Chapter 85: Shadow Tower
March 3, 2015
Author: Floating Tower (诸生浮屠)
A day quickly passed.
Soren mobilized three large ships to transport these indigenous slaves back. Due to concerns about the indigenous captives resisting, they could only be shipped in batches of approximately one hundred people at a time. This led to several trips, and in the end, the total count of captives was one thousand fifty-six. This batch of captives was very significant; as long as they could be controlled, the construction progress Soren was making would greatly accelerate, and it would eliminate the hassle of transporting captives from Taro Port.
Batches of people were transported back.
By the time Soren finished his tasks, it was already dark. The camp suddenly increased by more than a thousand people, making both space and food scarce. Fortunately, there was still a considerable amount of rations in the indigenous tribe, and Soren believed he could manage for about two to three months without issue. However, due to the large number of indigenous captives, Soren had to order stricter supervision. All the captives were divided into three groups, with fifty to sixty people in each area taking turns to keep watch at night.
Even the Drow Warriors were assigned to oversee the indigenous warriors guarding the captives.
These were truly troublesome hard bones!
It would be best to subdue them, but if they couldn’t be subdued, Soren prepared to slay them all; he could at least gain thousands of killing experience points.
Human power is incredibly important in a relatively barren era!
………………
Logically speaking, Soren’s tight arrangements should not lead to any problems.
He hardly slept that night, merely dozing for about three hours. There were only a little over three hundred pirates in the camp, and about thirty Drow Warriors, but the number of enslaved captives reached over thirteen hundred. Under such circumstances, Soren found it hard to rest easy; he had even prepared to suppress any rebellion among the captives with brutal means. However, the real problem did not stem from the indigenous captives or the slaves brought in.
It was Soren’s own subordinates!
His subordinates had gone missing.
Not just one, but three people disappeared suddenly in the middle of the night. The pirate responsible for watching the fence tower guaranteed that no one had entered or exited, nor had anyone approached the perimeter. Yet, in this way, three of Soren’s men still went missing, disappearing without a trace. Not a hint was left behind. The pirate who took over for them stated that these three men vanished completely within the span of a tea time.
“How is this possible?”
Soren sat in the hall at dawn, frowning as he listened to the report from a Cyclops Pirate, muttering, “How could three living people just suddenly disappear without a reason?”
These were pirates who had gone through numerous battles, each possessing at least second-tier strength.
Their disappearance was so strange!
It surely wasn’t something that could be done with conventional means.
“Continue searching!”
Soren looked at his subordinate and said solemnly, “Search the entire camp. I refuse to believe that three living people could simply vanish for no reason!”
The Cyclops Pirate nodded in response, and the pirates lit torches.
Teams of people began to circle through the camp, and this sudden action caused some commotion among the captives, but no one dared to act recklessly. The subservience of the lower-tier indigenous people was still relatively high. Pirates scattered throughout the camp, some even searching outside the fence, yet still found no traces. Half an hour quickly passed, and many returned empty-handed, unable to find anything. There were no footprints leading out.
As for the footprints inside the camp, they were too chaotic to track!
Time ticked by.
Without finding anyone, Soren inevitably had to let his subordinates rest, but he felt an inexplicable weight pressing down on him, sensing that something was off.
In such a situation, Soren naturally couldn’t sleep.
So he remained in the hall until a hint of light began to appear on the horizon. At that moment, Soren suddenly heard chaos and noise from outside, followed by screams and cries of agony. He had been sitting in the chair and almost immediately opened his eyes, then saw his figure turn into a blur as he charged toward the source of the disturbance with incredible speed. Before him were a group of patrolling pirates who had apprehended someone, while others were shouting and swinging their swords as if trying to block something from approaching.
The smell of blood!
Soren furrowed his brow and leaped, his toes touching the wall of a building, and then he soared like an eagle, landing in front of the group of pirate lackeys. What he saw left him shaken, and then a cold blade light appeared in his palm as he decisively slashed at a very vague and blurry shadow before him.
——“Twisted Shadow!”
The space before Soren appeared as a distorted picture; under the shadow of the building lay a grayish crack, where three to five twisted shadows could be seen, along with two mangled corpses. Based on their features, scars, clothing, and so on, he could almost definitively identify them as the pirates under Soren.
Shadow crack!
A space passage connecting to the Shadow Plane had emerged due to certain reasons, possessing supernatural spatial capabilities that could potentially absorb nearby individuals directly into the Shadow Plane. These shadow cracks usually appeared in places with a strong connection to the Material Plane and had supernatural power to maintain their operation. Most of the time, they would manifest at specific times, and then gradually disappear when energy operation became distorted.
“Fall back!”
Soren shouted a warning to his subordinates beside him, then suddenly leaped directly into the shadow crack.
——“Sword Intent: Whirling Dance!”
The curved blade in his hand cut through the cold light, avoiding the nearby twisted shadows, and then he kicked the corpses of two pirate lackeys, sending them soaring from the Shadow Plane back to the Material Plane.
Bang!
The two corpses hit the ground.
The space of the shadow crack seemed to be gradually closing because the sky was starting to brighten. A piece of data surfaced in Soren’s eyes, but he had no energy to check it at that moment. What appeared before him shocked him so much that he momentarily froze, then regained his senses and stomped his foot, charging back from the gradually closing crack in the Shadow Plane to the Material Plane.
In the moment before he returned to the Material Plane, Soren looked deeply ahead.
Before him was a tower piercing the clouds!
A nearly intact Wizard Tower, with gray stone walls, located no more than three kilometers away, closely aligned with the location in his memory where he discovered mutated plants.
The only difference was!
The Material Plane was a wasteland, while the Shadow Plane had a complete Wizard Tower!
……………(To be continued ~^~)
