Chapter 415: Exploring the Ruins

That was all Baiyi could get out Matt — the only witness he currently had. If there was anything else, he would have to find it out himself, at the place where the incident took place.

Unfortunately for Baiyi, this world was unable to handle evidence properly, unlike the CSI back on Earth. In this world, not many could preserve evidence; instead, they ended up tampering with it. As the incident at Matt’s village happened such a long time ago, Baiyi could only hope that a few clues were left at the scene.

A month after Matt’s village was attacked, the village in the first video was attacked. To Baiyi, the timing of the attacks was suspicious. Matt’s village lied to the east of Baiyi’s current location, while the village in the first video lied to the west. After thinking for a short moment, Baiyi decided to visit Matt’s village first.

The trio — Baiyi, Matt, and Lady Assassin Walker — headed to the town closest to Matt’s village. When they entered the town, Baiyi asked the Assassin Walker to wear something more conservative than what she currently had on. When she had done that, Baiyi used magic to levitate her and Matt, after which the trio flew towards a canyon situated deep within the wasteland. This was where Matt had hidden his villagers.

After flying for a few hours, the trio reached the canyon, but they did not find any zombies. There to welcome them was a pile of white bones almost fully covered by sand. That put an end to any hope that Baiyi had of acquiring a live specimen.

When Matt saw the bones, he fell to his knees in despair. He grabbed a pile of bones and began to weep profusely. With a sidelong glance, Baiyi signaled Lady Assassin Walker to gently lead the young guard away. As the Assassin Walker led Matt away to comfort him, Baiyi erected barriers around the area, and then he crouched to examine the bones.

Matt did not stop crying; moments later, he was crying so hard that he looked close to fainting. Baiyi began to arrange the bones that littered the ground around him, and soon, he was staring at the skeletons of the slain villagers, assuming the pose they were in right before they ceased to exist.

All the undead villagers seemed to have been walking around before they perished; they had not been attacked. From how blackish the bones had become, Baiyi could deduce that the zombie villagers crashed to the ground a little while after Matt left them; it could not have been more than a month.

“Any suggestions?” Baiyi asked the Voidwalkers still in the Void.

“In a battle, the only use for these low-ranked, sluggish zombies, other than to create a scene of horror, is to serve as incubators for skeleton knights. These zombies could slowly transform into skeleton knights,” the Lich Walker answered. “What we’ve seen here is disturbing for only one reason: there does not seem to be an objective. I cannot fathom why someone would do something like this.

“To be a successful Lich, one must be able to commandeer the dead. They must be cold and have a nose for efficiency. As for the Lich responsible for this, I feel that it should have more or less the same mentality as myself, so there must be a reason why it massacred the inhabitants of a rural dwelling so far from civilization, causing the inhabitants to turn into zombies. It waited for the zombies to turn into skeleton knights, but, for some reason, it left them here. I think it did this because, somehow, it could not bring the skeleton knights with it,” the Lich Walker said.

“Could the Lich have abandoned the skeleton knights because it found them physically underwhelming after their transformation?” Baiyi asked.

“Oh no, you… You erased the memory I shared with you in the past, didn’t you?” The Lich Walker sounded hurt. “Look, only those who understand the virtue of frugality can become Liches. I mean, you need to regard every bone, no matter how damaged, as something useful for your skeleton knight! There’s no room for spendthrifts in our trade, especially when corpses are hard to come by.”  ( NovelFull )

“Fine; let’s get back on topic. For what reason could a Lich choose not to bring corpses back with it? Baiyi asked. “Powerful Liches, such as yourself, possess pocket dimensions, in which they store their undead army, right? So, what stopped the perpetrator from stuffing the undead villagers into its pocket dimension?”

“Oh please! That’s a big misconception right there,” the Lich Walker snapped. “Not every powerful Lich own a pocket dimension; excuse you. They would have to be as powerful as I am! These losers can only lead their armies around with them, hoping not to get hunted or killed, and one day, they get fed up and abandon their armies.

“Take yourself as an example; after all, you own a realm of your own. Have you ever taken a look at it and the thought, ‘Wow, this is so convenient; it’s like a very large storage pouch,’ crossed your mind?” asked the Lich Walker. “Realms and pocket dimensions cannot be mentioned in the same sentence as spatial tools. To transport beings and items into a realm or secret dimension, you would have to build bloody transporter portals — something that can only be done after involving the goddamned government. We both know how much of a hassle that is! Everything about it is a drag! I was only able to store my armies in my pocket dimension — and summon them whenever I wished — because I possessed the Souls of the Enslaved; it allowed me to bypass the need for transportal portals. As there is only one Soul of the Enslaved in existence, the only person who could do that… was me!”

‘Yes, you — the most infamous, and worst, Lich that ever existed.’ Baiyi sighed quietly before saying, “Go on.”

“So, back to the question: if the Lich could not bring his new pets, the undead villagers, with it, why did it attack the village? Why did it come all the way here? I have thought about these a bit, and the only thing I can come up with was that it had been experimenting,” the Lich Walker replied solemnly. “Only someone experimenting would not mind wasting a few resources, here and there. You can chalk up the abnormal behavior to this reason.”

The Lich Walker’s words made Baiyi’s face change. He ignored the skeletons and hurried over to meet Lady Assassin Walker and Matt. Without wasting words, he led them over to Matt’s village.

The village had been attacked months ago, and all that was left in it was rubble. When they reached the village, Baiyi ignored the weeping Matt and began to carefully comb through the delipidated village with his psychic sense.

He found nothing, though. He had arrived too late and could detect no magical undulations.

Combing the village with his psychic energy took Baiyi so much time, by the time he was done, the sky had completely darkened. The stars that decorated the night sky glowed brightly. Standing in a village, whose residents had been zombified, soon began to give them the creeps; Matt had long since stopped his weeping and was now too scared to breathe out loud.

Seeing as his efforts had gone nowhere, Baiyi decided to leave.

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He was just about to turn away when his peripheral vision caught a part of the desert close by. As Matt had said earlier, One could see you could see the obscure silhouettes of the rocks and other natural formations on the Wasteland, even though the night was pitch black.

“Hmm. I almost forgot about this,” Baiyi mumbled, thinking. He led the other two towards the desert, scanning the surrounding with his psychic energy as he moved.

When they were almost out of the village, Baiyi suddenly stopped. He crouched and began to sift through the mud below.

“Hey, Dum-Dum! Are you looking for something? Do you need me to help?” The Assassin Walker called out. “Just so you know, I have amazing night vision!”

“Nah. I found what I was looking for,” Baiyi replied as he stood back up, with a small mound of mud in his hand.

“Is it a clue that will lead to the murderer?!” Matt asked hurriedly. “Master Hope, I beseech you… Please, right the wrong that was done to our village!”

Now that he had lost the people closest to him, Matt no longer had any goals in life. All he wanted to do now was avenge his people. However, the identity of the culprit had yet to be revealed.

“If you seek to walk the path of vengeance, you can join the Church,” Baiyi said, right after placing Hypnosis on Matt to calm him down. “Tell them about everything you’ve been through, and maybe they would allow you the opportunity to exact revenge…”

Baiyi was not being serious, though. Nevertheless, he did not get involved in the revenge-themed plot of the side character that was Matt, so he decided to give the young guard a clue. To Baiyi, doing that was already considered being nice.

With that, he led the two back to the town they had come from. When they got there, a hypnotized Matt blankly waddled towards the nearest branch of the Church. Baiyi, on the other hand, found lodging in an inn, where he would be staying with the Assassin Walker.

Sitting at a wooden desk in their room, Baiyi inspected the mound of mud and muttered, “We should go visit other places. I’m sure we’ll find more clues.”

Moments after the sun had risen, Baiyi left the inn, leading the Assassin Walker to the Sorcerers’ Association branch in the town. As the pair crossed one bustling street after another, Baiyi, in his heart, admitted that bringing the Assassin Walker was a good decision. None of the passersby approached them because of her. Although Lady Assassin Walker was cute enough to warrant attention, no one was paying any attention to her.

After all, she exuded the aura only the best assassin from Umbra could. This was why, despite her cute features, she arrived at the Void a single woman, just like the Scholar Walker.

Fortunately, this inconspicuous appearance was exactly what Baiyi wanted at the moment. Without any hindrance, the duo managed to arrive at their next location before noon.

This village — the one in the first video — had been utterly decimated as well. This time, Baiyi did not bother searching through every pile of debris; after walking around the village once, he made a beeline for a certain part of the village and dug out another handful of mud.

“This is it,” he muttered. “The reason why that army of undead could appear out of nowhere, but the undead made out of the villagers could not leave… is this.”

“Oh? Did you find something?” The Lich Walker asked from the Void. “I had been thinking hard about this strange situation for a while, but I have yet to come up with an explanation.”

Baiyi’s answer was shocking. “That army of undead never came here. The village went to them!”

“W-what? What the hell?! The Lich Walker exclaimed. “That’s the direct opposite of how spatial magic works! If the village was moved away via spatial magic, then what are we even looking at now?”

“I don’t think this falls into the realm of normalcy anymore. Whatever this is, it’s just as much an anomaly as we are; that’s the level of abnormality we’re dealing with,” Baiyi replied. “Look at this mud here. There’s something faint but distinctly different hidden in it…”

He stretched out his hand, pointing at a section of ashen grey mud mixed with the normal brown mud.

“Last night, I noticed that only the outermost part of Matt’s village contained this greyish mud. The interior of the village contained only brown mud. This is also the case in this village. You surely don’t think that some punk brought some grey mud from far away, just so that he could use it to make a nice perimeter around this village, right?”

“Besides, don’t you find this ashen grey mud eerily similar to the mud from Duat?” Baiyi added.

“As for why this village returned to our realm… Well, I think that there is a time limit during which the village can be shifted to that location. Once the limit was up, the village was naturally shifted back here, bringing the bizarre grey mud with it…”