ominous.
Soon, the boy noticed that the growling in his stomach had stopped, and he felt full. Realizing something, he clutched the glass bottle tightly, flickering his eyes toward the sorcerer standing before him.
Ivan smiled, “Don’t worry, it’s yours now.”
After handing over the bottle cap, he ignored the bewildered boy and continued his inspection along the streets. Discover exclusive tales on empire
By the end of the day, he still hadn’t found any useful traces.
The next day, the group continued to search separately for unusual energy fluctuations.
However, after several days had passed, neither team had found any helpful clues, nor had there been any unforeseen incidents, making the situation very different from what they had anticipated.