Astartes of the Bear School

Chapter 1878 1850. Abundant Forest
The light from the little golden tree was soft. Torisia patted the short sword at her waist on the bridge and joked with Lann, teasing him for confusing the Golden Royal Family with the Golden Clan.

Lan En scratched his head and shrugged, looking like he had learned something new.

It's no big deal if people make a few sarcastic remarks; at least it prevented Torisha from continuing to wallow in her sense of powerlessness.

The two continued forward, and were about to reach the other end of the bridge.

"How much longer until we reach the Bountiful Forest?" Lan En asked. "After crossing the bridge, do we head north?"

They had already traveled quite a distance north, and if they continued, they would be close to the northern edge of the border area.

There will be steep cliffs and an endless sea shrouded in mist.

Lan En doubted whether forests could really grow on cliffside terrain near the sea.

Moreover, if the journey is still so long, Lan En is considering whether to summon the Qilin.

“No, I don’t want to go any further north.” Tolissa quickly shook her head, her headscarf and veil swaying. “There’s a village further north where they’ve built several windmills, but… uh, I don’t want to go there.”

"What's wrong with the windmill?" Lan En asked, puzzled. "Does it take a lot of cut when they grind wheat for people?"

Generally speaking, as a public facility to some extent, people would think that mills are too far away. It's troublesome and laborious to transport wheat to and from mills and flour back and forth. Who wouldn't want to be closer to one?

"No, the flour mill in Windmill Village is fast and fine, and the flour from there is also used to bake bread that is fragrant and soft."

Halfway through her sentence, Torisia shook her head: "But there haven't been any good rumors circulating about the village of Nuora lately. Some people say they saw strange rituals there. Strange rituals that are not recorded in either the Golden Law or the Golden Law Fundamentals."

"This is a bit too... too outrageous."

Even Torisha, who sympathizes with the mixed-race and children of ominous signs under the Golden Law, stammered, finding it difficult to speak.

It is clear that this was indeed a very serious accusation in her mind.

The Golden Law was the belief promoted and implemented by the Golden Dynasty. To say that a village held a ceremony outside the norm is tantamount to saying that the village was pagan.

Another apostate?
Lan En frowned slightly as he listened to Torisha's words.

After investigating the matter of the Flame Watchers of Lienia, which involved multiple demigods, Lann couldn't help but feel a little nervous.

"Is Dolores going to investigate the heretics?"

"No, that won't happen. Besides, you can't just say things like 'heretic'!" The perfumer quickly waved his hand. "Don't harm anyone before you're sure!"

Lan En scratched his head, feeling that his initial impression of the stable, enduring, and orderly Golden Dynasty when he first arrived at the border was irrevocably collapsing.

Now, having set aside the initial filter of arriving at this border region and begun to delve deeper into this land and this prosperous divine dynasty... why are there heretics everywhere?! Why are there problems everywhere?!

Indeed, only by gaining a thorough understanding of a place can one avoid being misled by initial impressions.

Lann's initial impressions of the Golden Dynasty are crumbling, but new impressions, combined with a greater understanding, are simultaneously reshaping them.

After crossing the bridge to the other end, Torisha, just as she had said, did not lead Lann any further.

Instead, turn directly and walk down the slope into the depression from the bridgehead built on the high ground on the other side, which crosses the forest depression.

The forest in the depression, surrounded by towering rock walls, seems to have only this section near the bridge pier that gently connects to the surrounding area.

Torisha's target was clearly the low-lying forest below.

It seems this is the so-called Abundant Forest.

If Torisha had said so earlier, then Lann could have taken her down into the depression when they were halfway down the bridge.

Since she hadn't mentioned it in the middle, Lan En pinched his chin and followed Torisha down the slope into the depression, glancing around as he did so.

Sure enough, halfway down the slope, he saw a small platform next to a bridge pier.

Like most places on the Alpine Plateau, it was covered with golden leaves and covered with yellowish wild grass.

However, from Lan En's eyes, which had been adjusted through optical treatment, there were quite a few messy marks on the platform.

Sure enough, as Torisha passed by, she pointed to the small platform and spoke.

"The bastards who gave me the message were up here at the time, and they said they saw someone dressed like Dolores."

Dolores's attire was nothing special, even unremarkable. After all, she was simply wearing a common men's hunting outfit.

However, her figure is slender and tall even among women, making her quite recognizable. Even a half-breed with a low intelligence could recognize her.

Lan En and Torisha stood on the small platform. The perfumer tried hard to find the angle and position that the hybrids had described to her. After a while, she quickly shook Lan En's arm.

"There it is!"

She pointed to the space between two birch trees in the distance, probably having spotted something that served as a landmark to determine their location. The two walked over, stepping on the golden fallen leaves and grass.

The Abundant Forest has many kinds of trees, but in this place on the Yatan Plateau, it's too close to the Golden Trees. All the trees, regardless of species, have been affected, their leaves turning golden yellow.

The only way to tell what kind of tree it is is by looking at the shape of its trunk and leaves.

Once they reached the two birch trees, that was the end of the clues Torisia could provide.

After all, she was just a perfumer, not some serious stalker.

But luckily, the person she pulled over was...

He gestured for Torisha to move aside, and Lann half-squatted in the spot Torisha indicated.

He touched the seemingly normal, yellowish grass with his fingers, and even picked up a bit of soil and put it to his nose.

"When did you see those bastards," Lann asked.

"It's been three days."

Torisha looked left and right. As a perfumer who researched healing and herbs, she had never actually seen how heroes like the Faded Ones worked.

"Three days, and it even rained in between."

Torisha was curious, but Lann had already entered the mindset of a witcher on a mission.

He muttered to himself, it was unclear whether he was speaking to himself or explaining to Torissa beside him.

In his cat-like eyes, the vertical pupils were constantly contracting and dilating, making the colors in his field of vision vivid and making all the traces in his field of vision seem exceptionally clear.

"Fortunately, at the foot of the golden tree, people were either making their own pilgrimages or finding their own fun, while the rest just lay around doing nothing. Nobody was running around."

Lan En's fingers gently brushed across the trunk of the birch tree beside him, and it was only when his finger pointed that Torisha noticed a slight scratch on the trunk.

"Dolores's footprints... well, the size matches. But the gait... it's definitely been practiced, it's just different."

"And this direction, this stride... what is she secretly tracking? Hmm, interesting."

At this point, Torisa had no room to intervene.

She could only watch as Lan En talked to himself, easily discovering many traces that she couldn't even notice in her own eyes, and then began to walk through the Bountiful Forest.

The Bountiful Forest is very quiet, starting from the direction Lan En and his group came from. However, given the vast size of the forest, there are actually quite a few residents living there.

While following Dolores's trail, Lann also searched for residents along the way, hoping to get some clues from them.

"I haven't seen anyone pass by here." The local resident looked nervously and irritably in the direction behind Lan En.

These people of the Golden Trees, who live in the bountiful forest, seem to have their own unique characteristics. They wear wide yellow robes embroidered with golden trees in gold thread, quite different from the people who wear tight-fitting clothes with puffy sleeves. They seem more rustic.

At this moment, a local resident standing outside his house was holding what appeared to be a table leg that had been removed from the table, clutching it tightly like a weapon.

“I say,” the local resident’s golden, blessed eyes were still peering behind Lann, “can she really handle that bunch of bastards? She’s just a perfumer.”

“Yes, don’t worry, sir,” Lan En reassured him without turning his head. “She’s no ordinary perfumer. She’s a hybrid, you know, she’s dealt with countless people.”

"Thank you so much." The local resident scratched his head with the broken end of the table leg and breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh dear, I don't want the reason I'm going back to the tree to die at the hands of a bunch of lowly bastards. These filthy killers and thieves."

Listening to the distant sounds, Tolissa, having already experiencedly calmed the group of struggling individuals, set her sights on the mixed-race people in the house.

Lan En nodded calmly, as if agreeing with the local resident's words.

"It's good that you're alright," Lan En said, his eyes lowered. "By the way, has anything strange happened around here lately?"

"Strange? What are you trying to say?" The local resident's lips curled down in displeasure. "We are honest and law-abiding people of the Golden Tree, people who have lived here since the glorious and bountiful era, and who have benefited from its bounty!"

“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. An era of abundance? Wow~” Lan En displayed just the right amount of admiration and curiosity.

This emotion effectively soothed the other person.

As everyone knows, when faced with appropriate and natural compliments, people will stop caring about what they normally say or shouldn't say in order to save face.

In just half a minute, in less than two sentences, the local resident's attitude towards Lan En improved significantly.

He first revealed that he had occasionally found sleeping rabbits and eagles in the woods these past few days.

They then added that there was a mysterious magic tower located to the west of the Bountiful Forest. However, these people were all law-abiding citizens of the Golden Tree and had no interest in magic or anything like that.

(End of this chapter)