Chapter 1020 - An Old Array
The village head was still not able to believe that he was flying at such a fast speed. And not just that, but that he was now riding in a spirit boat!
He had once been to the capital of the Northern Tribes before and had seen the power of the great elders there. They spirit tools that could achieve the same and he once dreamed about experiencing them.
And now he finally had the opportunity to do so.
The journey that would have taken him over two days to complete was finished in less than thirty minutes now!
The village head thought that this was rather fast, not knowing that Lin Mu and Jing Luo were able to go many times faster than this, but doing so would probably not be fine for the village head, with no cultivation base.
"There! That's the place!" The village head pointed.
But when Lin Mu looked at the place, he was confused.
"There's… nothing here." Lin Mu spoke.
"On the ground, there are some writings on the ground." The village head replied. "We'll need to go down."
Lin Mu landed the Spirit boat and looked around the area. This place was on a wide hill and was covered with grasses and shrubs like most of the other places. It looked rather normal and if one didn't visit this place before, they wouldn't even be able to tell that this place was special.
Lin Mu's spirit sense spread around and checked the ground.
'There is indeed inscriptions below this…' Lin Mu realized.
Jing Luo too detected it and cleared out the soil with a wave of his hand.
It turns out that there was actually a broken rock platform below the soil layer. Over the years, an inch thick layer of soil had settled on it making it hard to differentiate. But now the hidden runes were all visible.
Lin Mu's spirit sense traced the edges of the platform and found that it was at least a hundred meters wide. Its original shape was impossible to make out due to how much damage it had sustained.
"I don't recognize these inscriptions. Can you?" Jing Luo asked.
Lin Mu tried to read the damaged runes and barely managed to tell their functions. They were simply too faded to differentiate and since there were runes in the Dao Script included in it too, the meaning of the runes would become difficult to decipher if it was not intact.
"A Teleportation array…" Lin Mu muttered.
"It really is that?" Jing Luo was surprised.
He knew of the history of the Great Zhou Empire and how the Northern Tribes had tried to invade the empire with the use of hundred of teleportation formations in the past. Nearly all of them were destroyed over the years, either by the kingdoms or the sects.
But there were still a few that were hidden all this time, lucky to have been missed.
"An old one… from the last great war…" Jing Luo spoke.
"Indeed." Lin Mu nodded his head.
The village head didn't know what Lin Mu and Jing Luo were talking about but didn't interfere in it. He simply stood there silently, so as to not offend two cultivators who might be elders.
He was not a fool and could tell the difference in power between the other warriors and cultivators he had seen in the past and Lin Mu. There was simply an aura that made him feel suppressed, even if he was not being targeted.
He had only felt that when he faced great beasts in the wild and escaped by the skin of his teeth.
"Is this still functional?" Jing Luo questioned.
"Doesn't seem like it." Lin Mu said, but still tried to inject some spirit Qi into the rune, testing if they were even receptive.
After a few seconds, Lin Mu shook his head.
"Yeah, it is completely damaged. There is no repairing it." Lin Mu stated.
~Phew~
"That is for the best. We don't want them coming here." Jing Luo replied.
Hearing this, the village head was a bit confused.
'Were we not supposed to come here? But it was the priest who told us to…' he thought.
"I want to check a bit more. Let's wait a bit." Lin Mu spoke to Jing Luo.
"Sure go ahead." Jing Luo agreed.
Lin Mu closed his eyes for a few seconds before opening them. His vision turned blurry for a moment as the scene in front of him changed.
'Hmm… no traces of any spatial fluctuations at all… though it has been nearly two years since these villagers arrived here, so it does kind of make sense.' Lin Mu thought.
The village head had told them when they had arrived here. They had tried to find other places to live but were unable to go past a certain distance due to the beasts that lived there.
One of their relatively strong members had set out to find more places, but had almost died from the beasts that wandered the plains. After that, they simply didn't dare to go any further and decided to live here at the coast where there were few beasts.
And even the beasts that did exist here were weak enough to not threaten the lives of the villagers.
Even the aquatic beasts were relatively tame as long as they didn't wander out into the ocean too much. And they didn't need to either, as there were plenty of fish and other aquatic beasts just next to the coast.
The villagers realized that while they may have been isolated from the others, they still got what they had set out for… better land.
Though it was another fact that they barely had any seeds to start farming with. Right now, they were only cultivating some wild vegetables they had found and still depended on the ocean for their sustenance.
Having checked the entire platform in detail, Lin Mu concluded that the arrival of the villagers might have whittled down the last bit of the durability the runes had.