The screaming shaman told Qianye everything as quickly as he could.
He was a very distant relative of Lord Sousa, and even that was enough to land him a fairly important position. The responsibility of dealing with the holy tree also fell into his hands. He heard something calling out to him the moment he saw the holy tree, and he responded without much thought. All of a sudden, the vague call erupted into a thunderous boom that stabbed into his consciousness like sharp stakes. The pain had almost knocked him out.
Qianye asked in greater detail and finally understood that the call probably came from the holy tree itself. The Moorland werewolves almost destroyed the holy tree, so the fate of this shaman who dared to respond to its angry consciousness wasn’t all that great.
The Moorland werewolves had always been ferocious, but they had suffered setbacks at every step of the pioneering process. Unfamiliar with the beast horde’s combat style, Overlord Sousa did not have sufficient troops or defensive arrangements when the door opened. As a result, their forces were immediately overrun once the enemy appeared.
The Moorland werewolves ultimately eliminated the beast army in a bloody battle, but the shaman squad that should’ve been hiding away at the back was wiped out in the process.
Shamans were the relayers of knowledge, as well as the scholars and doctors of the tribe. The loss of such important members threw many of the tribes into chaos. In the end, Sousa himself had to take to the field and suppress the confusion.
The werewolves were quite cautious during the early phases of expansion in the new world, building outposts at every step. They managed to wipe out the beast army, but one werewolf duke and three marquises suffered injuries while fighting against a six-armed commander. Their injuries deteriorated rapidly, and it was only because of the fortunate distance that they managed to retreat in time. Even then, one of the marquises eventually died from his wounds.
The current forest was the second one they had attacked. They had already dealt with the army and its six-armed commander, but Sousa’s shaman believed that the holy tree would make good material for a statue of the overlord. That was why this squad had entered the woods again.
“Why wasn’t the tree chopped down back then? How about the holy tree in the first forest?”
“We suffered so much damage that the overlord burned the entire forest in a fit of anger.”
Qianye was curious. “How did he burn it?”
The forests of the new world weren’t like ordinary woods back in the Evernight World. The trees here were fairly resistant to ordinary flames and could only be ignited by origin fire. It wasn’t too hard to burn a couple of trees, but it would take quite a bit of power to burn an entire forest.
The shaman replied, “The overlord summoned a hundred thousand laborers to transport black stones into the forest, filling it almost entirely.”
“Were there any special people among the injured?”
“The one who died was the overlord’s nephew.”
“No wonder.” Qianye finally understood. Sousa probably wasn’t stupid enough to engage in such a waste of manpower and resources without a special reason.
Seeing that there was nothing else to gain from the prisoner, Qianye reached out and grabbed the shaman’s neck. “I’ve told you everything, shouldn’t you let me go?”
“Is that so? I don’t think I ever promised that.” Qianye thus crushed the werewolf’s neck.
Qianye picked up the shaman’s body and was just about to throw it away when he sensed a feeble beckoning. He glanced at the holy tree and saw that its leaves were moving rhythmically. How could the tree move when there was no wind in the forest? Qianye didn’t respond to the calling as he recalled the shaman’s experience, but he placed the werewolf’s body against its tree trunk.
The holy tree’s bark split open, shooting out countless tendrils that crept along the shaman’s body, engulfing it entirely. The roots then merged and hardened into tissue similar to tree bark, only leaving the shaman silhouette on the surface.
Qianye watched quietly, sensing that there would be more changes later on.
As expected, a great flow of origin power surged inside the holy tree. It was almost as though the vitality within had been reignited—a branch grew out from where the shaman had been absorbed and then began to flower at a visible rate. In the end, a green, fist-sized fruit was born. The fruit’s skin immediately turned from green to brown before dropping to the ground and rolling toward Qianye.
The holy tree reached the end of its life after the fruit had been produced. The body of the tree withered noticeably, and its leaves turned a dry yellow as they fell off.
The miraculous effects of the forest were lost after the holy tree’s death. The origin power within immediately became similar to the outside. Water seeped continuously out of the soil, causing it to turn arid and infertile.
Qianye picked up the holy tree’s fruit and immediately felt something was odd. There was a bit of the shaman’s aura in it, but regardless, this was no time to be studying it. He returned quickly, calling upon the Martyr’s Palace on the way. The airship was ready for battle by the time he was back.
Qianye filled the palace with weapons, ammunition, and tens of thousands of werewolf soldiers before flying toward the Moorland werewolves’ “door.”
According to the shaman’s confession, the Moorland werewolves were still busy building their base, and the construction was being overseen by a vice-duke. The soldiers had yet to recover from their previous skirmish in the forest, and they were currently in the process of transferring new experts from the Evernight World. Their forces in the new world were currently in a weakened state.
To Qianye, all werewolves from Evernight—with the exception of William—were enemies, to speak nothing of the ancestral faction. It would seem that the status of the Moorland werewolves wasn’t that high in the Evernight Council, or else they wouldn’t have missed out on such vital intelligence regarding the new world.
A werewolf fortress was being constructed at full speed within the giant valley. Tens of thousands of laborers were moving rocks and gravel from the surrounding areas to the construction site. They would then pour their load between vertical steel plates, covering them with another plate at the top when the compartment was full.
This used to be a human method of quick-construction in the field, something the werewolves had also learned after many years. However, this was a massive fortress that could fit a hundred thousand soldiers, so the progress wasn’t all that fast.
A group of soil-carrying laborers slowly walked into the fortress and dragged themselves toward the designated area. One of them staggered and collapsed to the ground at that point. Seeing this, a werewolf soldier walked over and whipped that person on the back. “Get up and work! What are you pretending for?”
The laborer screamed in pain. He wanted to get up, but the whip-wound was so bad that he ultimately stopped moving entirely.
The werewolf soldier spat. “What luck, another that couldn’t hold out.”
He waved the whip around and shouted at the remaining laborers, “Everyone, work hard! You may leave this place if we finish the construction on time! If not, you’ll all die in the new world like him! Hear me?”
The laborers continued forward, moving a bit faster than before.
The outline of this massive base had just taken shape at this point—many walls were still under work, and only a couple of cannon turrets had been erected. Atop a high tower overlooking the base, a tall, stern-looking werewolf was watching everything with narrowed eyes. His duke-rank aura caused all the werewolves around him to tremble.
No amount of scheming could find shelter before this vice-duke. His strength also allowed him to stand there from dawn to dusk, almost as though he needed no rest.
Not far away, some werewolf viscounts were working together to lift a ballista cannon onto the turret. The vice-duke’s expression relaxed somewhat when he saw this scene. The installation of fixed heavy weaponry meant that the construction-work was slowly progressing toward the end. He would be able to leave this accursed place soon.
The ballista cannon had only been lifted halfway when an earth-shattering rumble echoed from the distance. The entire cannon turret shook from the impact! The stunned viscounts dropped the ballista cannon, crushing the werewolf soldiers below into meat paste. Most importantly, the priceless heavy ballista cannon was also ruined.
The vice-duke’s eyes narrowed as he glanced into the distance. A giant shadow was slowly emerging from the edges of the valley, but he couldn’t see it clearly because of the direction of the sun.
A sudden flicker appeared from within the shadow as a massive ballista bolt flew over. The vice-duke was shocked out of his wits when he noticed the pulsing origin arrays upon the projectile.
The giant bolt flew rapidly, tearing thousands of meters across the sky and landing on one of the half-constructed gate-towers. A part of the structure was blown into the air with an earth-shattering boom, and the unfilled fortress wall was tilted to one side. When the third bombardment arrived, a hundred-meter segment of the wall collapsed with a loud rumble.
The vice-duke was woken up from his shock, his heart filled with alarm. “It’s a main cannon! At least at the regular warship grade! How can the beast army have such a weapon?”
He sent out a series of orders, upon which his aides ran out of the tower and in all directions to deliver them. Chaos ensued in every area of the base as anti-air weapons were moved out from the storage. However, the second round of attacks arrived before they could even load the cannons.
Two more giant ballistae exploded on the fortress’s kinetic tower. Although the werewolves’ kinetic structure was coarse and sturdy, it couldn’t last very long against the bombardment from an airship cannon. It broke from the middle after two more blasts, collapsing onto a block of buildings below.
Only at this point did the Martyr’s Palace appear above the fortress, revealing its massive frame before the Moorland werewolves.
The dragonship turned sideways. The main cannon was no longer in range, but the dense array of side cannons filled the werewolves with dread. The Moorland soldiers hadn’t even figured out whether the enemy in the air was an airship or a void colossus when countless streams of fire bore down upon the fortress, turning it into a living inferno.
Hundreds of cannons fired at different frequencies, stirring up a row of flames that pushed forward. All buildings in its wake were reduced to rubble, and the soldiers and laborers were turned into charred corpses.
The Martyr’s Palace was just too fierce. Waves of natural suppression descended from the Earth Dragon, pushing the defenders’ morale to the bottom. That vice-duke hadn’t finished issuing his orders when the soldiers began to flee in all directions.
Before he could find somewhere to vent his anger, he flew up with a drastic change in expression. The tower below him was now engulfed in flames, with explosions erupting everywhere. The structure was simply too eye-catching, and it quickly became the target of the cannoneers after the carpet barrage.
