28. Departure and return

My mood had become so bad that even Kuz knew this was the time to avoid me. I sat on the back of the thunder rhinoceros with my head hanging, while Kuz and Uncle Fred helped the old kuru to bundle his luggage. We had prepared very well for this trip into the mountains, and with the original luggage of herbs and tents and felts that we needed to have to carry, it made a huge bag appear on the back of the already not very generous rhinoceros, which looked incongruous from a distance. Pushkin, the handler sitting at the front of the neck of the thunder rhino, kept reminding us not to overload the load; we were riding with a male thunder rhino who was very grumpy and often had temper tantrums because he was just about to go into rut.

I was too young to help much, I just watched in silence as the whole camp was torn apart, everything that could be taken away was thrown onto the rhinoceros's back, the whole caravan had gone out a few hundred metres at the head of the line, and sitting on the thunder rhinoceros looking from afar the long line looked like a dirt snake slithering across the grassland. There were still a dozen Thunder Rhinos in the camp ready to go, ours were lined up very far back and there was still plenty of time to get organized.

With his hands clasped to his chest, Master Leipas stood atop the last of the thunder rhinos in charge of the line, his cold eyes unreadable, looking like a statue from afar. Silently, he watched as the last of the thunder rhinoceroses followed the distant group on their journey to the orc horde. This was arguably the last leg of the journey, and if it went well, they would be back in Sloat, the most northern city the humans had ever known, before the end of the year.

The thirteen caravans of the dance troupe had been prepared early, and each caravan had a colourful array of spells of light appearing on its body, flickering and hidden inside. Each caravan was inscribed with countless magic formations, which were eventually linked together by the master inscribers to form a huge matrix of complementary magic. "Wind Walk", "Speed Stimulation", "Wind Formation", "Group Acceleration", etc. "Force Field Control" and other magical statuses were added to the entire caravan, and with the dull mooing of the bison of the swamp clan, who were reputed to be born with divine strength, the caravan of dancing groups eventually merged into the larger group, slowly following behind.

The adventurers of the Prosperity Adventurers rode at the front of the group on their gubbo horses, their scouts by now running ten miles away and signalling if they spotted anything dangerous.

I was still standing on the highest part of the thunder rhino's spine looking out from afar, a tremor of the thunder rhino's huge, tank-thick thighs on the grass beneath me. The footsteps of seventy thunder rhinos sounded like war drums on the march. Old Kulu sat on the leather saddle behind the thunder rhinos, resting his eyes, while Kurtz crouched beside Uncle Fred, muttering something, looking back at the trampled camp behind him, where there were only piles of ashes and dug-up pastures, with the white bones of abandoned antelopes, causing a steady stream of vultures to converge in the sky, seemingly waiting patiently for the caravan to move on. Afterwards, they dropped down in search of some scraps of food.

"Don't look, Ja. Look what I've got!" Kurtz said to me with a grin of forced amusement, leaning over the cargo box beside me. We both lurched together with the rhythm of the Thunder Rhino as it walked, like a sailboat traveling across the sea chopping through wave after wave of wind and wolves.

I withdrew my gaze with some loss, my mood extraordinarily low. Perhaps I would never see Sister Koko again on the rest of the journey, and I had even thought that I would follow her back to her hometown in those future days when I was separated from Kurtz, thinking that maybe I would settle down there, that I would see those groves of golden apples she talked about on the farm, that I would see the banks of the Surin River in front of her house, that I could sit for an afternoon in the milk tea shop that sold nutty little shortbread cookies down the street from her house, but I have yet to achieve any of these.

I wasn't in the mood to fool around with him and watched as he spread his hands to show me a few white and crystal wind wolf toe bones on his hands, realising that he wanted to make wolf bone buttons with me, but I never got up the nerve to look away, avoiding his gaze and saying, "Sorry, Kuz!"

Old Kru gave me a meaningful look and said, in a hushed, slow voice, "Perhaps you could try to calm your mind! Try meditating on those things I taught you last night, learning passes the time on a boring journey."

I nodded and sat meekly beside the old kuru, and Kurtz hung his head and sat quietly beside me. This was how the three of us had slowly spent the previous seventeen months of the caravan's journey through the New Siacis Mountains, sitting in the seat of the saddle behind the Thundering Rhino. It was Old Kulu who suggested that I once again learn my new "Cloak of Shadows", a simplified version of the "Cloak of Shadows" that Old Kulu had carefully devised for me after searching through countless tomes, a skill that is similar to the Elvish natural skill This skill is similar to the Elf's natural skill "Concealment" or the Ranger's skill "Lurking", both of which are stealth skills. The Cloak of Shadows is a skill that uses magical power to change the light around your body to hide you in the dark.

Even so, this elementary magic skill still required me to use both a spell and a magical array to perform it, and it required almost all of my magical power to perform it once. Even so, there was a major drawback to the simplified Shadow Cloak, in that I had to use it in dim light or in the shadows.

Only a rookie like me, who had no way of using the primary magic of Time Stop, would worry about something like the spell being out of sync with the drawn magic formation, because with the self-propelled Time Stop With the self-cast "time standstill", today's wizards can simply recite the spell and succeed in the spell formation in this state without the embarrassment of the spell being out of sync with the spell formation. But Old Kulu said to me that this was actually a good thing for me to seriously appreciate the subtle relationship between the spell and the magic formation.

Old Kulu said that nowadays, wizards who have awakened their magic pools learn to eat up their magic skills very quickly, and there are instructors at the magic academy who specialise in teaching magic spells and instructors who specialise in drawing magic formations. Few apprentice magicians care about the unique rhythm of the spell itself in relation to the spell formation. The spell is also a brainless process, requiring only a steady output of the Force to produce a stable spell in the time it takes to draw it. However, Kulu said that magicians nowadays rely too much on the Time Stop spell, and no flaws have been found yet, but he still hoped that I would be able to take the time to learn the Time Stop spell when I don't have enough magic power to do so. He still wanted me to take the time to learn the subtle relationship between the spell and the spell formation.

I don't know why, but my keen magical perception is slowly strengthening my other five senses, which I have only recently discovered. At first I wondered if Kurtz was a nearsighted werewolf, but after I tested my eyesight with Uncle Fred, I realised that my eyes were really good, and my hearing and sense of smell were still far behind Kurtz's, but they were also much better than Uncle Fred's.

Sometimes I wondered if Uncle Fred had been emptied of his body by drink and sex, causing a decline in many aspects of physical fitness, but I didn't want to expose these things that made me different from the others, and I didn't want to try it on anyone else.

Leipas, the highest leader of the caravan, was picked up by Lord Breguet, the head of the Prosperity Adventurers, on a gubernatorial horse after the caravan was on track, and returned to the front of the caravan on top of the Thunder Rhino, which was the caravan's leader's seat. When the strong warrior on the horse, wearing full armour, passed by my Thunder Rhino, suddenly I couldn't help but feel that the man was a wall, it was a very strange feeling, just like when I was at the foot of the Great Wall, looking up at the undulating Great Wall, I would have a spiritual tremor.

At that moment, the mighty and strong Breguet suddenly seemed to look at us with a sense of purpose, and his stern eyes swept over us quickly, with such an overwhelming murderous aura that I turned instantly pale with fear. The old kuru sitting next to me simply raised his eyes and gave Breguet a glance, and the head of Breguet gave us a small, friendly smile, tugging at the corners of his mouth to withdraw that murderous aura. In a matter of moments, Breguet and the mysterious magician hiding in his cloak on the gubernatorial horse beside him instantly ran off a few dozen metres away.

And I still had a keen feeling that just a moment before, the eccentric magician hiding in the cloak suddenly looked back at me, his viper-like eyes sweeping over me, sending chills down the back of my spine.

"Humph!" The three of them lowered their bodies in unison, raised their whips and smacked their horses on the buttocks, and the two galloping gubbins neighed in unison, as if they were frightened and scurried forward with the speed of lightning.

When the men were far away, the old kuru withdrew his gaze and turned his head to look at me, but said nothing.

"Sensei, why do I feel like the head of the Prosperity Adventure Group is like a tall wall?" I still couldn't hold back in my heart and asked the question out.

Old Kuru grinned faintly and nudged my head with his hand and said, "I thought you could hold back from asking. That's because your sixth sense intuition is already sharp enough to feel the 'momentum' in Breguet's body. Oi! These things are knowledge that even in war schools are only accessible to seven or eight-something warrior apprentices, and in your words: only a peak ninth level warrior with one foot on the threshold of the tenth level will see a significant increase in strength after becoming a tenth level warrior. Before entering level ten, every warrior needs to break through a bottleneck, and that is the comprehension of 'potential'."

"That wall is his 'momentum'?" I asked.

Old Kulu just nodded, but didn't say anything more. I knew that Old Kulu was no longer prepared to say much in front of outsiders, and was thinking about how to get Old Kulu to talk about these things in the evening, when I suddenly noticed a few black dots on the grassland in the distance, and the faint dust raised behind them ...

My heart suddenly had an inexplicable feeling that made me stand up in surprise and hitch my hand to the distant view.

"Hey! Your sixth sense is actually growing fast too, and if you don't know how to reign it in, someone will eventually notice the difference." The old Kuru's voice rang in my ears once more, the kind of sound that rang in my heart like a bell, shaking my eardrums to the core. But I stood up unconcerned and looked into the distance without blinking, and gradually the black dots became clearer and clearer.

As the horses galloped closer and closer, the familiar figures appeared in my field of vision.