The cultivators who had stopped the trio were a bit shocked, to say the least upon seeing their reactions. They had not expected three grown men to act like this. Then they noticed their disheveled appearances and got a better grasp on their identity.

“You are… Young Master Shirong!” One of the guards recognized.

“Yes, yes… that’s me,” Shirong said while stuttering.

“What happened? You all just went out in the morning and it only been twelve hours…” Another guard asked.

“Dead… they’re all dead…” Ye Dai said in a crestfallen tone.

“WHAT!” The guards collectively exclaimed.

When the trio of Shirong, Ye Dai and Bei Wen had arrived, only two of the guards had seen them and had listened to their cries. But even then they had not paid proper attention as they were more focused on whether they were intruders or something.

But after confirming their identities, they were now shocked. It had already been a rather surprising thing that the clans approved of someone to go into the forbidden zone after such a long time. In the past year since they had established the barrier and the outposts, only three teams had ever gone in.

Two of them returned after just a few minutes as they had only gone to check if the barrier was working well, but Shirong’s team was the one that had actually entered for a proper expedition. No one had dared to go after knowing about the cultivates of the Ling Kingdom’s royal court, thus they did not expect it.

But now their fears were fully confirmed as the first proper team that went in for an expedition had come back with only twenty percent of their members. 

“Take them inside and contact the city… tell them we have a lot of causalities,” One of the guards who seemed to be the head spoke.

By now almost all of the guards from the outpost had gathered around. Shirong looked around and counted about thirty of them here.

‘Damn, there are a lot more than we saw on the way in. And this is just on one outpost, there are more than size surrounding the entire zone.’ Shirong thought.

He then did a quick sweep of the cultivators and saw that except for five people, all of them were at the qi refining realm, while the five were at the core condensation realm.

‘This does not seem right, did the clans lie to us? There is no way they would assign so many core condensation realm experts here unless there was something important in there. Did they perhaps get even more information than I thought?’ Shirong wondered.

They brought the trio to the inside of the outpost, which was nothing but a wooden building that was of three stories. The three of them were scanned over with a few formations to make sure that they did not have any of the dangerous fumes and toxins from the forbidden zone on them.

“They’re all clear, although their defensive talismans are pretty much fully depleted.” The cultivator who was operating the formation said.

The head of the guards nodded and then looked at Shirong.

“Tell us what happened in detail.” The head guard spoke in a serious tone.

The man knew how severe the situation was right now. Among the people that had died, there were some cultivators with important identities. There were even two heirs of a clan with them while the rest of them were all core condensation realm cultivators, which were higher members of the clans.

In the clans, a nascent soul realm cultivator was already qualified to become its patriarch, and thus the core condensation realm cultivators were enough to be given the position of elders. The loss of even a single elder was a blow to the strength and power of the clan.

The head guard needed to ensure that he got all the facts correctly, or even his life could be on the line.

“We went in as we had originally planned, but soon after getting about a quarter of the way in we were attacked. It was a beast… a very strong beast. I… I could not even see its cultivation base. It happened rather fast, we tried to run, but the beast was much stronger.” Shirong said and took a pause, pretending as if he was tired.

The head guard did not prod him further and let him take a short rest. Meanwhile, Shirong was actually trying to gauge the reaction of the head guard and his two followers. Ye Dai and Bei Wen were simply hanging their heads low, but he could tell that they were picking up on everything he said and were listening intently. He estimated this should be enough of a break and continued.

“We were reduced to about ten men after not even five minutes and continued escaping towards the center of hate forbidden zone. We couldn’t turn back as the beast was behind us. The beast didn’t even let us take a clear look before he had already killed our companions, it was simply too fast.

Then when we were running, I was able to get a glimpse at it… I couldn’t get a grasp on its appearance it was something completely unlike I’ve ever seen or heard of. Its body was hidden in a veil of some kind and prevented us from seeing its true form.

It kept on taking down our companions one by one until eventually only three of us were left. Finally, we had reached close enough to the center that the beast stopped following us. I do not know the reason for it at that time, but soon enough we discovered it. 

Our defensive talismans were deteriorating at a visible speed. The more one went towards the center of the zone, the stronger the toxins and fumes got. This pretty much put us in a dilemma. We could either stay there or go back out the same way we came from.

Finally, we made our choice. We… burned our cultivation bases and used a trump card to escape the area.” Shirong explained.

“This guy is a professional actor, I say!” Lin Wu said feeling impressed.