Chapter 571: Jier Wanders, Yamila Worries

At first, the villagers began to carefully take a single piece of meat, then filled their bowls with plenty of broth, thinking that would be enough.

But after they had drunk their fill of broth and eaten a little meat, they saw a new round of delicious wild chicken soup beginning to cook, and everyone was dumbfounded.

When the second batch of broth was ready and the delicious aroma wafted out, the villagers who went up to get food began to grow bold.

One took a bird wing, another a large wild chicken leg; one took half a breast, another snatched a whole chicken tail.

Jier maintained order and warned the villagers to take only what they could eat; if he saw any discarded food, he would punish them severely.

He did not say what the severe punishment would be, but the villagers, knowing Jier's prowess, wondered one after another if they would be beaten to death by Jier with his bare hands. They could not help but think so darkly, because the rude soldiers outside the mine did exactly that.

Especially when Changmai Village had just been breached and the captives were controlling them, whenever anyone dared to resist, these soldiers, who were using violence for the first time, would beat the disobedient villagers to death, regardless of whether they were old or young.

They beat them all to death.

But in fact, Jier's so-called severe punishment was merely to exclude the disobedient villagers from the queue to get food themselves.

Although both sides had different ideas about "severe" punishment, this actually made the order here quite harmonious. The villagers lined up honestly, honestly took the cooked wild chicken and bird meat, and unable to wait for it to cool, they used their hands as soon as it came out of the pot, blowing on it with their mouths before taking a bite.

The delicious meat juices moved many villagers to tears, and some of the older boys, fed by their families, had their bellies rounded in a short time.

By the time the third and fourth batches of broth in the iron pots were ready, not only were the villagers full, but the female villagers who did the cooking also began to eat.

But at this time, a villager who was completely full saw that Jier had not eaten a single bite, and asked in panic why Jier was not eating.

Jier was not very hungry, and besides, he had crawled into the belly of a Forest Deer to get here today; it was bloody and visceral at the time, and that indescribable feeling made him not want to eat meat for the past two days.

"It's fine, I'll just have some wheat porridge; I really don't want to eat meat today." Once Jier said this, the elderly villagers sitting around and burping looked at each other. Look, he doesn't want to eat meat today, which means he usually has plenty of meat to eat. Jier is not an ordinary farmer at all; considering his martial strength, the answer was practically ready to emerge.

It was just that the elders dared not ask about Jier's identity and intentions; they were afraid that Jier would get angry, or that the answer would not be to their satisfaction. Therefore, even though they had basically guessed that Jier was no ordinary person, they pretended not to know and not to have noticed.

The young people in the village, because they lacked experience, simply felt that Jier was powerful. Not only was his martial strength great—he could defeat dozens of young villagers—but he could also defeat more than a dozen alien Beast warriors without a scratch. Not only that, he could unite the scattered villagers and reach a new trade agreement with the difficult alien Beasts, effectively "driving" those alien Beasts from the upper mine tunnels to the middle ones.

He had basically achieved most of the slogans he had shouted before.

They only felt that Jier was powerful, but they did not understand what this kind of power represented.

People with such abilities do not just pop up from the ground like random weeds; they usually have a background, a history, their own interests, and their own missions.

And these unknown things were the reason the village elders dared not ask.

They were afraid—afraid that Jier was deceiving everyone, afraid that Jier was using everyone, even though these villagers had almost nothing left but their own wretched lives.

But in another world, sometimes this life is also something that certain people and forces covet.

Some elderly migrants from the Empire had heard that some cultists would trick ignorant villagers into blood sacrifices, using various means to make the villagers gradually lose their land, homes, wealth, and faith, leaving them with nothing but their lives, and then giving those villagers who had nothing a dead end with no choice.

In the end, the cultists would sacrifice the lives of the tricked villagers to the Evil God they worshipped, which often caused greater disasters.

Because the Empire had a large population, it was very careful about such things, and the migrants from the Empire had a certain degree of vigilance against this. But the new generation born in the Saint Hors Kingdom from childhood knew nothing about these things.

They had no sense of precaution at all.

After all, in this world, there is no love without reason, and no hate without reason; the root of all things is driven by various chains of interest.

Jier was helping them so wholeheartedly at this time, yet they dared not ask, nor dared to refuse Jier's background and help; they could only take it one step at a time.

When all the villagers were full and were leaning against each other to rest and sleep, Jier had someone make him a small pot of wheat porridge. He drank most of it and told everyone to go rest.

The various bird feathers drying on the side were piled into a small hill. Jier ignored the stench of these feathers, went out to wander around the deserted mine tunnels, and somehow returned carrying a large bag.

He packed up the feathers, carried the full, half-person-high bag, and went to the surrounding deserted mine tunnels again. When he returned, the large sack in his hand was gone.

Of course, the mine was quite dark, and the well-fed villagers did not care what Jier was doing in the middle of the night.

Jier had no sleepiness at this time; he had just slept for a few hours in the lady's dream, and now he was full of spirit and energy, so he wandered around the mine at will.

He explored every mine tunnel in the middle and lower levels of the mine. In the middle tunnels, the Mao Mao were both excited and troubled about how to deal with the piles of Mineral Ore.

In the darker and more stifling lower tunnels, Jier waded through ankle-deep standing water and checked the bottom-most tunnels. The air here was stifling, there was standing water on the ground, and worse, some villagers, to save trouble, had actually urinated here, making the standing water even more foul.

Fortunately, they did not eat much, so not many people defecated here.

But this was bad enough.

At the same time, the Mineral Ore here was not as abundant as in other places, but at this depth of nearly a hundred meters underground, one could always dig up a steady stream of ore.

Jier estimated that if this mine were really to continue to be exploited, the output would likely be significant, but it was clear that the ore was in deeper layers, and the difficulty of mining was not low. With the current backward mining methods and almost non-existent mining technology and management, it would not be easy to continue mining.

At the very least, ventilation in the deep parts of the mine would need to be done, right? Lighting other than torches would also have to be provided, because lighting from burning materials would compete with the human miners for the already scarce oxygen, making deep-mine excavation even more unfavorable.

Moreover, drainage on the ground here would have to be done, living waste in the mine would have to be cleared away in an orderly manner, reinforcement of the mine would have to be constructed, and so on and so forth.

But Jier soon shook his head; he felt he was sick. This mine would inevitably be abandoned, so why was he thinking so much?

Wandering up from the depths of the mine, Jier came to the upper level of the mine again. He checked the mining situation of the ore where the Mao Mao had been entrenched today. He found that in this half-day, the hundred or so villagers had dug up about one-fifth of the ore here. Basically, if they were allowed to work at full capacity after being full, they could dig the ore here clean in two days.

It seemed that the villagers' future ore mining would have big problems, but Jier did not care at all. The enemy Jiedian would be breached within these two days; as long as the villagers could eat their fill and nourish their bodies in these two days, it would be enough.

He then wandered to the entrance of the mine. Borrowing the cover of the entrance, he saw a campfire of Defeated Soldiers not far away facing the entrance of the mine, and there were Defeated Soldiers who had not slept, talking idly while facing the direction of the mine.

Jier knew at a glance that these were the soldiers guarding the villagers, wary of the villagers trying to escape secretly in the middle of the night.

It was just that because the villagers were exhausted every day for that bit of food, very few people tried to climb over the Jiedian wall to escape.

Furthermore, there were elite Defeated Soldiers patrolling the Jiedian wall. Even if one avoided the sight of the patrolling soldiers, it was not easy to jump down from the four- or five-meter-high wall without making a sound or getting injured.

Not only that, there was a circle of hidden sentries set up in the trees in the Forest outside the Jiedian, which made it even more troublesome.

But Jier did not care much.

A large, pitch-black bird flew out from his right eye, and then he squatted in the shadow of the mine entrance, not letting the guards outside see him. With a flick of his hand, the Shadow Bird, under his control, flapped its wings and flew out.

During the day, it was difficult for him to use the Shadow Bird to Scout in this Jiedian camp without trees to block the sun, but now it was a pitch-black night, and using the Shadow Bird not only had no extra consumption, but was also much smoother.

The Shadow Bird flew into the air, and its flashing figure was still seen by a soldier not far away who was specifically watching the mine entrance.

But this soldier just rubbed his eyes, feeling that he had seen wrong.

He told his companion, who was tending the campfire, what he had seen. The companion guessed: "I guess it might be some bird that those alien Beasts hunted that escaped; it just flew out of the mine. What a lucky bird! Hey, tell me, when those alien Beasts eat the birds they hunt, do they pluck the feathers and roast them to eat them cooked? Or do they eat the raw meat directly?"

This question actually stumped the soldier in charge of guarding. He scratched his head and thought for a long time but could not figure it out, but another soldier nearby who seemed to be asleep spoke up: "Let me tell you! Although those alien Beasts are stupid and backward, they also eat cooked meat. I have seen how they handle those birds before. Basically, it's about the same as us; they all pluck the feathers and roast them to eat, but the disgusting thing is that they especially like to eat the Viscera. They will specifically take out the bird's Viscera and string them on branches to roast them."

The soldiers felt a wave of disgust, because when they passed through the Southern Mountains before, many of them knew that some birds in the mountains and forests were actually full of parasites, especially in the eyes, brains, nasal cavities, Viscera, and other places, which were not clean.

Under the bright feathers, they were often not clean either. Some birds that could not fly and were sickly were often covered with parasites. Although they were easy to catch, none of the soldiers dared to eat them.

And some healthy and clean birds were often alert and agile; they would flap their wings and fly away before anyone could get close, and they could not be caught at all.

Jier controlled the Shadow Bird to fly above the Stronghold Yingdi, circled twice, and then flew south.

The Shadow Bird's vision overlapped with his own at this moment; Jier closed his eyes and focused on controlling the Shadow Bird.

Before long, he arrived at the place where he had encountered that terrifying Magic Creation at noon.

This area had been blasted by that Magic Creation, which was shaped like a wooden house, using terrifying Magic; a large patch of trees, soil, and everything else on the ground had been blown into fine powder. Everywhere else was filled with collapsed large trees, and every time he saw this, Jier would marvel at the formidable power of that thing.

A massive tree that would take two people to embrace could be knocked down by a single punch from that Magic Creation; if it hit a person, it would likely easily smash them into chunks of flesh.

Jier's Shadow Bird possessed a unique night vision ability, so even though it was deep in the night and the light from the several moons today was insufficient, he could still see many things on the ground through the Shadow Bird's eyes.

"That thing seems to have gone south; let's go over and see if I can find it."

Jier muttered to himself, and then the Shadow Bird began to Scout back and forth in a zigzag pattern, roughly in the direction the other party had fled.

After the Shadow Bird had flown about two kilometers south, it made a discovery.

It was not that Magic Creation shaped like a wooden house, but a hundred-kilogram wild boar, which was currently lying on the ground, being dragged and moved toward the southwest by something invisible.

"Is it this? The woman who turned invisible?"

In the Forest of the dark night.

Yamila was panting; even though she had activated the power Magic in the Magic Foot Ring on her right foot, it was still very strenuous for an elegant lady like her to transport such a heavy, dead wild boar.

A voice of complaint rang out in the empty space.

"Seriously, if I had known, I would have exchanged this piece of junk for a Strength Bracelet; at least a Strength Bracelet could provide me with a constant Five-Person Strength, instead of this useless strength-enhancing Magic of yours."

She angrily tapped the Magic Foot Ring on her right ankle with her left heel, feeling that while this thing looked like it could help with everything in the book's introduction and appeared to be an excellent Magic Tool, it actually couldn't play any important role at the truly critical moment.

For example, right now, this wild boar weighing over a hundred kilograms was more than twice her own body weight; even though she had cast Magic on herself, her strength was still insufficient, leaving her exhausted.

The sweat covering her head made her long hair stick to her neck, feeling sticky and greasy, and she had sweated so much that her clothes were clinging to her body; that feeling made Yamila's expression distort in discomfort.

But she had to drag away this wild boar, which she wouldn't even take a single bite of.

At noon, the Magic Hut Mimi had released a massive amount of Magic without any restraint. It looked impressive in power, but the Magic Power energy consumed behind it was a staggering number.

When she and the Magic Hut had moved to a place that felt safe, Mimi told her about the Magic Power consumption, which immediately gave Yamila a headache.

She checked the storage crystals in the Hut's Magic Core; the two Magic crystals that no longer glowed made Yamila's heart ache for her own purse. To refill a Magic crystal with Magic Power, she either had to work hard to create Magic Power herself and fill it in to supplement the crystal, or honestly pay money to refill those crystals when she returned.

Magic was very expensive, and her teacher would never have any room for negotiation on such matters.

She had yelled angrily at the Magic Hut at the time, causing Mimi to emit a wailing sound of grievance. Fortunately, after crying, it still gave her a new option for her troubles.

Many Magic Huts could slowly replenish Magic Power by consuming animals; this was related to the production principles of Magic Huts, as most of them were equipped with the Magic Organs and digestive organs of some Magic Beasts. As long as they hunted animals, ate, and digested them, they could slowly recover some of the chaotic Magic Power of Magic Beasts.

Although it was not as good as the Magic Power of a Mage, it was still a type of energy that could barely be used.

And it wasn't impossible to let the Magic Hut hunt animals itself, but it was hard to guarantee that the Magic Power consumed during the hunting process would be worth the final harvest; in fact, many times, if there weren't many animals, it would be a loss to hunt.

Mimi was a Magic Hut that couldn't hunt.

Its massive size meant that even the stupidest animals would flee from far away; unless it used Magic means to kill the prey, it couldn't catch any animals at all. But using Magic to kill prey would only consume more Magic Power, making it even less worthwhile.

There was no other way; Yamila had to go out herself, letting Mimi stay in the mountain hollow where it was hiding, while she went out to help the Magic Hut provide food and replenish its Magic Power consumption.

"Don't give up; this stinky wild boar can at least save you two Gold Coins worth of Magic Power, work a little harder!"

After cheering herself on, Yamila, who was hiding her figure, once again dragged the Rope, pulling the heavy wild boar on the ground toward the direction of the Magic Hut.

And all of this was seen by Jier's Shadow Bird; he couldn't see the other party's appearance, but the words Yamila spoke to herself, thinking no one was around, were heard by Jier.

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