About three hours ago, when Luan was swinging about from tree to tree like some primitive caveman, an interesting development occurred in the forest he was.
"Walk faster, the sun is about to set!" A gruff voice could be heard amidst the dense forest, accompanied by quite a number of footsteps that didn't seem to be countable at first glance.
"What's the matter, old man? So what if the sun is about to set?" Another voice, feminine and childish asked, clearly dissatisfied that she was being rushed through such habitat.
"Trust me young miss, you wouldn't like to find out. Even with my green core cultivation level, I'm not sure I'd make it out alive," the voice replied.
A lot of steps faltered, clearly shocked by what the man said, but with his urging, they started moving again.
Albeit a bit faster.
Soon enough, the group that caused the footsteps emerged in the open– where there were lesser trees packed together.
There were 24 humans in this group.
About 18 of them were youngsters who looked no older than the age of 18, but the remaining six looked like battle-hardened veterans, especially the man at the lead who spotted a small gray goatee.
One conspicuous thing about this set of people were the kinda of dresses they wore.
The males were dressed in off-white shirts, black trousers and shoes, while the females were dressed in what could simply be referred to as gowns.
If not for the weapons some of them carried beside them or hung on their belts, they would have looked like a party of guests that got lost instead.
Although the gowns were short enough not to hinder any movements and long enough not to reveal anything inappropriate, the man with the goatee still seemed disgruntled whenever he saw them.
The same went for the shirts the men and boys wore.
Out of the 24 people, he was the only one dressed in an attire that could be called appropriate for the forest.
From his cap that had a white feather on it to his robe that looked to be entirely made of beast skin to the sword he hung on his belt, he was the only one who didn't seem to come to the forest to party.
"Wait here, I have to take a look around from a higher vantage point," the man said.
The youths wanted to protest, but the man was already gone, flying to the top of the tallest tree nearest to them as a green aura swirled around him.
And yes, he was was actually flying.
As they watched him fly, one of the youths– a male– spoke.
"I can't imagine how he does his silent casting... I've been trying for months, all to no avail."
"Hm," another female nodded. "The way he explains it seems so simple and yet..."
She sighed, and the other youths also followed suit in sighing or venting their frustrations.
Spells were the ways mages applied mana in order to give the highest output with the lowest amount of mana, and while more mana was used the higher the grade of the spell, it ultimately depended on the type of spell being cast in the first place.
Spells were a series of named diagrams that one needed to memorize and visualize before being able to cast them, and saying their names enabled the focus a person used when casting a spell to be amplified.
After all, the human mind was a quagmire that sunk different sorts of random thoughts, both important and unimportant, with every passing second.
All mages could cast spells, but not all mages had the same speed of casting.
Some mages could even double-cast, which meant casting two spells simultaneously.
There were also triple-casting, quadra, penta and hexa-casting, but most of the time, there was a need for the mages to say the names of the spells out loud.
Casting six different spells with six different diagram lines was already taxing enough, therefore the mages had to speak out loud to focus.
What truly set apart mages from each other was the ability to recall the name of the diagrams, the lines of the diagrams themselves and move the mana according to this pattern without uttering a single word.
In other words, silent casting.
This caused the youths to be envious, but they also knew this something they couldn't achieve quite yet.
The "old man" was over 70 years, after all.
The old man in question, who was named Zindi, landed atop a thick tree branch while holding firmly to the trunk.
Then, his pupils seemed to have become infinitesimally smaller to the point of becoming dots in the whites of his eyes, enabling him to see far, far into the distance.
As he scoured the length of the forest for somewhere he and his followers could stay the night, his gaze landed on a part of the forest that was starkly different from the rest of its surroundings.
There were usually some bushes or patches of grass where there were no trees, but this particular place looked like it had been ravaged by a fight between two beasts.
The grass was almost non-existent, and the ground was riddled with large hoofprints and misshapen earth that Zindi had almost mistaken it as a mage's doing.
Darkened blood stains filled the area, splattering the trees and staining the ground.
One spot in particular was especially filled with blood, making the old man wonder what could have happened.
He only wondered though, as he knew that being overly curious in Thorn Forest- the name of the particular forest he was in- was suicide.
Shaking his head, he scoured the remaining areas and his gaze suddenly lit up when he saw something.
He spotted a cave.
The darkness in it's depths wasn't properly lit by the light of the midday sun, but judging by the size of the cave and how there seemed to be many hoof and paw prints by the caves entrance with some even leading into the cave, the creature within the cave couldn't be something his entourage couldn't handle.
As long as they killed whatever lived inside and sealed the entrance with earth magic, their survival would be all but guaranteed.
Satisfied, he was about to glide down with the help of a spell when his eyes suddenly caught on something behind the dense cover of trees located at the back of the cave.
It was a mast.
A broken mast.
A broken mast of a temple dome.