After a few more days, one morning, when the first ray of sunshine shone on the earth, the vines, which had become as thick as a child's wrist, suddenly trembled, and the leaves quickly changed color, withered and fell. In just a moment, the farmland around the village was full of fallen leaves.
As the leaves withered, the green vines also began to change color and became golden, as if they had absorbed the sunlight for a long time. Just looking at those golden vines made people feel a little warmth in their hearts.
After the villagers cheered, they began to harvest. They cut the vines about a palm high from the ground, and then cut them into sections, each section about half the length of an arm. Golden-white powder fell from the sections of the vines, and many villagers would take two bites when harvesting. It seemed that this was their staple food.
However, Sui Xiong noticed that no children ate the vines that were cut off. This made him give a bad comment about the taste of those vines. Children were the most innocent, and even wild fruits that were 80% sour and 20% sweet, they would happily pick them and eat them. Since they had no interest in these vines, presumably their taste must be very boring.
Harvesting vines was obviously a strenuous work, and the lumberjacks were tired and sweating. The children and women were busy collecting the withered yellow leaves, grinding them with a stone mill, turning them into a gray-yellow paste, and transporting them to the stone houses in buckets. No one knew what they were going to do with them.
There were a lot of vines around the village, and the harvesting lasted for three days. When all the vines were left in the last circle near the village, the villagers stopped harvesting and began to prepare for other things.
They gathered the old people and children who lacked fighting power, put them in clothes soaked in the gray-yellow paste, and let them gather in several relatively strong wooden houses. In front of them was a statue on the roof of a stone house, and there were several buckets of paste beside them. No one knew what they were for.
The young adults, regardless of gender, were all busy eating and drinking to their heart's content. This time they did not eat the usual batter, which was probably made from the powder of the crushed vines, but the air-dried chicken taken from the stone house. It seemed that the chicken was not delicious, and everyone was frowning while eating. However, everyone was trying to eat more, perhaps to maintain physical strength.
"Looks like that battle is just around the corner." Sui Xiong nodded secretly. He had already thought about it. When the time came, he would appear as a powerful but not overly friendly giant beast. For this reason, he might need to deliberately suppress his strength, but compared with being too powerful and making the villagers panic, it was still very cost-effective.
Suppressing his strength was very simple. He only needed to slightly modify the fine structure of his muscles to reduce the efficiency of his power exertion. He wasn't worried about encountering any danger. After spending so much time in the Black Forest, he hadn't encountered anything that could be considered dangerous. What's more, his most powerful means wasn't his powerful physical body, but his ice magic power. With the ice magic power as his trump card, it didn't matter if his physical body was weak.
After everything was prepared, the sky gradually darkened.
The villagers closed the gate of the wooden fence tightly. Some especially strong villagers were holding weapons and waiting near the gate. Some of the able-bodied villagers climbed up the houses and were responsible for keeping watch. Inside the village, around the fence, bonfires were lit every few steps. Almost every bonfire was guarded by a villager.
The burning flames illuminated the surroundings, and also brought sufficient warmth and more importantly, a sense of security.
The night in the Black Forest was cold and dangerous. For the night watchmen, fire was indispensable.
When the moon slowly rose, Sui Xiong, who was lurking in the depths of the forest, felt a trace of a strange atmosphere.
Under the open space near the village, chaotic and turbid magic was condensing. Although every night, magic would condense in the Black Forest to form a black fog, it was the first time he had seen such a powerful magic.
In this Black Forest, condensing magic would turn the bones underground into skeletons that could move. So, what would happen with such a powerful magic?
The answer was soon revealed. He clearly felt that countless skeletons were slowly forming under the ground, and it wouldn't take long for them to break out of the ground.
"Strange … why are there so many skeletons under the ground around the village? Where did these skeletons come from? I didn't notice it before … "
Sui Xiong muttered to himself in confusion. He wasn't worried that those skeletons would pose a threat to him, but he couldn't understand.
Could it be that the skeletons of the dead could actually move underground?
This world was really strange!
After a while, the skeletons had already condensed and slowly floated toward the ground. This was also completely contrary to physics. The soil was not water, and the skeletons were not fish. Why could they directly penetrate the soil, as if they were swimming?
Sui Xiong thought while watching the development of the situation.
When the skeletons approached the ground, the roots of the vines left in the farmland emitted a faint golden light, forming a circle of protective cover, blocking the skeletons.
This protective cover couldn't hold for a long time. The thick magic quickly gathered from all directions and offset each other. In less than an hour, the golden protective cover was completely eroded by the magic, and the roots of the vines all withered and turned into black sawdust.
"No wonder they left a circle of vines near the village. It seems that it is also for defense." Sui Xiong nodded secretly. "These villagers are indeed a people who can live in the Black Forest. They have long been prepared."
Thinking of this, he couldn't help but be a little worried.
If the villagers could easily crush the enemy, then wouldn't he not be able to get a chance to fight?
If he didn't wait for the right opportunity, it would be more troublesome to get in touch with the villagers …
But Sui Xiong soon found that his worries were unnecessary. The magic condensed around the village was getting thicker and thicker, and more and more skeletons rose from the ground. Gradually, there were thousands of them. Seeing this terrible number, he knew that no matter how complete the defense of the village was, it was bound to face a hard battle.
His opportunity to play would come soon.
Thousands of, this was a very wonderful word.
When it appeared in books, even children would not have any special feelings; but when it became a reality and appeared in front of people, even the most powerful warriors would be shocked.
If this number was followed by the "enemy", then it was simply a matter of despair.
The thick magic continued to condense, eroding the protective cover formed by the circle of vines near the village. Although the protective cover formed by the complete vines was far stronger than what the roots could do, in the face of the endless magic backed by the whole Black Forest, it was quickly defeated and turned into black sawdust.
In fact, it was even shorter than the time that the roots could buy.
Perhaps this was the reason why the villagers only left a circle of vines. The magic condensed faster and faster, and no matter how many vines were left, they could not last long. Even if all the vines in the farmland were not harvested, it was nothing more than a waste of food.
For people who were not rich, this kind of waste was obviously not allowed.
Although the result of failure in the battle was death, the result of a lack of food in this strange Black Forest was obviously death. If they were to die anyway, it seemed that it would be more pleasant to die in the battle instead of starvation.
If there were only two choices, presumably most people would choose to be like a good man, eat and drink, and then die in the battle happily, rather than being trapped in hunger and cold, exhausting their vitality little by little, and finally dying in despair.
The ancients had a saying, "People are not afraid of death, but why should they be afraid of death?" When the people could only choose between starvation and death in the battle, the deterrent of the state's violent machine would be ineffective to them, and what would happen next would be earth-shaking.
This kind of thing, no matter which world it was, should be similar.
Because of letting his imagination run wild, Sui Xiong was distracted for a while. When he came back to his senses, he found that the battle had begun.
Countless skeletons, like a black tide, were rushing to the village and surrounding the whole village. They constantly attacked the wooden fence that protected the village, and seemed to want to destroy it. Although the strength of each strike was not worth mentioning compared to the sturdy wooden fence, it was only a matter of time before the entire fence collapsed if it continued to accumulate.
The villagers were constantly attacking these skeletons with lit firewood. The firewood itself was probably negligible, and the real damage to the skeletons was caused by the flames. Every time the flames touched the skeletons, they would slightly retreat as if they were burned. If they could not avoid it, their bodies would slightly tremble, and the parts that were burned by the flames would slightly fade.
It was like being illuminated by the sun, although the effect was much worse.
If you looked carefully, you would find that the ground around the fence had been piled up with a thick layer of skeletons. The color of the skeletons was light gray, which meant that the power that drove them to stand up as skeletons had dissipated. At least in a short time, it was impossible for them to become those terrible things again.
Judging from the number of these skeletons, the villagers' struggle was still very effective. But when Sui Xiong looked at the whole battlefield, he could not help but feel pessimistic about the situation of the villagers.
The number of skeletons did not seem to decrease.
He used his spiritual senses to observe the ground, and found that the skeletons were still constantly emerging and constantly emerging from the ground. With the support of the endless and thick magic, it seemed that the only thing that restrained their number was the size of the open space that could accommodate them.
What the villagers had to fight against was not "thousands of enemies", but "thousands of enemies, and an infinite number of enemies."
To put it more clearly, they were fighting against an endless number of enemies. There was no possibility of winning this battle.
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