What Eve didn't know was that at this moment, Lin Gui's heart was also churning with giant waves.
The smile still lingered at the corners of his mouth, but his heart had sunk into a deeper shock.
Under the gaze of his Eyes of the Netherworld, the surrounding scenery was completely different.
Floating in the tavern were no longer the usual boring, lazy soul-shadows.
Instead, there were twisted, hideous faces filled with murderous intent.
Their eyes were wide, their mouths agape, and their soul bodies fluctuated violently due to extreme anger.
They looked very much like the merman's souls at the bottom of the Silent Sea that had suddenly lost control and turned into vengeful ghosts.
Terrifying, yet... desolate.
Lin Gui understood.
The source of all this was the conversation of those few hunters just now.
It was that line, "slaughter his whole family," and that heartless burst of laughter.
These ghosts.
Most of them had been ordinary residents, peddlers, and craftsmen in life.
They were the lowest class of this man-eating city-state world.
What did they remember?
Was it a past where they were equally powerless to resist?
Was it a time when they were casually trampled upon by nobles and the strong?
It was the despair of everything they had accumulated through a lifetime of hard work being casually destroyed.
None of them were practitioners; they could not affect reality in the slightest.
But their anger caused their soul bodies to emit a bone-chilling cold.
There were even a few soul-shadows desperately lunging in the direction the hunters had left.
They opened their ethereal mouths, making biting and tearing motions.
Others were using all their willpower to try and move the debris on the ground.
That brick thrown at the assassin was the result of their collective effort.
But in the end...
Nothing changed.
The hunters left, carrying contempt and mockery.
They left behind this group of ghosts, trembling silently in place.
Forlorn, unwilling, and aggrieved.
...If only these damn bastards, just like those nobles back then...
...could be swallowed by demons...
...Then... we could tear their souls to pieces...
...It’s always been like this... always... they’ve always treated us like stray dogs on the street!
Damn it! If I had known, I would have practiced cultivation. At least then, I could bite a piece of their flesh off now!
Who wouldn't want to cultivate? But those noble lords wouldn't let us touch a breathing technique.
Once discovered, you'd be thrown into prison to serve a lifetime of hard labor in the nobles' mines.
Those goddamn animals!!
Sob, my daughter was killed by a passing hunter; she was the only child I had managed to raise.
...
Fragmented curses came intermittently.
They were accusations and anger against an unjust world.
And even more so, the despairing sorrow over their own helplessness.
Unlike the pain and anger of these spirits, Lin Gui felt an incomparable sense of relief in his heart!
Simply because of sympathy for the weak.
Simply because they did not want to see an ordinary family casually destroyed and trampled.
They swung their "hoes."
Such simple, direct, and even somewhat naive anger.
Lin Gui had...
not seen it for too long.
Eve's puzzled voice came from beside him.
She couldn't see the spirits, but she could vaguely sense that suppressed anger.
"What's wrong with them...?"
Lin Gui smiled.
"They are just like me."
"They find those guys an eyesore."
"They’re pondering how to slaughter them and make them eat demon shit on their knees."
His tone was as relaxed as if he were chatting about the weather.
"Alright."
"I enjoyed this 'scare game' very much."
"It’s also time... to let this game continue."
"But before that."
Lin Gui shifted the direction of his staff.
"Let's do the proper business first."
He did not pursue the hunters into the mist where they had vanished.
Instead, carrying Eve, he silently glided out of the tavern and rushed toward another direction.
Toward Deepwood Outpost.
No matter how much he wanted to feed those pieces of trash to the demons, he would not let his emotions interrupt the steps of delivering mail.
In this world, strength was everything.
Without strength, sympathy was merely self-deception.
Anger was merely the impotent rage of the incompetent.
Just like those ghosts, who could only move a brick after exhausting all their strength.
Just like himself back then, when he developed the Shroud of the Gloomy Night that could subvert concealment magic, yet could only witness everything being sent onto that despairing funeral pyre.
He could only let those arrogant laughs echo in his ears.
He could only allow the towering rage in his eyes to extinguish powerlessly.
Facing the wind and snow, the flying vessel sped at low altitude.
It crossed undulating hills, skimmed over frozen streams, and left Whitestone City far behind.
Lin Gui stopped thinking about those hunters.
That was just an interlude, a small accident in a boring game.
He did not know that the farce he had witnessed had inadvertently pushed him toward the edge of a certain whirlpool.
A bottomless storm that the System judged as "unable to intervene."
The wind and snow grew heavier.
Ahead, deep within the gray mist, a blurred silhouette gradually appeared.
They had reached Deepwood Outpost.
This city-state stood quietly in the snow.
Unlike the ruggedness of human city-states, its buildings were slender and tall.
The overall color tone was a somber dark purple, which, even covered by white snow, emitted a profound sense of beauty.
There were spired watchtowers, arched gateways, and ruins of vine and star reliefs on the walls.
This was once a border outpost for the Night Elves.
Now, only a silent ruin gently buried by white snow remained.
Among the seventeen city-states swallowed by the Wall of Sighs, there were not only human ones.
There were also those of dwarves and elves.
Lin Gui had traveled east along the Wall of Sighs, and by entering Deepwood Outpost now, he had stepped into the elves' sphere of influence.
Further ahead, passing through Shadowmoon City and crossing Gloomlight Forest, they would step out of the Wall of Sighs and reach the border of the Elven Forest.
If The Silent End had spread even a bit further back then...
the elves would probably have been forced to move their capital again.
The flying vessel slowly landed on the main thoroughfare of Deepwood Outpost.
The snow was thick, deep enough to submerge one's ankles.
On both sides of the stone-paved streets, the buildings still maintained the unique elegance and decadence of the elves.
The pointed arch window frames were broken, and the vine reliefs were covered in frost.
It was excessively... quiet.
Following his usual practice, Lin Gui chose a relatively well-preserved elven hall.
He cleared the snow and hung up a wooden sign.
【7-Copper Post Office Deepwood Outpost Branch】
Subsequently, he took the 103 letters belonging to this city-state and hung them on the exhibition board temporarily set up outside the door.
The cold wind blew, and the stationery rustled.
They were like a flock of pale hands waving silently in the stillness.
After finishing all this, Lin Gui retreated into the building and lit a fire.
As usual, he waited.
Eve rubbed her hands, which were red from the cold, and flipped open the book she carried with her.
Lin Gui sat by the fire, fiddling with a newly acquired spell.
Flower Growth.
He chanted in a low voice, his gestures unfamiliar yet stable.
One by one, small flowers of various colors emerged out of thin air from his palm.
Red ones, white ones, purple ones—they stood tremblingly on his fingertips.
Like a silent magic trick.
In this way, time passed amidst the falling snow and the sound of turning pages.
One day.
Two days.
Three days.
On the evening of the fourth day, Lin Gui stopped practicing Flower Growth.
A pile of withered flowers had already accumulated before him.
On the display board outside, the letters were still hanging neatly.
There were no signs of them being disturbed.
Inside his mind, the sign-off notification from the System... had not sounded once.
Rate on N.U.
