Chapter 95 The Secret

With a high-level class holder traveling beside him, the outer Misty Forest was not much more dangerous to Xia Nan than Rivervale Town.

His daily routine had barely changed.

Eat.

Train.

Sleep.

The food was worse.

Stewed meat and mushroom soup had become jerky and black bread.

His training grounds had also changed.

Instead of practicing in the woods outside town, he now practiced inside goblin nests.

That was about it.

If anything, his sleep had improved.

There were no tavern patrons shouting themselves hoarse in the middle of the night.

No old staircase groaning and creaking every time someone walked across it.

And the monsters that normally hunted after dark?

Forgan’s completely unrestrained Transcendent Tier aura kept them well away from the camp.

Even so, Xia Nan did not allow himself to become careless.

He had only been an adventurer for two or three months.

Some habits might seem unnecessary now.

Later, they could save his life.

Better to learn them early.

Setting warning traps was one.

Keeping watch was another.

Even though the freezing pressure hanging over the area was enough to make the dumbest forest rat instinctively flee, Xia Nan still took the time to arrange simple alarms around the camp every night.

Not one had been triggered since they left Rivervale Town.

That did not matter.

Seeing them there made him feel better.

Keeping watch was similar.

Forgan had never asked Xia Nan to split the night.

Xia Nan proposed it himself.

The barbarian neither agreed nor refused.

He simply changed his routine.

Instead of remaining awake through the entire night, Forgan began sleeping during the first half and waking sometime after midnight.

That gave Xia Nan enough time to rest too.

With his current constitution, half a night of sleep was enough to recover from most of the exhaustion built up during the day’s training.

Tonight was different.

The crescent moon, mostly hidden behind thick clouds, had barely risen above the treetops when Forgan woke.

Much earlier than usual.

And unlike the previous nights, he did not begin sharpening his obsidian handaxe with frost and ice.

He only sat beside the fire.

Silent.

The simple chain rested in his hand.

His eyes remained fixed on it.

Forgan naturally noticed Xia Nan looking over from the other side of the camp.

The young adventurer was observant enough to realize something was wrong.

Forgan had no intention of explaining.

The cold metal links wrapped around his fingers.

His thumb brushed over the pendants one by one.

The focus in his ice-blue eyes slowly drifted.

The Frostmoss Highlands were a brutal place.

Blizzards raged across the land.

Cold winds tore over the plateau.

Ice and snow formed a natural wall that had isolated generations of inhabitants from the rest of the world.

Over the long years, young clansmen occasionally left the snowfields to find their own paths.

Some returned.

They brought stories.

News.

Changes from the outside world.

But the Frostthroat Clan remained the Frostthroat Clan.

Its barbarians still followed the traditions of their ancestors.

One of those traditions concerned prey.

The hunt a warrior was most proud of in life was preserved.

Sometimes as jewelry.

Sometimes as a tattoo.

Sometimes as both.

The necklace in Forgan’s hand was simple and sturdy.

It had accompanied him for many years.

But he had only begun wearing it after adulthood.

His earliest memory of killing went back to the age of six.

An icefield lemming had panicked for some unknown reason and darted into their home.

The details were mostly gone now.

Too many years had passed.

What remained was one moment.

Forgan driving an ice-bladed dagger, a gift from one of the clan’s warriors, into the lemming’s spine.

The light fading from its tiny eyes.

The muscles beneath its fur twitching.

Then going still.

It had not traumatized him.

It had not frightened him.

Warriors who fought against ice and snow would encounter death sooner or later.

That was simply life in the highlands.

His strongest memories from that day were far more practical.

The lemming stew that night had smelled wonderful.

And the little vest made from its hide had helped him survive the deep winter.

At twelve, Forgan had already become the strongest child in the tribe.

Under the guidance of the clan’s warriors, he had begun real combat training.

One day, while walking home from the training grounds, he encountered a starving snow spider.

The fight left a bloody wound on the left side of his chest, close to the heart.

The scar remained even now.

Years later.

The pincer that had caused it did not survive.

Forgan smashed it apart and turned a fragment into a pendant.

It still hung from the outermost section of the necklace.

At sixteen, Forgan followed the hunting party deep into the snowfields.

He became separated from the group.

Then a newly hatched white dragon mistook him for prey.

Among chromatic dragons, white dragons were considered the least intelligent and most primitive.

Some struggled with problems as basic as finding enough food.

Driven by hunger, the hatchling attacked Forgan like a wild beast.

They fought in the snow.

Clawed.

Bit.

Struck.

Killed.

Forgan emerged drenched in dragon blood.

He kept a section from the tip of the white dragon’s tailbone and later made it into another pendant.

At twenty-two, the prey was a juvenile centipede beast.

The details of that battle had faded.

The companion had not.

A winter wolf fought beside him.

A partner he trusted enough to turn his back on without hesitation.

That same wolf’s fur now covered his shoulders.

Bone pins pierced the wolf muzzles at his chest.

Even in death, its soft fur still shielded him from wind and frost.

Then came the age of thirty-nine.

Snow filled the sky.

An abominable yeti howled across the frozen peaks with enough force to trigger avalanches.

Forgan pushed through the sound.

Closed the distance.

Seized its curled, ram-like horns.

And cut its head from its neck.

That kill fulfilled the final condition.

Forgan stepped into the Transcendent Tier.

But not through the class he had once planned to take.

Originally, he had intended to remain beneath the protection of the heroic spirits.

To inherit the power of the Northlands.

Frost.

Nature.

Rage.

Then advance into [Icecrown Warrior], a class with a clear progression path that suited the fury of a barbarian.

That future had died with the Frostthroat Clan.

A ruined homeland.

More than a hundred corpses buried by his own hands.

There had been no room left in Forgan’s heart for anything except vengeance.

So he paid a different price.

Faith.

And his soul after death.

In exchange, [God of the Hunt], [Black-Blooded One] Malar gave him the power he needed.

Forgan advanced into [Mourning-Frost Oathbound].

An oath became the chain around his heart.

Grief became frost.

And within that frost, a wolf spirit searched endlessly for the trail of his enemy.

That was how Forgan had crossed half the continent.

From the Frostmoss Highlands of the Northlands…

All the way to the Misty Forest.

He would find that beast.

Twist its neck apart.

Then take a thorn tangled in fungal threads and place it in the empty space deliberately left at the center of his necklace.

Once that vow was fulfilled…

Under the gaze of the God of the Hunt, Forgan would complete his next class advancement.

One final step before Legendary.

…

Across the fire, Xia Nan sat comfortably enough.

The warmth from the burning branches had already driven the last traces of cold from his body.

He was used to it.

During the past two days, every training session with [Fang Hunt] had involved Forgan using frost to guide his muscles and movements.

At this point, Xia Nan was more or less accustomed to being chilled.

Even without the campfire, ten or twenty minutes of training would raise his body temperature enough to drive the cold away.

The night had deepened, but it was still too early for him to sleep.

With his current constitution, if he lay down now, he would wake naturally before dawn with all his stamina restored.

Then he would be stuck awake at an inconvenient hour with nothing useful to do.

So instead, Xia Nan pulled out the small wooden chest he had found in the hobgoblin nest.

He opened it.

Gold gleamed beneath the firelight.

Xia Nan picked up one coin and turned it between his fingers.

The golden reflection shone in his dark eyes.

His expression gradually became thoughtful.

The hobgoblin he had fought during the day had completely overturned his assumptions about goblins.

It had felt like a different species.

Ordinary goblins were chaotic and half-mad.

Bugbears were violent and straightforward.

Hobgoblins were neither.

They could think.

Organize.

Command.

The one he fought had shown enough tactical awareness to direct its underlings during battle.

More importantly, it had somehow forced a group of stupid, vicious greenskins to actually obey orders.

That alone was impressive.

If a sufficiently powerful hobgoblin ever managed to gather and unify enough goblin settlements…

Xia Nan could easily imagine it becoming a serious threat to nearby human towns.

There was another side to that intelligence, though.

For adventurers, smarter goblins meant richer goblins.

Hobgoblins understood accumulation.

They stored money.

They collected useful equipment.

That meant an adventurer who cleared one of their nests did not need to kneel beside every foul-smelling corpse and search through filthy clothes hoping to find a few coins.

Find the hobgoblin’s hidden cache.

Take everything at once.

Efficient.

Even the nest itself was more tolerable.

There were no huge piles of feces soaked into muddy floors by urine.

Far fewer half-eaten corpses had been left to rot in corners.

And those goblin children he had seen before…

Xia Nan’s thoughts stopped.

His fingers froze around the gold coin.

Something was wrong.

Over the past few months in Rivervale Town, he had learned quite a bit about goblins.

Among low-level monsters, they were one of the most numerous species on the continent.

They were like cockroaches.

Or mosquitoes.

Kill them.

Clear the nest.

Search the area.

Confirm there were no survivors.

It did not matter.

Ten or twenty days later, another group would somehow appear.

Professional adventurers could clear the same region again and again.

The goblins always came back.

Almost as if they grew from the ground.

That was strange enough on its own.

But there was another fact.

Goblins had no females.

If that was true, then maintaining such an enormous population should have required them to abduct large numbers of women from other races.

That was the obvious conclusion.

Except…

Xia Nan had cleared quite a few goblin nests over the last several days.

He had not seen a single captive woman.

Not one.

More strangely, juvenile goblins were rare too.

Most of the goblins he had seen looked almost identical in age and development.

Like products stamped from the same mold.

One after another.

Xia Nan frowned.

Strange.

Far too strange.

Once he noticed the inconsistency, he could no longer ignore it.

His curiosity grew quickly.

Across the fire, Forgan was still turning the necklace between his fingers.

The barbarian was awake.

He showed no sign of going back to sleep.

Xia Nan considered his wording.

Then asked.

He had expected little from the attempt.

Forgan was not exactly known for long conversations.

Even if he knew something, Xia Nan doubted he would explain much.

Unexpectedly…

Perhaps because of the mushroom they had found growing from the hobgoblin’s corpse earlier that day, Forgan did answer.

Slowly.

In short, measured sentences.

He told Xia Nan about a secret from ancient times.

A story circulated mostly among class holders.

According to that story, many thousands of years ago…

Goblins had been different.

Or perhaps it was more accurate to say they had once been normal.

Male.

Female.

Able to reproduce naturally like the other living races of the world.

They had still been unpleasant creatures.

They raided travelers.

Attacked caravans.

Stole.

Killed.

But such incidents were far less frequent than they were now.

At the time, goblins were simply common low-level monsters.

Then came a war.

Not an ordinary war between kingdoms.

Not even a war between races.

A conflict that engulfed the entire continent.

Countless nations.

Countless peoples.

Several divine pantheons.

The scale was so vast that Legendary figures standing at the absolute peak of mortal life died in numbers that would have been unthinkable in any other age.

Forgan described it simply.

Their corpses could have filled the widest Sacred Forge Square in a dwarven underground kingdom.

And every night…

Meteors crossed the sky.

Except they were not meteors.

They were deities.

Falling from the heavens.

Dying.

Among the gods dragged into that war was Maglubiyet.

[Supreme Chieftain].

[Lord of Depths and Darkness].

Chief god of the Goblin Pantheon.

A deity who held authority over domains such as war and domination.

The exact course of that ancient conflict had long since disappeared into history.

Too much time had passed.

Too much knowledge had been lost.

But one critical turning point survived through oral tradition.

At some point during the war, several hostile gods joined forces against the goblin race.

The result was catastrophic.

Goblins were almost completely wiped from the continent.

Settlement after settlement disappeared.

Army after army vanished.

Eventually, only a few remained.

A tiny population surviving beneath the protection of their god.

Maglubiyet fared little better.

Despite once possessing powerful divine authority, even he began losing his domains as the war continued.

The Goblin Pantheon approached collapse.

The goblin race stood on the edge of extinction.

And then…

Maglubiyet disappeared.

No final battle.

No glorious last stand.

No corpse.

He simply vanished.

And he took the last few hundred goblins on the continent with him.

All of them disappeared from the multiverse.

Xia Nan blinked.

“He ran?”

Confusion filled his face.

“Then where did all the greenskins I killed today come from?”

Forgan shook his head.

“By the time goblins appeared in the world again…”

“The war had already been over for several centuries.”

Maglubiyet had returned too.

Back in his divine realm.

Restored.

Powerful.

Perhaps even stronger than before.

No one knew what had happened during those missing centuries.

No one knew where Maglubiyet had taken the surviving goblins.

No one knew why the goblin race returned without any concept of sex.

No males and females.

Just goblins.

No one knew how Maglubiyet had reclaimed the divine authority he lost.

And perhaps strangest of all…

No one knew why the other gods simply allowed it.

No punishment.

No renewed war.

No obvious reaction.

As though everyone in the heavens had silently agreed not to question what had happened.

The camp fell silent.

Only the fire remained.

Crackle.

Pop.

Crackle.

Xia Nan slowly processed everything he had just heard.

He had asked a casual question.

Somehow, he had received an ancient mystery involving extinct populations, divine wars, vanished gods, and several centuries of missing history.

That escalated quickly.

Still…

Interesting as it was, Xia Nan did not spend too much time worrying about it.

What would be the point?

He was not even a class holder yet.

These were matters involving gods and ancient wars.

With his current strength, he could not even touch the edge of such things.

Better to keep the information in mind and worry about something relevant.

Like [Fang Hunt].

When was that damned technique finally going to reach the Novice level?

Xia Nan shook his head.

Forgan had already put the necklace back around his neck.

“So the plan is to take me to the nearest town first, then you’ll go handle your own business?”

“Yes.”

“Back to Rivervale Town?”

“Too far.”

Xia Nan paused.

“Then where are we going?”

Forgan looked into the fire.

“Kalanfor.”