As he floated through this mysterious forest, Ronan had come across a few battlegrounds before, where unknown creatures had fought and left their carnage behind. But nothing compared to what he had just discovered today.
Curiosity drove him onward. This scene wasn't something a few individual creatures could have created. After discovering the first corpse, he floated only another ten meters before finding the forest littered with animal carcasses.
Ronan's expression grew increasingly grim. Near one of the unknown creatures' bodies, he spotted a broken longsword.
A sword!
Since his reincarnation, he hadn't encountered any humans. Ronan had been deliberately avoiding one particular question—whether or not humans even existed in this strange world.
Now, seeing the sword, and a little further ahead, the torn remnants of clothing, Ronan couldn't help but feel a surge of excitement.
However, his excitement didn't last long. As he lowered his altitude and continued drifting forward, what awaited him was a field covered with corpses—piles of unknown creatures' bodies, with blood flowing outward from them.
The ground had been completely stained red, and the metallic stench had transformed into a foul miasma, gathering into clouds that even blocked out the light of the sky.
In the dim light, Ronan's blood-red eyes slowly looked upward.
Ahead of him, countless bodies were stacked into a mountain, with blood flowing like a spider's web beneath it. The pool of liquid at the end of the web had turned a deep crimson.
Ronan froze. In both his previous life and his current one, he had never seen such a scene, like hell manifesting itself in the human world.
There were at least one hundred thousand corpses in front of him. This was nothing short of a massacre of unknown creatures.
Unconsciously, he drifted forward. When he finally stopped at the base of the corpse mountain, his mind went blank for a moment. Slowly, his attention was drawn to a flag planted atop the pile of bodies. It was a pure white flag, untouched by even a single drop of blood. In this world of red and black, it was the only anomaly.
Ronan didn't know how long he had been staring.
He was dumbfounded by the horrific sight before him.
His mind, which had stalled, gradually started up again. He suddenly snapped out of his daze due to an unexpected sound—a faint rustling.
He had already scanned the area earlier and confirmed that there should be no living creatures besides himself here. But now, amidst the sound of blood flowing from the mountain of corpses, there was also this eerie rustling.
His mind didn't jump to ghosts or anything of that nature. Listening carefully to the noise, Ronan floated to the side of the corpse mountain.
There, he saw that one of the corpses on the surface of the pile was slowly "lifting" its upper body.
Ronan's eyes widened, and he moved a bit closer.
The corpse "shifted" again, rolling over.
Ronan waited in silence, and finally, a hand... no, a claw emerged from the gap beneath that corpse.
"..." Ronan remained silent, watching as the claw that was eerily similar to a human hand but with only three fingers, groped the air.
It seemed to be testing its surroundings. Ronan could hear muffled groans coming from beneath the pile of corpses. Whoever—or whatever—was down there seemed to be confirming that it was safe and was now struggling to climb out.
He moved a little closer to observe it, and finally, a yellow head poked out from the pile of corpses.
As soon as the creature emerged, it began gasping for air. Ronan hovered directly above it, and the creature hadn't noticed him yet.
Ronan felt a surge of excitement, not for any particular reason, but because this was... a person, maybe.
He quietly watched. The "person" crawling out from the corpse pile seemed to have rested enough. After looking around, it suddenly burst out with a curse.
"Damn it!"
The accents were strange, it was not something Ronan shouldn't have understood, but somehow he did.
"Phew~" After the curse, it let out a long sigh, filled with relief from narrowly escaping death.
Ronan squinted. This "person" had sparse yellow hair on its head, a bulging forehead, and a very pointed skull.
Grunting and groaning, the yellow-haired being finally crawled out of the corpse pile and sat down, looking utterly disheveled.
Ronan remained silent. Within two minutes, the yellow-haired creature suddenly started sobbing.
"..." Ronan, who had just been looking for the right moment to speak, was now unsure how to react.
After crying for two more minutes, the yellow-haired creature lifted its claw-like hand to wipe its face and made a move to stand up.
Ronan finally lowered his altitude a little.
Suddenly, without warning, their two pairs of red eyes locked.
"..." The yellow-haired creature blinked.
Ronan's pupils narrowed slightly.
The yellow-haired creature blinked again.
Ronan attempted to smile, though he wasn't sure if he could manage it. "You..."
"AAAAAHHHHHH!" A shrill scream erupted, giving Ronan no chance to speak.
The yellow-haired creature exaggeratedly scrambled backward, only to tumble into the stack of corpses behind it, falling exactly as expected.
Ronan, ever considerate, followed. He watched as the creature rolled three times before coming to a stop.
"You-you-you!" The yellow-haired creature had small, deeply sunken eyes in its long face, and now, out of sheer terror, its yellow lips stretched wide.
Ronan politely smiled, though the twisted, misplaced features on his face against the black mist made it particularly frightening.
Tears, which had just been wiped away, began to fall again from the yellow-haired creature's eyes. Its face went pale as it begged, "Don't kill me, don't kill me, please don't kill me."
"I..." Ronan realized his voice was off too. What came out of his mouth wasn't the language he had spoken in his previous life. It was unfamiliar, but it felt oddly natural. "I won't kill you."
The yellow-haired creature still wanted to run, but now that it was facing Ronan directly, it knew that escape was impossible.