Chapter 36: A New Discovery (An Extra Chapter for Alliance Leader H Aquarius)

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With the enemy chieftain dead, it was obvious that these captives now looked to Dashi for leadership.

The moment Dashi pledged his allegiance, they all followed suit and swore loyalty.

Zhou Xu was not particularly concerned about it. The two sides had only just finished fighting. To expect these people to throw themselves wholeheartedly behind him from the outset was simply unrealistic.

For now, his demands of them were straightforward: all they had to do was work for him obediently. He expected nothing more.

“Is their camp far from here?”

“Not far.”

If the two tribes had been separated by a great distance, the other side could not have spotted them in the morning and immediately mobilized its forces to attack by noon.

In fact, their progress had been rather slow. To carry out their former chieftain’s tactics, each of them had to haul both a massive shield made from a door panel and a skeleton on their back. They had been moving under a considerable load.

Having received that answer, Zhou Xu turned directly to Feique.

“Feique, take a group of men and settle them in. Dashan, bring those skeletons and come with me to their camp.”

Feique understood at once. “Settling them in” really meant keeping an eye on the captives, lest they cause any trouble.

With that arranged, the ten men led by Dashan quickly assembled. Without wasting time, they took Dashi with them and set out.

There would probably be some defenders at the enemy camp. Under ordinary circumstances, bringing only ten men would hardly guarantee them an advantage, but Zhou Xu was not worried in the slightest.

His confidence came from two sources.

The first was his own strength. After obtaining the True Word of Skeleton Control, he alone could raise more than a dozen skeletons to fight for him.

His personal combat ability was far beyond that of any ordinary soldier.

The second source was Dashan.

Dashan’s actual strength had already been fully demonstrated in their previous battle.

To be honest, it had surpassed Zhou Xu’s expectations entirely.

At first, he had assumed that although Dashan’s potential in Martial Prowess had a ceiling of four stars, he currently possessed only two. Even with the bonus provided by his innate talent, he had thought Dashan would be only marginally stronger than ordinary two-star members.

The facts had proven him naive.

Dashan’s performance in that battle had made one thing unmistakably clear: even among people of the same two-star rank, the gap in actual combat ability could be enormous.

That forced Zhou Xu to reconsider what the star ranking truly meant.

The limit of two stars was probably the utmost level an ordinary person could reach through personal effort alone, without possessing any exceptional talent.

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In truth, however, the vast majority of ordinary people in this world could never touch that limit. Most merely hovered around the average, muddling through life until their end.

Dashan was unquestionably above average—and by no small margin.

Unless the opposing side possessed someone with strength equal to Dashan’s, the ten tribal warriors under his command, combined with his Skeleton Control, would be more than capable of fighting even twenty or thirty opponents.

It was worth mentioning that the True Word of Skeleton Control they had acquired from the enemy was somewhat different from what Zhou Xu had originally imagined.

In his mind, once the True Word was invoked, skeletons should have crawled directly out of the earth, or perhaps emerged from some magical array. That was what he had imagined a spell for summoning skeletons would look like.

But the truth was different. The enemy possessed not Skeleton Summoning, but Skeleton Control.

Those were entirely different concepts.

Skeleton Control required the existence of skeletons before it could be used. That was why the enemy had needed to carry skeletons with them when they attacked. Otherwise, their True Word would have been useless.

Even so, that did nothing to diminish its value.

Skeleton soldiers that feared neither death nor destruction—soldiers that could be pulled back together through the power of the True Word even after being smashed to pieces, then sent back into battle.

Even without the ability to summon them from thin air, their value on the battlefield was beyond question.

As they traveled toward their destination, Zhou Xu naturally did not remain idle. He continued questioning Dashi about the tribe.

“You were the tribe’s former chieftain?”

“Yes.”

Judging from the captives’ reactions at the time, it was not difficult to see the position Dashi had once held within the tribe.

“Then why did you choose to summon a Divine Chosen?”

“Our tribe was in conflict with a neighboring tribe at the time. We couldn’t defeat them…”

There was no need to explain what happened afterward. In essence, the Divine Chosen they had summoned had helped them reverse the situation and win the battle.

At the same time, because he was a Divine Chosen, he had naturally become their new chieftain.

“Then why did you gather your people and come to our territory?”

“Scouts we sent out discovered a strange forest. They returned to report it, and since the former chieftain possessed the True Word of Skeleton Control, sending skeletons in to explore was the safest option for us.”

Zhou Xu approved of that reasoning.

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If he possessed those skeletons, he would also have sent them first to carry out a potentially dangerous mission, thereby saving his own manpower and resources.

That said…

“Just looking at the matter of exploration, don’t you think you brought a few too many people?”

There was an unmistakable hint of teasing in Zhou Xu’s voice as he said this.

Dashi was at a loss for how to respond.

He could hardly say that their chieftain had been a coward, could he?

Although Dashi had privately harbored quite a few complaints about the man’s way of doing things, the chieftain had nevertheless helped them survive their crisis and had given them a better life.

Now that the chieftain was dead, Dashi was not about to speak ill of him here.

Seeing Dashi’s reaction, Zhou Xu did not dwell on the matter. It was no longer important. What concerned him now was something else.

“Does that True Word belong to your tribe?”

“No.”

Dashi shook his head.

“The former chieftain found it himself on the grasslands.”

The answer was well beyond Zhou Xu’s expectations.

At first, he had assumed that every tribe possessed a True Word as a sort of benefit bestowed upon its Divine Chosen. Now it seemed that was not always the case.

And within that brief exchange, Zhou Xu caught another piece of information that filled him with excitement.

“Grasslands? There are grasslands near your camp?”

“Yes. There is a stretch of grassland near our tribal camp.”

Upon hearing this, Zhou Xu could no longer conceal the smile spreading across his face.

Earlier, he had been troubled by the environment of the Black Forest. Combined with their shortage of manpower, their exploration efforts had been painfully slow, and he had not even known where to move the tribal camp.

But now, things had changed. An area with an obviously better environment than theirs was gradually revealing itself before him.