The arrival of the wise clan has become the Xia dynasty of the Xia tribe, and they will welcome...
Azurewood Crow had suffered quite serious injuries. But thanks to the treatment from Sveta and Zeran, his injuries were fully healed.
However, his overuse of natural power has left his body weakened, and he has been unable to use the power of ice and snow for the past few days. If he were to force it, he would collapse the moment he activated the ability.
"That's what the elves said. So Cangmu, you need to rest well during this time. Mo Rong still needs you. He keeps talking about when his deputy can come back to help him with his affairs." Jiang Yunlan sat next to Cangmu Yuya's hospital bed, her tone relaxed.
Aoki Yuya was amused by Lan's words, and his expression unconsciously relaxed. However, when he thought of the Pokémon he hadn't found and his teammates who had died in battle against the enemy, the faint smile on his face vanished instantly.
After being ambushed by the enemy, he and his team defended and retreated, using up all the explosives they carried and losing half of their teammates before barely escaping the encirclement. If it weren't for the arrival of their tribesmen to support them, he and the last few remaining teammates would have been wiped out.
He couldn't understand why he and his teammates had encountered the Apocalypse Orcs, who seemed to have been prepared all along. He couldn't help but wonder if the Orc who attacked him with plants had killed the elf he was looking for.
Cangmu Yuya shared all the ideas swirling in her mind with Jiang Yunlan, hoping to offer her some help.
Jiang Yunlan looked into his eyes, listened quietly to his story, and then slowly spoke, her calm voice filled with determination, "I have the same suspicions, and we are currently verifying these guesses. Don't worry, leave all of this to us. Xia will not let any undercover agent or traitor get away with it."
The elves and people who died because of them, and the families of those people, all need an explanation.
Leaning against the hospital bed, Cangmu Yuya nodded and continued, "Lan, this time they brought controlled wild beasts. It's a pity I didn't participate in the battle against the beast tide on the grasslands, so I can't tell the difference between them."
"Their attack power, running speed, and physical strength are several times greater than those of normal wild beasts. But we defeated them and found their weaknesses!" he said, so excited that he almost sat up, his eyes filled with a fighting spirit that wanted nothing more than to annihilate the enemy. "They have no self-awareness and do not actively avoid danger or protect their weaknesses."
After listing the weaknesses of the beasts they had defeated, he added, "We launched a night raid on the enemy. We discovered that the beasts controlled by Apocalypse would remain motionless in place unless they received a command."
Upon hearing this, Jiang Yunlan asked thoughtfully, "Are commands given using sound or language?"
If that's the case, perhaps we could try to take control of the Apocalypse Orcs and have them attack the Apocalypse Orcs instead.
“It should be the sound. The orcs of Apocalypse always blow a whistle-like object when they launch an attack,” said Cangmu Yuya.
A whistle? Jiang Yunlan thought of the bone whistle that Bai Youfeng's group had given her, which originally belonged to an undercover agent.
She didn't know if the bone whistle would work. If it didn't, she would have to go to the enemy and steal a usable whistle.
Silently noting down the whistle incident, Jiang Yunlan looked at Cangmu Yuya, whose face had clearly become tired, and gently told him to rest well before getting up and leaving the ward where only the two beastmen were present.
At the entrance.
The guards stood tall on either side of the door, their eyes fixed straight ahead, occasionally shifting their gaze toward the direction from which the sound was coming from.
Jiang Yunlan came out of the door and looked down to see Greysien sitting next to the guards. He was pouting, with a few damp raindrops around him, and his tail was thrashing restlessly from side to side. It was a clear sign that he was furious.
It's clear that he's already being considerate of the ordinary orcs by controlling the ice to prevent it from appearing.
The humanoid Greysien wagged his tail, clearly unhappy with Jiang Yunlan's decision not to let him go to the battlefield. Jiang Yunlan sighed helplessly, reached out and ruffled his hair, pulled him off the stool, and led him outside.
“Don’t be stubborn. This situation is different from before. Our opponents are orcs who possess the power of nature just like us. I don’t agree to you joining the team, nor will I agree to let Chaoxia and us search for the enemy’s lair…” Jiang Yunlan said, suddenly feeling him break free from her grasp.
He looked down at the road, but still obediently followed Lan's lead. "But you're willing to let me and Ilovin go find Cangmu. Although I didn't encounter the Apocalypse Beastmen when I found Cangmu, it's still possible that I'll run into them."
"Why did you give it to me then, but now you won't!" His tail was held high behind him, so frustrated that he didn't want it to drag on the ground.
Jiang Yunlan sighed, looked around, and pulled him into an empty ward on the right. She looked at him earnestly and said, "Because no matter what the outcome is this time, I want cubs like Chaoxia and you to live on. You are the future of Xia and the hope of all living beings on the continent. If I fail, I hope you can take my place in destroying Tianqi in the future."
Gración froze, instinctively looking up at Lan's face. He had considered the possibility of death, but never the possibility of failure.
"...How could we possibly fail with you here?" he couldn't help but retort, his anger instantly extinguished as if a fire had been thrown into water.
He hadn't expected that Lan's refusal to accept his application to join the war was because she had considered things so far into the future.
“I don’t know exactly how many elves’ lives they’ve taken, and I can’t estimate their strength. I really can’t tell you for sure that we’ll win this time,” Jiang Yunlan said.
She knew perfectly well that the world she had entered was a real world, not a novel. She wasn't some protagonist who could defeat Apocalypse simply by wanting to.
The world won't be on her side; she must prepare for the worst-case scenario.
“But I believe that we who do not give up fighting them will surely win. If not me, then it will be you, it will be your descendants,” she raised her hand again, ruffling Gracie’s blue hair, her voice gentle, “Could I ask you to stay at the habitat with Maple Syrup and Dawn while I lead the team out?”
Gración nodded, raised his right hand and said, "Then you must promise me that you will come back alive."
Jiang Yunlan looked at his serious face, smiled, and raised her left hand to give him a high five. The crisp sound echoed in the room, followed by a "good!"
Having persuaded the older cubs, Jiang Yunlan returned to her routine of handling tribal affairs, eating, and sleeping.
Two days later, the orcs of the Wise Clan arrived in Xia.
Meanwhile, orcs suspected of being undercover agents were placed on a special care list. These orcs were almost all those who had come to Xia in recent seasons, while the few who had joined Xia a few years ago had close ties with them.
Jiang Yunlan glanced at the familiar leopard-beastman names on the list, folded the papers, locked them in the drawer, and got up to greet the orcs of the Wise Clan.
She didn't understand why Yan Ganguo would be in close contact with the suspected spy, but she believed that the orcs who hadn't betrayed Xia would eventually be cleared of suspicion. She only hoped that the orcs who had followed her to the grasslands since the forest wouldn't disappoint her.
"You must be the Lan they've been talking about." The chieftain of the Wise Clan stood beside Lian Sanshan, the Sand Fox Beastman, his gaze fixed on her, smiling kindly.
When Jiang Yunlan walked over, she was drawn to his horn. She glanced at the half-broken horn on his head before snapping out of her daze and greeting him, introducing herself.
“Water flows still,” he said, also stating his name, then with a smile, he pinched Lian Sanshan’s ear and continued what he hadn’t had time to say before, “You rascal! No one in the team was in trouble, so why didn’t you warn us?!”
"Do you know how many mounts we died while rushing here? We were so afraid that your belongings would be stolen by wild beasts that we didn't dare to rest for a whole day. We almost vomited blood from the rush." He cursed irritably, and pinched the ears of his teammates from Lian Sanshan as well, his face seemingly saying, "You'd better learn your lesson."
The orcs, including Lian Sanshan, howled as if they were being pinched, which made the soft-hearted chieftain carefully examine their ears when he let go.
Jiang Yunlan listened to 022's simultaneous translation, and she and her people stepped aside to quietly observe the scene.
The trained beastmen smiled pleadingly, diligently massaging the shoulders and hands of their chieftain and fellow beastmen. Shui Liujing glanced at them sideways and asked, "Where did Yunxing and the others go?"
"They went to deliver supplies to Xia's Forest Lake habitat. After they finish delivering the supplies, they will go to deliver messages in the surrounding area. They will probably be back around the time of preparing for the fruit season." Lian Sanshan thought of his teammates who especially liked to go out and deliver messages, and glanced at the ground.
She silently told them in her heart that they couldn't be saved, then looked up at her clan leader, whose expression was strange, and asked in bewilderment, "Clan leader, we haven't told you about Lan yet, have we? Who are these 'them' you're talking about?"
“The Healer Clan. After we finished exploring the western end and left, we encountered the Butterfly Beastmen,” Shui Liujing mimicked her in the language of the grasslands, pointing to Lorelei in the distance, “and there were Beastmen who looked a lot like him. They told me that opposite the western end, in the direction they came from, there is a clan called ‘Xia’. The Xia clan leader, Lan, is the wise man I want to meet.”
Lan was indeed as easy to recognize as they said, with a transparent sprite on its head. Was that a water sprite? No, sprite 022 gave the orc more of a wood sprite, yet it seemed somewhat different. He frowned in confusion, looking at 022 with a probing gaze.
He was completely baffled. He blinked, and suddenly a Lorelei appeared in front of him.
"The orcs you saw who look so much like me, is their chieftain named Aliya?" Lorelei forced down his excitement and asked nervously.
"The Healer Clan? Were the two orc races you encountered traveling together?" Jiang Yunlan keenly noticed this, her words, though seemingly a question, were spoken with an affirmative tone.
The two sentences appeared one after the other, almost simultaneously striking the still water.
The surrounding Xia beastmen also turned their gazes to him. Those beastmen who knew the Yi clan wanted to hear about their old friend, while those who didn't were curious about how that clan knew about Xia and Lan.
Shui Liujing smiled kindly and said cheerfully, "Yes. When I met Aliya, he and his people were following the butterfly beastmen of the Healer Clan around in the same place. They seemed to be looking for something, but they didn't say what they were looking for."
Upon hearing this, Jiang Yunlan immediately thought of the Tianqi Tribe's laboratory.
Zelan must be looking for someone of her own kind. And Alanya, being a forest elf, would surely want to help Zelan along with Caibaihua and the others if she heard about Zelan's situation.
Feeling uneasy, she took a deep breath and calmly asked, "May I ask how long you had been away from the West End when you met them?"
“About two seasons,” Shui Liujing said.
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