Chapter 88: The Abandoned Village

After leaving the Flying Sword Sect, Xuan Hao quickly regained his bearings as he decided to ignore whatever the new system feature was for now and instead focus on finding the source of the plague that had been spreading or at least find out who was behind it… Though he did wonder how strong the people they would send out would be.

Jumping on top of his sword and Xuan Hao started flying towards the borders of the Flying Sword Sects territory where the plague had first started, at the moment he could only be happy at the fact that the border that the Heavenly Sky Kingdom shared with the Azure Sky Kingdom was not near the place that he was going…

At the very least he would only have to deal with the people send by the ones spreading the plague instead of dealing with people from the Azure Sky Kingdom as well at the same time…

Flying through the sky on top of his sword, Xuan Hao moved way faster than he had done in the past and soon passed over the first village that had been infected with the plague on his way to the border region.

The village itself had long since been left as bodies of people in all sorts of stages of decay were laying on the ground rotting away under the sun. The only sign of life left in the village was the crows poking to the still rotting flesh of the long dead bodies with their sharp beaks.

Xuan Hao saw this and almost felt like throwing up when he saw the still rotting bodies being slowly eaten by the crows, but he just barely managed to hold it in as he quickly made his way down and landed in the abandoned village below.

"W-what is this…?!" The state of the long dead bodies was already quite a shocking scene for Xuan Hao to see, but the moment he landed on the ground and spread his divine sense out to inspect the bodies of the now dead villages, he saw a truly horrifying thing.

Inside the bodies of the long dead villagers, the plague had spread out to every part of their body, like a tree taking root in the ground, the roots of the plague had spread through the entire body of its victim.

At the moment, the body of the dead villagers were nothing more than a simple layer of skin, inside them a complicated network of roots spread throughout their bodies, with a giant ball of sorts in the middle of the body.

Xuan Hao inspected the centre of all the dead bodies in the village and found out that all of them had the same ball shaped thing in the middle of them, other than the fact that it was some sort of energy like qi, similar yet not. Xuan Hao could not tell what it was or what purpose it had.

Swoosh~

Waving his hand at one of the dead bodies, Xuan Hao's sword qi swept over and split the body open. Following this, Xuan Hao used his qi to extract the ball shaped energy out from the body.

The ball shaped energy had a dark green colour as it gave off an eerie kind of holy feeling, almost like a part of an evil god's power had seeped into the ball of energy and merged together with it.

Not daring to try and absorb the energy into his body and inspect it in detail, Xuan Hao threw it away as it slowly dispersed into the surrounding environment without the protection of the human body to keep it from dispersing.

"Hah…" Sighing to himself, Xuan Hao looked over the empty village and felt a slight pang of sadness wash over him as he saw the dead bodies of both old and young lying dead everywhere.

The dark green energy ball that had formed inside the bodies of the deceased worried Xuan Hao quite a bit as he jumped back on his sword and made his way back into the air towards the village located at the border of the Flying Sword Sect territory where the plague had first begun in the north region of the Heavenly Sky Kingdom.

No matter what, he could not stay in the abandoned village for too long as he wanted to complete the task that the Sect Master had given him and find out who was behind the plague and more importantly, return to the sect to quietly cultivate and train his disciples…

Maybe he could even start interacting more with them as he clearly did not do so enough! Being a master who only ever came out to teach them a few times a week would not cut it!

At the very least he was not like most of those other elders in the sect that almost demanded a constant form of respect from their disciple and would only teach them a few things every year.

Maybe it would come with time and he would end up like them when he grew older in the future… Now that he thought about it, Xuan Hao quite liked the idea of being respected more by his disciple while putting in minimal effort to teach them only once or twice every year…

…

At the same time that Xuan Hao thought about how to go about teaching his disciples when he returned to the sect, a group of black robed individuals with a strange symbol on the front of the robe arrived at the village that Xuan Hao was currently making his way towards.

"Are we sure that the Flying Sword Sect will send someone to check the village…? The chance of finding anything here is close to abysmal and there are only corpses left!" One of the black robed men said in a slightly angry voice as he pointed at the surroundings of the village.

Most of the dead bodies had long since been eaten clean by the surrounding wildlife or was in a state of decay with all sorts of insects crawling all over the place.

"We have gotten information that the Heavenly Sky Kingdom's Imperial Family requested for each of the four sects to send at least one person at the Nascent Soul Realm to inspect the places where the plague started after the priests, we sent took care of the Core Formation experts they mobilized to do so earlier." Another of the black robed figures spoke up as he ignored the complaint.

"Now we just have to be ready and make sure the person from the Flying Sword Sect does not return…" Saying this, the black robed figure looks at everyone present as each of them understood that there was no way out of it…

Now they had to wait for who knows how long before the Nascent Soul expert of the Flying Sword Sect arrives…