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Chapter 339: Silence

"Ouch! What happened....?" Gavril slowly opened his eyes. He rubbed the back of his head which felt like it was melting. Even with his sturdy body, he was still feeling the effect of Fortis\'s attack even after such a long time.

He sat on the edge of his bed trying to remember what happened.

"How long was I out?" he mumbled to himself. His body felt weak, too weak to even stand up but still, he pushed through and forced himself to get up while using the sidewall as support.

He dragged his feet across the floor and reached the window. The curtain was pulled apart and the street outside was visible.

"Hmm?" he frowned as soon as he noticed it. The street was empty. And it wasn\'t just the street either. Normally there would be distant clattering of the chains and pickaxes with a lot of noisy racket going on no matter the time, but it was silent. Completely silent.

"Something\'s not right..."

He started looking around the room for something and found it not soon after. It was a small rock about the size of his fist. More than two-thirds of it had an ashy texture while the remaining 1/3rd was glowing with a faint light.

This was a natural stone found in this mountain range which was used by the Orcs to tell time. The rock would lose its glow in approximately 72 hours after it was excavated and it held no other uses. The one in Gavril\'s hand had been excavated the same day as Hao Xuan and Jin Wang arrived, meaning it had been more than 2 days already.

Gavril stood in front of the rock staring at it with wide eyes, not believing that he had slept for more than 40 hours straight when the ground suddenly shook. The tremor wasn\'t that strong but it still managed to bring Gavril down to his knees in an instant.

"What is happening? Why did no one come to wake me up?"

Maybe it was the medicine or maybe something else, but he didn\'t remember Hao Xuan at the moment at all. He went to the kitchen area and took out a few pieces of dried meat which he started knawing on while changing his clothes.

His body felt extremely weak and he could barely stand up by himself, but now wasn\'t the time to sit around and wait.

He got dressed within a few minutes and ran outside with shaky steps while shouting.

"HELLO? WHERE IS EVERYONE??"

All the streets were empty with not a soul anywhere in sight. The only sound was his own reverberating voice coming to him. He went to his friend\'s house, to Buse\'s house, but found no one there. He ran to the main building in the middle of the settlement but even that was empty. Agueda who had always been there since the moment Gavril got a hold of his senses was now gone.

"No, this can\'t be possible, it has to be a dream!" he shook his head trying to wake himself up but nothing changed. He slapped himself in the face, bit his hand hard enough that it drew blood and then ran headfirst into a wall. But every time he would open his eyes and found himself back in the empty settlement.

"ANYONE? PLEASE!" he shouted desperately but no one was there to reply.

"No no, this can\'t be right. They must have gone to the ceremony! There is nowhere else they could go to..." he told himself and started running towards the sacrificial hall.

The ceremony he was talking about was held every year to honor Ra. It wasn\'t due for a few more weeks still and would always be done on the exact same day every time.

He ran to the sacrificial hall but it was empty as well, like all the other places he had been to so far. There was not a single trace of anyone even entering it in the last day or two.

Distraught, desperate, and at the edge of his sanity, he started running around aimlessly from one area to another looking for someone, something, anything, that is until he found the area where the \'ancestral essence\' was stored.

*Huff*Huff*

He grabbed his knees while looking at the silent chamber. Normally you would hear splashing sounds a few dozen meters before even getting close to the chamber but he was standing just a few feet away from what used to be an ocean of the purple liquid but could hear nothing.

The eerie silence became defeaning the closer he got to the hollow basin and as he peered into it, his legs gave way. With a thump he fell to his knees, not being able to believe what was right in front of his eyes.

1, 2, 5, 10....he lost count. The ocean basin held numerous corpses of his tribesmen. From children to the few elderly, everyone was here.

Their eyes wide open and the horrified expressions on their faces were a sign of the horror they had witnessed before they drew their final breaths.

Gavril sat at the edge of the basin, peering into it in confusion. His head full of black hair turned white within minutes as he looked at the faces of all the people he saw every single day.

"Wait...Buse isn\'t here," he mumbled lightly after a few minutes. He would have seen her face even among these thousands of bodies, but she wasn\'t here.