Hearing his guide's detailed explanation, Lu Yan curled his lips and smiled silently.
Ten years had passed in the blink of an eye. Over this decade, the city walls of Beizhou City had been repeatedly rebuilt and renovated, subjected to countless rounds of tedious construction.
It wasn't as if he had never been to Beizhou City before. Memories of the past were still clearly branded in the depths of his mind. He even remembered once pawning an item at a pawnshop inside the city in exchange for fifteen taels of silver.
Back then, he had held dozens of discarded, useless storage bags in his hands. Relying on those items, he had managed to make a small fortune.
It was actually quite comical. He heard that after that transaction, the pawnshop owner practically refused to accept storage bags ever again. Even if he absolutely had to take them, the maximum price he offered was strictly capped at fifteen taels of silver.
Who else but him would pawn a batch of storage bags worth hundreds of spirit stones for a mere fifteen taels of silver? In the eyes of outsiders, doing such a thing was no different from being a fool.
But at that time, Lu Yan was a wanted fugitive blacklisted across the entire Central Continent. As the vital gateway between the Northern Border and the Central Continent, Beizhou City had been heavily blockaded with checkpoints everywhere. His portrait had been posted on every corner, and cultivators had been searching and interrogating everyone in sight.
He simply didn't have the luxury of leisurely bargaining to drive up the price. Not daring to linger for even a second, he could only pack everything up in a rush and hastily sell off the pile of storage bags at a low price, hoping only to quickly exchange them for worldly silver and escape.
In his memories, the old outer city wall of Beizhou City looked exactly like what the two of them had just seen from afar—broken bricks and tiles scattered all over the ground, cracks and gaps everywhere, the structure dilapidated yet stretching far into the distance, seemingly endless. In those days, Beizhou City was still nominally under the jurisdiction of the Ten Thousand Formations Sect.
This was clearly territory under the Formation Sect's name, so why did they build such a great wall, turning their weapons against their own people?
Back then, Lu Buqi had asked him that very question. The old man's hands, covered in thick calluses and mottled old scars, had gently stroked the head of Lu Yan, who was barely over ten years old at the time.
“If the Formation Sect ever falls and is destroyed one day, then this city wall will finally serve its purpose.”
Even though Lu Yan possessed the memories of two lifetimes, looking back to when he was ten, his mindset was still only that of a teenager—an age of passionate blood but shallow thoughts. How could a young boy understand grand concepts like the collapse of the world or defending the land for the public good?
He had tilted his head up and looked at Lu Buqi with a face full of confusion. “If the Formation Sect is already gone, then what use is there in keeping this great wall?”
Lu Buqi did not continue to explain the complex pros and cons to a child. He merely said softly, “When you grow older, you will naturally understand. Besides, if even a tiny spark of our legacy remains, wouldn't we have to rely on this place to slowly plan our counterattack?”
The ten-year-old Lu Yan had nodded silently, only half-understanding. But the moment he turned around, he treated this heavy warning like a passing breeze and tossed it to the back of his mind in the blink of an eye.
How could the Formation Sect ever perish? Such words sounded as absurd as saying the heavens would collapse. In his young heart, the Ten Thousand Formations Sect was an immovable giant.
Times change, and the world turns.
Now, as Lu Yan rode his horse beneath the ruined city wall, faint traces of the defensive formation personally engraved by the Formation Sect back then could still be seen on the surface of the structure. However, eroded by time and worn down by the flames of war, the profound formation lines had long since peeled away. Many of the runes were broken and incomplete, their spiritual energy completely extinguished, leaving only shallow, hollowed-out grooves on the cold brickwork, silently recounting the past.
Lu Yan slightly slowed the pace of his spiritual steed. The horse, conjured from spiritual energy, trotted over the gravel-strewn ground, slowly approaching the entrance of the city wall.
With his current cultivation and strength, flying directly over this city wall would have been an effortless task, requiring no exertion whatsoever.
Yet, as he gazed upon this high wall that had once carried great hopes of preserving the Formation Sect's final spark of life, he felt a deep sense of irony. Now, by a cruel twist of fate, this very wall blocked the last remaining spark of the Formation Sect from entering. A heavy wave of melancholy washed over him, but at the same time, a stubborn streak rose in his heart.
It was a stubborn desire to enter openly and honorably through the main gate. He refused to be like a rat, climbing over walls to sneak inside.
But when Lu Yan actually drew close to the foot of the city wall and his field of vision fully opened up, he was suddenly stunned.
Dense, sprawling camps of refugees, filled with dilapidated straw huts and mud shelters, were built tightly against the towering city wall. Packed side by side, they left no breathing room. Tattered burlap, decaying wooden planks, and scavenged dry branches were haphazardly cobbled together to form shelters that barely kept out the wind and rain.
Scenes of misery lay everywhere. Quite a few people had already lost their breath, lying stiffly on the cold, muddy ground.
No one dug graves to bury them. Perhaps the living nearby had already exhausted all their strength and had no energy to spare.
Or perhaps these deceased no longer had any living relatives left in the world to collect their bones. Gusts of wind blew by, kicking up dust that formed a thin shroud over the corpses.
Lu Yan's throat suddenly tightened, a suffocating feeling clogging his chest. His voice sounded slightly strained. “Why are there so many refugees gathered at Beizhou City?”
Beizhou City was located at the southernmost edge of the Northern Border. Even if the Ice Spirit army had breached the northern cities and forced the refugees to flee south, there shouldn't, in theory, be such a massive influx of people piling up outside Beizhou City.
The guide's face, which had been full of endless chatter along the way, completely lost its smile. He fell into a brief silence before speaking heavily a moment later, “These... were originally Beizhou City's own citizens.”
Lu Yan felt a rush of absurdity hit him. Citizens? The native-born citizens of the city had been driven out, reduced to displaced vagrants, becoming corpses exposed to the elements without even a single plot of earth to be buried in after death.
After saying this, the guide tightly shut his mouth, refusing to utter another word. Clearly, there were many unspeakable details hidden within this situation.
Lu Yan did not press further. For some truths, rather than hearing them from others, it was better to see them with one's own eyes.
With a thought, he increased the output of spiritual energy channeled into his spiritual steed.
The spiritual horse raised its hooves, and with the wind howling past, it galloped forward at high speed, directly cutting through this boundless refugee camp.
This refugee camp seemed to stretch endlessly without a boundary in sight, yet in this chaotic world, the fleeting lives of countless people were as brief as morning dew.
So long, yet so short...
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