The Blood Claw Tribe Branch established in this nearby location has always had numerous suspicions surrounding it.

Although this place is relatively remote, with no supernatural areas around for hundreds of kilometers, perhaps the lake reservoir that seems like a meteor crater beside Dragon Nest counts as one, but it's obvious that the Blood Claw Tribe didn't expend great effort to establish a branch here for this reason.

Considering the combined distance of several hundred kilometers and the primitive survival methods of the original Beastman Tribe, under normal circumstances, it would take at least one to two years for the Blood Claw Tribe to possibly react and send people to investigate.

But now, within less than half a year, the Blood Claw Tribe's Beastmen have already arrived here to investigate the situation, showing how much emphasis the Blood Claw Tribe places on this branch.

Such emphasis is clearly unusual.

The only possibility can only be that the Blood Claw Tribe has other extraordinary plans in establishing a branch here.

The purpose of the Blood Claw Tribe's plan, the previous branch's leader, Grom the Grizzly, might know a thing or two, but in that battle, he was blasted to oblivion by Austin, leaving no trace behind. The rest of the Dark Elves like Adinlek and other Extraordinary Beastmen don't know much either. They were only told to follow Grom the Grizzly, heading southeast to find a place to establish a base.

Why does the Blood Claw Tribe want to establish such a base? Austin doesn't know, but combining the previously discovered continuously infecting wasteland and those zombies, along with the recent movements of those large tribes near the Bloody Border, Austin has vague suspicions.

Leaving them alive is to determine if these suspicions are correct and to learn more.

"Cough cough... Esteemed His Highness Blue Dragon... We came here not only to investigate the division's destruction but most importantly to probe the movements of the evil spirits..."

A Silver-level Blood Claw Beastman struggled to stand and respectfully spoke towards Austin.

"Evil spirits? What are they?"

...

Several days later,

The Copper Mine Base that was previously destroyed by battle had undergone some simple repairs, the broken blast furnace being rebuilt anew, and the Goblins had made certain modifications to the earth furnaces based on previous experience. However, the newly mixed clay hadn't dried yet, to prevent cracks from appearing, they could only wait for the furnace to naturally dry before continuing copper refining work.

Even though copper refining couldn't proceed due to the furnace issue, the Beastmen didn't sit idle.

A large number of Beastmen excavated chunk after chunk of copper ore from the mountain and transported them to the copper refining site where the furnace stood tall. Meanwhile, massive trees were felled and burned into charcoal in the furnace, piled high like a mountain and placed on the open space of the square.

The circulating Beastmen were all well-organized, everything orderly and steady, waiting only for the furnace to dry before throwing themselves into copper refining work.

If not for the gigantic claw marks deeply embedded in the ground, with web-like cracks spreading from the shattered earth and the overturned massive clods of soil left uncovered, these terrifying battle scars yet to be concealed, one might have thought this tranquil Copper Mine Base had never suffered an attack at all.

The injured from that assault battle had basically been escorted back to Dragon Nest Tribe's residence for treatment, and the captives were also locked with heavy copper chains and shackles and taken away.

Though the whole tribe seemed peaceful, the power spread from the battle—the Beastman Three Techniques, the ancestral bloodline power of Meng Bi, the formidable strength of His Highness Austin—was widely discussed throughout the tribe.

The most obvious manifestation being that some of the young Beastmen categorized as militia began training hard in their spare time, hoping one day to showcase such demeanor before everyone and earn the qualification to join the Dragon Nest Legion to cultivate the Beastman Three Techniques.

The impact from the Blood Claw Beastman's assault continues to spread within the Dragon Nest Tribe, reaping admiration and belief from many of the Dragon Nest Beastmen.

Only, at this moment, Austin, residing in the Dragon Nest, found himself in a troubling dilemma.

The trouble bothering him was the news brought by the Blood Claw Beastmen, a revelation that shook his confidence!

Without exceeding Austin's expectations, indeed, the Blood Claw Tribe's plans were related to those zombies in the west.

No, or it could be said that the Blood Claw Tribe expended vast resources to establish the branch here primarily for those zombies and the spreading wasteland!

And all of this traces back to the start with the evil spirits.

According to the Blood Claw Beastmen, the appearance of zombies is connected to the evil spirits.

Evil spirits are entities that harvest faith through panic and eeriness, and when accepting faith, they become tainted with boundless wicked thoughts forming into malevolent spirit bodies.

Initially, spirit bodies can harvest faith similarly to divine entities, surviving and gaining power from faith, yet they lack divine essence, unable to become divine. During this period, they're highly susceptible to wicked thought infection, descending into thorough evil spirits.

Evil spirits coerced intelligent creatures to worship and sacrifice with faith in fear, harvesting faith by using panic as a weapon, accumulating their ethereal form with fearful faith, becoming nightmares for intelligent creatures. They then spread more fear to gain additional faith, utilizing the terror and struggle within souls to gain stronger sources of power.

And some evil spirits rely on blood sacrifices, feasting on living flesh, acquiring more powerful strength through sacrificing the living flesh of intelligent life forms.

Yet no matter the type of evil spirit, these inherently wicked beings are almost universally hated across the entire continent.

However, as long as there is demand, the soil for their survival exists.

Despite those who believe in evil spirits ultimately being harmed by them, in places like Kawa Great Forest, to survive and gain greater strength, some Beastman Tribes do worship evil spirits, obtaining more food by relying on evil spirits, growing stronger and ultimately becoming the very thing the evil spirits consume.

There are various kinds of evil spirits, among them, the existence of mutated evil spirits.

And this time, the source of the wasteland that appeared on the western lands and the numerous rotting infected zombies stemmed from a mutated evil spirit that surfaced years ago in an obscure corner.

No one knows when the mutated evil spirit suddenly appeared within a tribe inside Kawa Great Forest, resurrecting dead bodies through unknown means, absorbing vast amounts of fanatic faith, causing the entire tribe to fall, leaving no more circulating news.

Familiarly neighboring tribes went visiting...

The result was beginning to spread swiftly like a plague,

Launching a sweep across the southernmost lands of Kawa Great Forest, continually spreading far and wide towards all directions of the forest, sweeping progressively far.

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