"Beautiful girl, you are the brightest starlight in the night sky ~~~ to illuminate my way home when I was grazing, I am willing to be by your side all my life, riding a horse and running on the vast grassland~~~~~" On the vast orc grassland, the thick and loud song sings from the sky, echoing between the endless heaven and earth.

In mid-to-late April, the grass has entered the growing season, and at this time, it indicates that the grazing season has arrived. Every year from mid to late April, the forcs who endure a winter will happily drive their livestock into the grassy grassland, allowing them to swim happily in the sea of food. On the once empty grassland, at this time, large herds of cattle, sheep and red deer are often visible, and the barking sheepdogs and domesticated canine monsters run around the cattle and sheep to their heart's content, consuming the energy accumulated for a winter in the gallop.

The songs of the orcs, the cries of the livestock, the chirping of wild birds, the never-ending sound of the wind, all kinds of sounds, played a music of life on the grassland. This is the beautiful orc steppe, this is the beautiful spring on the steppe.

It's early morning again, early morning on the prairie.

A spring rain quietly came at night, so that the grassland was full of wet smell, crystal clear raindrops, still hanging on the grass curved and low-hanging grass blades refused to fall, slightly moist soil, exuding the unique fragrance of the earth, the sky after the rain, clear as a piece of clear blue crystal.

When the night fell, the newborn morning sun slowly revived from the night's slumber after the rain, and the vigorous vitality returned to the grassland.

In the dense and deep grass, two steppe gophers poked their heads out of their holes, and their four little eyes blinked and looked around. After watching cautiously for a while, the two little ones crawled out of the hole one after the other, moving slowly and silently against the grass roots. Gray-green fur is the best protective color, so that they will not be easily spotted by enemies during their cautious and slow movements.

"Rustle. After climbing more than thirty meters, the two gophers stopped, curled up again, and disguised themselves as ordinary clods of earth with moss, but their small heads were still writhing, allowing as many unstable factors in the surrounding environment as possible to collect in their eyes. After camouflaging for a while, the two gophers put their minds at ease, stretched out their short limbs again, stretched out their sharp little paws, and chose a few grasses seemingly at random, and began to dig down against the roots of the grass. After digging about ten centimeters high, the two gophers suddenly shook their bodies, got together excitedly, stroked each other's backs with their tails and rubbed gently, as if expressing the happiness in their hearts. After rubbing for a while, the two gophers continued to dig along the position just now, and within a few minutes, more than 30 insect eggs were dug up, and the eggs were fat and fat, looking the size of a thumb, which made the two gophers flick their tails around excitedly. With a "whoosh", the gophers each picked up an egg and ate it.

With a "whoosh", two gray shadows swooped out of the grass like lightning, and two prairie foxes, one large and one small, followed far behind from the gopher when it left its nest, following all the way in order to wait for the moment when the gopher relaxed its vigilance. After more than half an hour of patient waiting, the opportunity finally came, and the gophers finally had a gap in their vigilance in front of the food, and the two foxes grabbed this gap and swooped down like lightning and bit off the necks of the gophers.

The sound of horses' hooves came from far and near, and the fox that had just been hunted was frightened by the sudden sound of horses' hooves, and its hair exploded, and it rushed into the depths of the grass with its prey in its mouth. But no danger came, and no one paid any attention to the movements of the two foxes, and the two horses galloped side by side, and a quaint and distant trumpet sounded from the mouth of the rider on the horse, and soared into the sky.

"Woo~~~", the same horn sound, came from the depths of the distant grassland, making a distant echo. Soon, the trumpet sounded farther away, and the sound of the beginning of the horse herding festival spread farther and farther away, gradually spreading in all directions.

As soon as the horn sounded, the dull drum sounded, and the continuous drum beat became more and more intense, and it sounded like a continuous thunder from a distance. When the thunder ended, countless people let out a roar of "woo he" at the same time, without any cumbersome ceremony, without any opening speech, the annual horse herding festival began in the woo hey.

The horse herding festival in spring and the ancestor worship festival in late autumn are called the two major festivals on the grassland. In late autumn, the orcs take the tribe as a unit to hold a grand sacrifice ceremony to the ancestors, share the harvest of the year with the ancestors, thank the ancestors for their protection, so that the tribe can spend the past dangerous year on the grassland. And the spring horse herding festival tends to be grander because it is a festival of communication with the gods.

In the distant Tertiary period, the steppe was still an ignorant barbaric era, every horse husbandry festival, the orcs would take the tribe as a unit, armed the slaves and warriors, each tribe out of a team, in a designated range of concentrated fighting, for the god of war to present a most exciting battle, in order to please the gods, pray for the gods' protection, so that in this year, whether war or production, everything can go smoothly. There are many tribes, and there are many teams, and there are often four or five thousand people who participate in the fight every year, and thousands of people fight in a small field, and they will not die until the team that survives to the end is decided, this team is the final winner, and the winner can get the best praise, and the slaves in the team can also be freed and become a normal member of the tribe.

As time went by, this barbaric and bloody battle gradually withdrew from the stage of history. Even so, the festival continued, so the orcs turned the bloody battle into a more civilized way, horse racing, archery, archery, safari, skilled, all kinds of competitive competitions will be staged in the three-day horse herding festival, replacing the real blood with competition. Although the orcs were worried about the gods' condemnation at the time of the initial change, the god of war soon passed down the oracle and approved this new way of sacrifice, which also relieved the nervous orcs.

This year, as in previous years, the Mokia tribe is holding a grand horse herding festival, which is attended not only by the orcs of the tribe, but also by a large number of tourists from all over the world to enjoy this exotic festival.

The Mokia tribe is a member of the tribal alliance of the steppes, with thousands of square kilometers of tribal pastures, and vast public pastures beyond the pastures. The strength of the tribe is in the middle and upper class in the alliance, with tens of thousands of people, its own priests and ancestral temples, and countless animal husbandry, it is one of the strongest tribes in the southern part of the grassland, and it is also one of the organizers and venue providers when the surrounding tribes jointly hold the horse husbandry festival every year.

When the thunderous drums shook the earth, a team of less than ten men crept into the bustling tribal territory. Before entering the tribe, Catherine stopped and sat on the horse's back, looking around, and let out an exclamation.

The tribe was huge, especially when compared to the small tribes outside the sphere of influence of the tribal alliances I had seen before. The orcs here also live in tents as a family unit, but because there are too many families, it is impossible to make all the tents in a circle like a small tribe, so you can see that thousands of tents are scattered on a grassland of more than 100 square kilometers as a living area like stars in the sky, and the arrangement seems to be chaotic, but in fact, it secretly implies some strange and unique order. Outside the residential area, there was originally an endless pasture that belonged to the tribe alone, and a large number of cattle and sheep should have been seen roaming in the pasture, but these days there is no such thing. A large number of arenas were built on the vast meadows, which were prepared entirely for the Horse Husbandry Festival.

The drums stopped, indicating that the festival had begun, and the whole tribe was gradually boiling, whether it was the aboriginal people or the visiting tourists, all kinds of people began to stagger around the grounds, making the atmosphere of the festival gradually richer.

"It's really different from human festivals. Catherine said softly: "Human celebrations tend to pursue concentration, concentrated in one city, concentrated in one area, the denser the flow of people, the better, the more people the more lively. But here it is the complete opposite, the flow of people is more and more dispersed, scattered to different places, although it may not seem so lively, but in fact it is not inferior to the celebrations of the human world. ”

"It's no different, it's like a bunch of hungry stupid dogs who smell food, and they go wherever they get food. Lina made a vicious comment with a cold face. Before returning to the client's camp, Lina had become another character one night, but no one expected that during the half-month journey, Lina revisited the book she didn't know which one by accident, and then changed back to this hateful appearance, which made everyone cry and laugh. While her evaluations were often completely accurate, overly blunt evaluations were often not so good, as they are now: "The difference is nothing more than seeing one pot of leftovers or seeing ten pots of leftovers." ”

"Ahem, Lina. Catherine finally couldn't help it, and said with a headache: "Let's discuss, you work hard tonight, finish reading the current book, and then hurry up and change it, okay?"

"Okay. Lina thought about it with a straight face, and reluctantly accepted Catherine's opinion: "If this is your request, eldest sister, then I will do it in a while, anyway, this book is almost finished." ”

"Whew. Catherine breathed a sigh of relief, and as soon as she turned her head, she saw that everyone around her held out their thumbs and made a gesture of praise.

"Wow, brothers and sisters, have you arrived?" Behind Catherine and Pannis, each of them made a child dressed in a toy puppet costume, although it seemed a little strange that they were all dressed in a puppet costume, but it was not uncommon for people in the crowd attending the celebration to wear all kinds of strange costumes, just puppet costumes, which did not attract much attention from others at all.

Obviously, Catherine fulfilled her promise so that the two children, who had been lonely for many years, could finally walk in the crowd and play with everyone. (To be continued.) )