The elder of the village looked at Zero with resignation. After eating their delicious vegetable stew, he had to keep his word. While these adventurers may act kind, he was not a fool to believe it entirely. Every adventurer had a cruel side. They didn't want to get on that bad side.
"The gnomes who travelled west passed by some of our kind," he admitted. "However, they did not meet kind ones. We cacti-folk are split between those who eat cultivated plants for supplement and those who eat others for supplement. The gnomes who travelled west a good sixty years ago met the other kind of cacti-folk. While I do not know details, we heard that some gnomes managed to escape and they travelled further west towards the sea."
Zero shared a look with Truen. If what the cacti-folk elder said was true, these gnomes should still be around somewhere. For gnomes, sixty years isn't a very long time. Like dwarves, they live for at least two hundred years.
