Divyat slowly digested what Cao Lin was telling him, at awe and incredibly shocked about what he had unwittingly just stumbled into, right in the backyard of three very powerful empires. The Ghadovara mountains had an aerial view of a crescent moon. However, it was a crescent moon with an extra curve growing out of it's back. It was this curve that separated all three empires. The mountain range was a continent all to itself as the Divine Sky Dao Sect was located at the bottom curve, right where the edged of the land was thinnest. To make it easier to understand the scope of how large the Ghadovara mountain range was is to imagine that it would take a foundation establishment stage cultivator a month to two months to cross, while running! And this was the location that was thinnest. It would take Divyat decades to cross the range into another empire, yet right now he was being told that the bandits he was currently captive of, had mapped out the entire tunnels system of the Ghadovara mountains for the 300 generations their families had been here.
"Thousands you say? But how? The empires are bound to have noticed something by now!" it made absolutely no sense to him, with such an extensive network through the entire Ghadovara mountain range, enough that they actually are able to make today's into and out of other empire's territory to raid, trade and rob, there should have been news about it by now. How could all of the empires have been so quiet when there's a literal back doors into their homes, that any body could just as easily take advantage of.
"The empires are usually in cahoots with multiple bandit groups. The thing is the Ghadovara mountain range is home to 8 different spirits of nature, they're very particular about having humans traipse all over the place. But the mountain range is an endless source of resource for the empires, but not proper excavation can be carried out due to not just the rough terrains, but the spirits. The bandit groups are remnants of almost extinct races, not limited to demons, mortal spirits, devils, immortals, and Beasts of all kinds. There's no full breed human anywhere within the Ghadovara mountain range, the spirits would never allow humans to go in deeper than within the first 30 kilometers, any further and it's a fight to the death.
Nevertheless, the bandit groups are descendants of humans who had originally tried to map the mountain range, and other races who had been pushed here due to the encroachment of humans and their ceaseless war mongering and greed for power and land. The mountain range is protected, and the bandit groups can either trade or rob from the empires, and also in that regard take deals for them to destabilize the other empires. We're all too happy to do it, humans are just the worst. In retrospect we get paid, and some of us can actually travel into the empires for adventure and stuff, join sects, get Information then come back here, home, where it's cold and freezing all year round. I don't know why we couldn't just stay in the part of the mountain range that's warm and tropical or something like that."
Divyat was gob smacked, everything else aside but the fact that there were pockets of….. demi-humans living within the Ghadovara mountain range was shocking. Yet the empires had kept completely silent about it all, the spirits were powerful in their own right, and beyond that it would take armies of extremely powerful individuals to bring one down. Not unless traps and proper plans were put in place, and there would definitely be casualties regardless. So the empires no matter how extensive they were, could not field such an expedition to explore or colonize the Ghadovara mountain range. Their losses would be such that it would completely destabilize the empires, yet somehow the Emperor of the Rizal Empire was able to get the drop on the Winter Stag, enough that even in it's weakened form, Divyat had been able to kill it.
It would not do for news about it's death to spread, because if it does, it will not take too long for the Rizal Empire to come marching in this direction bringing the same death and destruction to this mountains of ice and cold, as what they had wrought on the Divine Sky Dao Sect. Of course the terrain would deter them as only….
"Fuck!" Divyat swore out loud as he attempted to get up, startling Cao Lin who promptly pushed him back down, with an annoyed look on her face.
"What do you think you're doing young man, it's not just your arm that was injured you know. The ribs in your right side were all shattered, leaving you with perforated lungs, and severe internal bleeding. And that's just one amongst the long list of injuries. You don't get to move until I bloody well say you can move. So stay put!" her tone brokered no room for argument, safe to say it actually caught Divyat off guard. She was not just eccentric but had a fierceness to her that scared him a bit. Either way she was right, there wasn't much he could in his current state and he was still recovering.
He felt he had to warn them… someone… anyone at all. With the absence of the Winter Stag, it will not take long for the Rizal Empire to conquer the Ghadovara mountain range. Divyat had witnessed first hand the power of their airships, a single one of them could give a peak cultivator problems, much less the ones here in the mountain range, even more so with the absence of the winter stag. But even then he could not give a warning, to expose what happened to the winter stag is to expose himself, and he didn't doubt for one second that, he would be killed and his organs harvested just as Cao Lin had said, just so that others could claim the power for themselves. After all, it was through killing he had obtained his power, who's to say the person to kill him won't take the power too.
But he had to do something, he had to figure out a way to stop the Rizal Empire. But at the moment what? What could be possibly done to derail the very obvious plan of conquest of a very powerful empires with a storied history, he was just one man, heck he wasn't really even a man yet, he was just 15! But in the end the only other way forward is to first try and survive and then grow stronger, the stronger he becomes, then perhaps the more option that becomes available to him, but all of that was on the pretext that he would survive being in a bandit camp filled to the brim with different races with absolute disgust and hatred for the human race, and he, metamorphosis aside, was as human as it gets. Perhaps worrying about the Rizal Empire is the wrong thing, because right now….the Ghadovara mountains might just kill him before those fuckers do.