Midday. The sun blazed high, scorching the earth with unrelenting heat.
For the blood clan, this was the most uncomfortable time of day, yet Earn, trusted confidant of Prince Visarius, appeared in the demon camp closest to Threehill City.
Ever since Fifteen had broken through the siege and slipped into the city, the incident had been a thorn in Earn’s heart.
Although His Highness the Prince had already said a contingency was in place, Earn had no intention of letting the camp under his command spring any leaks that humans could exploit.
“Double the shadow bat patrol density,” Earn ordered the subordinate behind him.
The adjutant’s face showed difficulty. “My lord, sending shadow bats out at this hour will cause heavy losses…”
“A few deaths are acceptable,” Earn cut him off coldly. “We have enough shadow bats left in the army to last until the end of this campaign. I want them rotating patrols—no suspicious movement is to be missed.”
Shadow bats were not easy to raise, and his men felt the sting, but with Earn’s word there was nothing to do but obey.
The adjutant dared not argue further and hurried to relay the order.
Earn turned his gaze to the camp’s perimeter. “Add bloodthorn traps on both flanks, staggered in three overlapping layers… and underground…”
Under his arrangements, sky, ground, and subsurface all received corresponding defenses.
If the humans dared a night raid, he would turn that raid into a decisive battle and annihilate the city’s remaining fighting strength in one stroke!
Satisfied that his orders were being carried out, Earn finally prepared to leave.
After confirming every instruction was being strictly executed, he turned to head back to the shaded command tent. Just as he did, his eyes inadvertently swept toward Threehill City—and his steps froze.
He beckoned the officer in charge of vigilance and pointed at the corpse piles in the ruins of the outer wall. “In the past two days, have the humans come out to collect bodies?”
The officer followed his gaze and answered blankly, “They shouldn’t have. There’s probably no space left inside Threehill City to bury them. Look—aren’t their soldiers’ corpses still mixed in the piles?”
“Then why… is the height of the corpse piles lower than yesterday?” Earn frowned slightly.
“Is it?” The officer squinted hard. “This subordinate thinks it’s always been like this…”
“Is that so…” Earn withdrew his gaze, half-convinced.
He had only asked on instinct and wasn’t entirely certain himself. With the officer saying that, Earn began to suspect he was being overly paranoid.
At that moment, one of Earn’s direct blood descendants hurried over, dropping to one knee. “Master, while reinforcing the outer perimeter as you ordered, we discovered an anomaly on the east side of the camp.”
Guided by the soldiers, Earn arrived at an empty patch less than half a li from camp.
Several burly demon soldiers had already dug a five-meter-square pit. At the bottom lay the dark mouth of a tunnel.
“What is this?” Earn narrowed his crimson eyes.
“Origin unknown, but clearly not natural.” The lead vampire leaped into the pit and slapped the tunnel wall. “Look—these walls have been reinforced. Crude, but solid.”
“A human secret tunnel?” Earn suggested, then immediately rejected his own idea. “No, too narrow.”
The passage was far too small for a human to pass through.
Among the demons, perhaps only the smallest goblins could squeeze inside.
Though he didn’t think it was a human tunnel, a suspicious passage like this could not be ignored.
Earn immediately ordered a few scrawny goblins rounded up. Under the command of a blood clan in bat form, they entered to scout.
Not long after the vampire led the team inside, they reached the first fork.
The pitch-black tunnel split into two, stretching into unknown darkness.
After a brief hesitation, he sent two goblins to explore the other branch.
Yet before they had gone far, a second fork appeared, then a third.
When they reached a wide junction where five tunnels converged, even the vampire realized this underground was a massive labyrinth. Continuing to split the already thin team would only scatter them further; he decided to keep the current formation and press on.
And so they wandered underground like headless flies for a long while.
Just as the vampire was about to give up and report back, the team finally spotted something different.
Fine mycelial threads clung to the tunnel walls, and one or two faintly glowing mushrooms had sprouted—the first signs of living things since entering the depths.
Following the mycelium-covered passage, they arrived at a cavern that made every demon’s hair stand on end.
Dozens of tunnel mouths dotted the ceiling like honeycombs, while the floor was buried under a mountain of corpses.
Mangled demon and human remains were piled indiscriminately; some had already turned to bare bone, others were slowly being decomposed by mushrooms growing from their flesh.
It looked like the lair of some horrifying monster. Not only the vampire— even the usually chattering goblins were shocked into silence.
While all the demons stood frozen by the ghastly sight, a squelching sound came from one of the ceiling tunnels.
First a severed lizardman tail dropped down, followed by broken limbs, and finally a blood-soaked Puchi popped out with a pop, hanging upside-down from the ceiling.
Though Puchis had no eyes, every demon present felt unmistakably discovered.
“Retreat!” the vampire hissed.
The goblins screamed and bolted back the way they came, only to hear the same squelching noises echoing from every direction.
Countless Puchis were surging in from every branch, sealing off all escape routes.
On the surface, Earn faintly heard a few muffled thumps from underground.
After waiting a long while, only a handful of goblins crawled back out.
They were the ones who had been sent down side passages earlier. Hearing strange thumps, they had panicked and fled back the way they came on their own initiative.
The vampire, however, never emerged.
No emergence was itself an answer.
Earn immediately mobilized more troops. Not only did he assemble a much larger exploration team, he ordered wide-area detection across the surrounding region.
As expected, within half a day three more similar hidden tunnels were discovered in different locations.
…
Meanwhile, the “kind deed” of helping with burials had been noticed. Lin Jun had no choice but to start producing more combat Puchis underground for defense while accelerating the laying of fungal mats through the tunnel network.
The demons’ near-blatant digging naturally caught the humans’ attention as well.
The humans, however, had no idea what was happening on the demon side.
Threehill City’s underground was also protected by defensive arrays. Even if the demons dug through, it would merely open another front; a sneak attack from below was impossible.
Unable to figure it out for the moment, the humans simply heightened their vigilance against Earn’s camp.
(End of Chapter)
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