Chapter 133: Public Post Station

Du Zhengyi drove off the highway and onto a national road, where the scenery along the roadside began to turn bright and pleasant. The distant mountains were like dark green eyebrows, the roadside nearby was filled with tea plantations, and villages were occasionally dotted in front of the mountains. After opening the car window and breathing in the fresh air of the Southern Country countryside, his mood was much better than when they had just set out, and Luo Qi even developed the illusion that they were taking his family out for an excursion.

At this moment, only Majiang could still say something that spoiled the scenery; he suddenly raised his head from his tablet and said, "This Daxiao Yinbinggou is a bit interesting."

Luo Qi looked at the clear sky outside and the thin mist drifting between the mountains, secretly rejoicing that they were not going to Ganzhou. The scenery here did not carry a trace of Yin energy; it was entirely a human pastoral scene. He stretched his stiff neck; the history book that Guan Xinyue had brought out was spread across his knees. Perhaps the speculation he had found in the hand-drawn map in the book was too far-fetched, so Du Zhengyi had just shaken his head and said nothing earlier.

Ever since Majiang got the tablet, he seemed not to have heard a word they said; he had been pondering the map, his fingers turning it back and forth. When no one answered, he continued, "These are human place names, and they are definitely not place names that modern humans would come up with. The area is mountainous, and human villages would be distributed according to the terrain, so they would inevitably not be as evenly distributed as in the northern plains. But if you look closely, there isn't even a single natural village near Daxiao Yinbinggou. Isn't that a bit too eerie?"

"Since it's an ancient settlement for you Mages, you must have fought many battles there, right? Maybe the legends came from here," Guan Xinyue said. "Is it possible that your way of fighting is too flashy, and to the humans watching, it looked like ghosts fighting?"

"Battles... we have certainly fought many," Majiang said with a grin, as if saying this also made his teeth ache. "But our fighting is still quite elegant. I'll let you see Du Zhengyi fight up close when there's a chance. I always feel that our ancestors' fighting couldn't have been so ugly that it looked like a bunch of ghosts brawling to humans."

"Didn't you mention a Sandbox yesterday? Would that kind of Barrier-like method make humans feel strange when they see it?" Guan Xinyue asked again.

"No, the Sandbox Barrier allows people to see absolutely nothing of what is happening inside," Majiang said. "It's practically equivalent to being in another space."

Guan Xinyue seemed to have thought of something; her complexion looked a bit poor, as if she didn't dare to continue, and she looked a bit like she was going to get carsick. Majiang asked her again if she was feeling unwell, and she said slowly, "Do you... use corpses to fight? Like the Corpse Handlers in legends?"

This time, Majiang truly hesitated. He put down the tablet, crossed his hands, and couldn't make up his mind for a moment. It wasn't that there was no way to drive corpses, but that was a shameful page in the history of Mages, and today's Mages were often unwilling to admit that they had ever done such a thing.

Before he could sort out his thoughts, Luo Qi said, "Not very likely."

"Why?" Majiang asked subconsciously.

Du Zhengyi interjected, "Necromancy has been extinct for three hundred years, and almost no one knows how to use it now. Even counting back from three hundred years ago, there hasn't been a large-scale use of this trick by Mages for at least nearly two thousand years. Since the place is called Yinbinggou, the fact that it can become 'Yin soldiers' implies scale. If there had been a large-scale appearance of Puppet Corpses there two thousand years ago, scaring the locals so much that they still keep the name today and dare not live there, that is unlikely. Two thousand years is a fairly long time."

"That's true," Majiang breathed a sigh of relief and followed Du Zhengyi's line of thought. "In other words, perhaps one can still see some ruins there today, and such ruins have remained frightening even into modern times. What could that be? In the human field of vision, what could Yinbinggou refer to?"

"Dead Man's Gully, I suppose," Luo Qi said lightly from the front.

Even Du Zhengyi, who was driving, glanced at him. "What do you mean by Dead Man's Gully?"

"It means a large number of people died on a massive scale at the same time," Luo Qi said. "They needed to be buried together."

"Died of a plague?" Guan Xinyue said from the back; she didn't even notice that she had started talking to Luo Qi again.

"People usually call such places mass graves, not Yinbinggou," Luo Qi said. He remembered that Du Zhengyi's parents had both died of a plague, so he felt uncomfortable mentioning this. He snuck a look at Du Zhengyi and hurriedly moved past the topic. "No, that wouldn't be so frightening, and the scale wouldn't be that huge. I think this name probably has nothing to do with Mages directly. A 'gou' is a valley; it means that an entire human army must have been buried in the two valleys there. I think the scale must be at least hundreds of thousands to be called Yinbinggou. 'Yin soldiers' must refer to a dead army, and Yinbinggou is the valley where a dead army is buried. Mages have never fought on such a large scale as humans; we don't have that many people, we can't afford to fight that kind of war, and we have never had that many people die in a single battle, so it is still a human ruin. Hundreds of thousands of corpses are buried in the valley; when it rains or there is a flash flood, some bones might be washed out from time to time. So, whether it's legends or fear, they would be passed down from generation to generation among the locals."

"You aren't talking about the Changping Battle, are you?" Guan Xinyue said in surprise. "Did the Changping Battle happen there?"

"It's not just the Changping Battle where hundreds of thousands of people were buried," Luo Qi said. "The brutality of the wars during the Warring States period is something later generations cannot quite understand; the Changping Battle is just one typical example."

Du Zhengyi couldn't help but smile when he heard what he said. "You are crystal clear about other people's business, but only have a half-baked understanding of your own."

Luo Qi licked his lips in embarrassment. "This place is probably truly complex in history; I don't know what opportunity they seized in Ganzhou."

Guan Xinyue suddenly asked in confusion, "Since there are many Mages in this place too, what were the Mages doing when the humans were fighting?"

The three Mages in the car suddenly went quiet, and no one answered Guan Xinyue's question for a long time. Guan Xinyue waited for a while before she realized the strange atmosphere, looked up at the three of them, and finally Luo Qi said, "Sometimes they get mixed up together, and it's impossible to untangle."

"Forget it," Guan Xinyue said readily. "Let's not talk about history that can't be untangled for now. Where are we going?"

Majiang looked out with her; they had long since left the national road and driven onto a village road that wasn't paved with asphalt, or perhaps it couldn't even be considered a village road. There were big mountains all around, no villages could be seen, and it was feared that there wouldn't even be a road further ahead.

Majiang realized with a start, "There's a Public Post Station here? It's a wonder you know that, Du Zhengyi! Is the location of every Public Post Station on this continent in your brain?"