"Will you stay here or go back home?" Ning asked Ely.
"Uh… I will stay here for a bit. Go and do your work. It shouldn't take that long right?" Ely asked.
"No, maybe a day at most," Ning said. "If it takes too long, I will come back for you."
"Sure, go then," Ely said and sat down to cultivate next to the pond.
Ning nodded and looked at the three beasts that were standing around, eager to leave. "Alright, let's go get one of your friends."
Night had turned into a small eagle that perched on his shoulder. Aegis turned into a small beetle that clung onto his robe like a badge of a chest. And finally, Blue turned to a very small flood dragon and wrapped it around his wrist a few times like a bracelet.
"Are you guys sure you don't want to turn into your human forms or even stay in your normal forms?" Ning asked.
"We are not used to the Human form, master. So we are afraid of making mistakes that would end up embarrassing you," Blue said.
"And our normal forms are too massive to go around in the normal human society if that is where we have to go," Aegis said.
Night nodded, agreeing with the other two.
"Sigh, okay," Ning said and teleported. When he reappeared, he was outside of the Origin. He teleported once more to appear in the Sephyr empire of the Central Continent.
He had, after a lot of tries, learned that the teleportation formation in the tomb didn't teleport one 3 times out of 5 times. The other 2 times it was either of the 2 other continents.
So, the probability of finding a beast was higher in here than on the other two continents.
He floated down to one of the mountains next to the massive forest that surrounded the Sun empire and started using his skill. Slowly, he could feel a faint sense of pulsing coming from deep inside of him. It was like something got his soul on a rope and was pulling on it.
3 very intense pulses pulled on his senses, but he tried his best to ignore them since they were obviously giving him the location of his 3 beasts.
The feelings were very faint and there were many of them, but he could feel it all as clearly as any other. "West," he said as he opened his eyes. That was the direction where the strongest pulse came from. He stood up and flew towards the west until he was on the border between Sepyhr Empire and the Galyra Empire.
He saw a small village that was surrounded by many layers of mountains. The people seemed to live in the valley and it didn't look like they had much contact with the outer world.
Ning didn't find it very surprising considering they were at the border of the empires, and empires tend to not care much for those that were very far from the capitals and other big cities.
He didn't want to scare the people easily, so he flew down to one of the mountains that were covered in nothing but trees.
"This is so very dense," Ning thought as he looked at the trees.
"Is this the place master?" Night asked from his shoulder.
"I think so," Ning said. He used the skill once more and the pulsing feeling was very intense right now. "Yeah, it's definitely right around here. The feeling is so strong that the direction is impossible to tell right now," he said.
"We'll have to ask around if they know of any beasts, I guess," Ning said.
RUSTLE RUSTLE
Suddenly, he heard movement from quite far away. A uniform sound of marching appeared from behind him and he turned around to see a bunch of people marching up the mountain going towards the peak.
He could see about 25 people, 8 of whom were carrying a sort of float like it was a parade. He was far enough that they couldn't see him, but he still used his skill to go invisible just in case.
"Is that a parade going on in the forest?" Ning was very confused about what was happening. Of the 25 people, 20 of them were men. As for the last 5, he couldn't tell since they had black hoods on their head.
He then turned to look at the float that the 8 people were carrying. "There's someone in there," he thought and sneakily spread out his divine sense to look at the insides.
When his sense reached inside, he could see a girl crouching inside the small float. The girl was about 20 years old from what Ning could tell, and she was wearing a very fancy robe, at least when compared to the men that were mostly wearing dirty rags.
The most confusing part of the entire thing was that the girl was crying inside the float. He would immediately assume that something bad had happened to her and the men were bad people if it weren't for the rest of the men dropping tears along the way too.
"What the hell? Is this a marriage by any chance?" he wondered. That would make sense given that most of them were crying.
"Little Bel, it's about 10 more minutes from now. Are you sure about this all?" an elderly person asked her.
"I-I'm okay, father. I will do what I need to," the girl spoke through her tears.
"I'm sorry, my child. I, as a father couldn't give you a better life," the man said.
"No, father. It was my choice. I decided to do this for you all. I don't regret it one bit," the girl said.
Ning looked at the whole thing and could see that nothing wrong was going on, but he still felt uncomfortable seeing all of this. "Where exactly are they going up the mountain? What's up there after a 10 minutes walk?" Ning wondered and sent out his divine sense to see that there was a cave that was carved into the mountain.
"Oh, does someone live there?" he wondered.. He decided to stop his search for the beast for a few minutes to see what was going on here.
