In the official social language of the Padrosi Empire's aristocratic circles, thieves are basically described as thieves and opportunists on the same footing as rats and dragon lizards, two notorious creatures. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

"They are the most despicable scum. Yes, yes, they don't kill. But that was only because they were afraid of the Empire's armies, and they did the same thing as murder. If you were to ask a knight of Parnira, he would tell you: "Don't think that it is good for a robber who doesn't kill, for they will loot all the property and rations of the babies who are waiting to be fed and the old who are too old to work." Compared to starving to death like this, wouldn't it be more refreshing to directly seal your throat with a sword?"

"Thieves or something, ah, it's terrible. And in the midst of the big city with high walls and safety, the delicate aristocratic ladies will cover their mouths and whisper like this—and then when you ask why it's scary, they choose to remain silent because they need to avoid saying things that don't fit their identity.

Even if you were to ask the citizens about a different class, their opinion of thieves and other outlaws would not be much better.

He is extremely vicious, and does nothing but kill people. That's the answer you'd give if you ask the people of a big city like Parnira who live in a safe city like Parnira - but not all civilians in the entire Padrossi Empire agree.

The good law and order and peace atmosphere throughout the empire was brought about by the unforgivable handling of crime with an iron hand, but the thieves were still not completely eradicated under such pressure and heavy punishment, and in the final analysis, the root cause was not solved.

"If it weren't for the lack of choice, who would want to live this life where everyone shouts and walks on the street and has to be careful not to be recognized?"

Although the overall prosperity of Padrosi is obvious to all, just as light is bound to be accompanied by darkness, in fact, there are still many oppressions of the nobility and the gap between the rich and the poor in various parts of the empire. And the vast majority of thieves come from these remote areas.

There was no harvest in the land due to a natural disaster, but the tax collector had to collect heavy taxes. Your child pulls at the corner of your coat and says he's hungry, what can you do?

Going up to repercussions with the aristocratic lord, wanting the officials to do something for the common people is their rightful right in the eyes of the citizens of big cities, but it is an adventure to gamble on their lives in remote villages.

It is fine once or twice, but if you disturb the "busy" business of the nobles, such as praying, enjoying good food, or beauties, you will not end up solving the problem, but the object of the problem, the peasants themselves.

How many people went to the nobles and never returned, no one knows, and no one cares.

The only weak people worthy of the knights of the empire to use their chivalry to protect were beautiful ladies and upright citizens, and the villagers of these remote villages, who spoke Lamanite with a strong accent, were not even human beings in their eyes.

This is also the origin of the stereotypical impression of the Lamani civilians in the prosperous areas as "all outsiders" for thieves.

The empire was too large, and the differences between the north and the south, the differences between cities and villages, created such deep-seated prejudices.

They don't want to understand each other and help each other, but they adopt confrontation, prejudice and exclusion. The end result is that no matter how much the iron-willed policy is used, the thieves will still exist.

If you can live a peaceful life, few people will want to become bandits, and even if there are indeed some thieves families, if you go forward, most of them are still old-fashioned officials and people at the beginning.

This is a delicate situation that exists only in the thousand-year-old empire of Padrosi, because of the bitter prejudice that the reputation of thieves is even more awkward here, even though the crimes committed are not as cruel as those of their West Coast counterparts.

Troubadours who wanted to go against the mainstream of society wrote stories about thieves and outlaws, in which they sang the praises of thieves as heroes who robbed the rich and gave to the poor without fear of power, and whose lives were accompanied by songs and full of freedom.

But like so many other stories, there's more to the than the truth.

A real thief would never do such a thing as robbing the rich and giving to the poor, because the rich nobles or the big merchants could not afford to provoke them. It was because of the pressure of life that he chose this very risky job, how could he risk losing his life and ruining everything just to complete a good deed.

It is true that they are not extremely evil, and they are definitely not "born evil" as officially advertised, but the so-called good and evil are not relative in the eyes of ordinary people.

They are two opposites of black and white.

In the eyes of mainstream society, there is no buffer zone in between.

Barrow recognized this a long time ago, and that's why he never did anything good.

By the standards of a thief, he was an outlier.

Speaking a standard Lamanite language, Barrow, who was nearly forty years old, had brown skin rarely seen among the Lamanites. With a big bald head and a height of 1.87 meters, he can be regarded as a medium figure even in the north, and in the south, where his stature is generally low, he can already be regarded as a top man with that muscle.

Such a person is better suited to be a centurion in the army or simply a knight, but the first rule in the world of thieves is not to ask where they come from.

People followed him and respected him as the leader of the bandits, because he acted decisively and did not drag his feet, and was familiar with the pain points of the nobles, and knew how to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages.

And act with their own set of rules.

"We are not good people, we don't do self-comforting kindness, because no one will buy it. But we act only to survive, to take what we need, not to be greedy, not to do personal harm, because this will bring endless revenge. That's what Barrow often says to those who follow him, and it's at the heart of his strong leadership and cohesion.

Although not everyone is buying it, most of the thieves are just ordinary people. Whether they are justified or self-deceptive, they need some creed to restrain themselves and sustain themselves from becoming outlaws.

In this way, within a few years, many people who heard of Barrow's reputation came to join the bandits, but in order to avoid the large group and the targeted encirclement of the Imperial army, they moved their base camp to the more remote south at the beginning of the autumn of this year.

And when it took half a month to finally arrive here, the first "work" encountered a setback.

The object of the robbery was a caravan with three wagons and little oil and water, and because they were not familiar with the place, they still cooperated with the local bandits even if they carried out a small operation at the beginning, and the conflict stemmed from the actions of the local bandits after the successful robbery.

"Let go of her. "Barrow used his physical superiority to stop the thief's misdeeds towards a young girl who happened to be in the caravan.

"You give me so much. The other party obviously didn't buy it, but seeing that Barrow's group of thieves was overwhelming, he finally gave up.

"I've heard before, what kind of person are you pretending to be a decent person, hypocrisy, and pretentious!" the man spat and turned away with his companion with their share of the booty.

There was friction with the Earth Serpent, and it was expected that they would be troubled by these peers in the future, but when the elven girl with black hair and black eyes looked up at Barrow, he felt that none of this was a big deal.

He could understand why the man had a lust for her.

The girl was indeed very pretty, with long black hair and pure eyes that were equally black, with a fair complexion and short pointed ears. But what he had about the girl was not possessive, and although his fellow thieves were joking behind him that the boss had finally gotten his way, Barrow frowned and looked at the alien girl closely, but the emotions in his heart were only cautious and curious.

She obviously didn't belong to this caravan, and she must have picked it up somewhere.

Barrow noticed her as the thieves rushed down the hillside with a cacophony of noise, but not because of her beautiful appearance, but because of her calm and unmoved posture as she sat among a crowd of panicked and frightened merchants.

Any words and deeds of any person have a certain purpose.

Barrow had the ability to read the other person's thoughts from the interlocutor's expression and eyes, which was his talent to some extent, but he couldn't see anything in the girl who didn't say a word.

Maybe it's because his skills are not at home, and the other party hides it too well, or maybe she's really pure like a diamond, without any impurities.

He couldn't understand or understand what kind of existence this girl was, he was only instinctively attracted, although it was different from those who were attracted to men and women, but he was also attracted to her after all.

So he took her back to the cottage and took her with him day and night, snickering at the snickers of his companions, but nothing happened as they thought.

What is this purity, is it the difference between elves and humans? no communication is ineffective to her, and the maiden will only stare at him silently, and then occasionally show a smile. And whenever this happens, from under the pure and beautiful face of the other party, from the pair of black eyes without impurities, Barrow always feels an inexplicable chill.

It was as if there was a behemoth with sharp teeth standing behind him, ready to tear him apart and devour him.

'Maybe bringing her back wasn't the right decision,' he had a sudden hint of foreboding, and then it quickly came true.

Four days after the black-haired girl arrived at the cottage, all the dogs in the camp had somehow disappeared.

"It must be those people who did it!" Because of the previous friction, the thieves were aggressive and wanted to seek revenge on those land snakes.

But how could it be that a thief of a few people could make more than a dozen dogs disappear overnight? Barrow's suspicion was placed on the girl, and he began to pay more attention to her movements, but he could not find the slightest trace.

"There's a wild beast!" the members of the thieves who were chopping wood found bloody claw marks on the trunks of some nearby trees, the size of which was suspected to be large dragon lizards.

Maybe it's because I'm overthinking, and that's the right answer. After asking the thieves to set off in a team for safety, Barrow thought.

But before he could put his hanging heart to the end, things changed again.

The maiden is gone.

When Barrow woke up on the morning of the sixth day, she was gone.

The door was locked and the windows were closed. No one saw any sign of her departure, and Barrow looked at the nearby dirt from his own experience, and found no footprints, as if she had disappeared into thin air.

"Michelle!"

"Isaac!"

Shouts echoed through the interior of the camp.

Along with the maiden disappeared were all the children of the thieves.

"Everyone, all armed!"

Instinctively trembling, the ominous premonition in Barrow's heart became more and more obvious, this continuous strange scene could not be a coincidence, first all the dogs, then all the children, this is definitely the ghost of the black-haired girl.

"There's blood here—" Walking through the mountains and forests was a thief's basic skill, and the dozens of people who set out quickly noticed the traces of the perverse sight.

"This way, this way!" a voice sounded from the right wing, and everyone reversed course.

"What the hell is this-" The stench began to thicken, and there was some slippery, dark black object on the ground.

"Hey, look at that, it looks like a man—" The thief who spoke, named Palson, turned pale as he said this, as the clouds drifted by, and the light became intense, and the miserable, disgusting face of the corpse that had begun to decompose was revealed.

- It's the same thief from before.

"There's another one, here. ”

All of them were there, they were disemboweled, and all their internal organs were hollowed out.

"Whew-" Some of the thieves, who were more psychologically fragile, turned pale. "The female elf did it. Someone whispered to Barrow, and the leader of the thieves nodded grimly.

He didn't hesitate any longer.

If you find her, you will be executed on the spot. The leader of the thieves made a decision.

Everyone's weapons are tightened, and the fact that they don't kill people doesn't mean that they will still be good when they are violated.

The terrain began to settle down, and from the bright light in front of him, Barrow assumed that it was an open ground that resembled a forest canyon or a dry riverbed, and that was probably their destination.

"Be careful. The smell of blood was so thick that Barrow shuddered, and when they finally got there, even if they had seen many, many, many others, the leader of the thieves could not help but be stunned.

It was a whole world of carrion.

Countless wild animals lay on the ground in a circle, all disemboweled, and died a miserable death. Flies and maggots fluttered and wriggled merrily above them, and the foul smell was already strong and gelatinous, and when inhaled, it adhered to the nose and mouth, making people retch.

With the buzzing of a pile of flies that were as dense as a black cloud, at least a third of the group turned pale in just half a minute.

It's a magic circle—even if you're not a magician, Barrow can tell.

The carcasses of wild animals are placed on a basis of size, with the outermost being the largest and decreasing inward.

They were all disemboweled, their long intestines pulling toward the center like some kind of line used to form a magic circle.

The magic circle composed of countless carrion corpses, and in the ring in the center of it, the "parts" formed are the disappeared children of the thieves.

With his eyes open, there were still tears in the corners of his eyes, and he was covered in blood and had lost his voice.

And the black-haired elf girl was wrapped in this huge sea of flesh and carrion, and stood at the center point, like a flower blooming from the flesh. "You demon!" the angry parents roared and rushed in.

But Barrow froze where he was.

The stench and the buzzing of flies seemed to be far away, and all the people became the background in his eyes, and nearly a hundred thieves, men, women, and children, rushed from his side to the black-haired girl. But the whole world faded in Barrow's eyes, and he could see, and could only see, the scene that was at the center of it all, extremely out of place, but in a way very harmonious.

The pure and white black-haired girl turned her head and looked in his direction, smiling again.

That smile is so pure, if you put her in the background of beautiful mountains and rivers, you must be mistaken for an angelic existence.

"Ahh

"I see. The thief said.

"She's pure, but she's the cause of my fear. He was talking to himself.

"She doesn't have bad intentions. ”

"She didn't realize that what she was doing was evil. ”

"She is. ”

"Evil itself. ”

"Roar—" The monster lunged at the thief who was standing still.