The next morning, Lin Fan headed out of the town with a refreshed look on his face.
He was heading off alone since it was only him who was heading out to take care of the bandits.
If it was before, Xiao Yue and Lala definitely would have gone with him, but now that the dungeon town had been established, they didn’t have as much free time. Yue Lan had pulled them in to do some work for her since she needed strong cultivators like them for different things.
And with how close the three of them had gotten, even calling each other sisters, they just couldn’t refuse Yue Lan’s request.
But Lin Fan was happy to see the relationship growing between these girls.
He had read about those harems where girls were jealous of each other and there would be a lot of infighting between girls. He didn’t want to see that happening with the girls in his harm, he just wanted them to be friends with each other as well as loving him.
So seeing them acting so harmoniously was naturally good.
Plus being able to move by himself like this made it much easier for him to act since he would have to slow down if the other girls followed him.
He didn’t want to mention it in front of them, but with the gap in cultivation between them, he would have to slow down to let them keep up with him. While he didn’t mind it, he was certain that the girls would be hurt if they were to learn about this, so he kept quiet about it.
But as soon as he was out of the town, he shot forward like a rocket that had been released.
It didn’t take long before the town had disappeared behind him.
Of course, he only did this for the first bit and didn’t keep running on his own since he knew that it would waste too much energy like this. So after getting a bit away from the town, he summoned Hi and rode on his back to his target.
Hi’s speed wasn’t that much slower than his, so it didn’t take him long to arrive.
However, he didn’t ride Hi right to the sight of the incident, but rather he got off Hi when he was still a kilometer away.
After getting off Hi, he carefully released the wolf pack, Greeny’s puppets, and the Gale Sparrow to scout the area before he started moving closer.
He didn’t think that there would be anyone there since they had already finished stealing from the shipment of iron that had been sent.
According to the report, the caravan that their town had sent out abandoned the carriage when the bandits came, but they had still lost two people while trying to escape.
Of course, this wasn’t because these people only cared about their lives, but rather because they had been advised to abandon the goods if they were ever attacked by bandits. That was because Yue Lan cared more about the people in the caravan than the actual goods of the caravan.
The iron ore that had been lost was abundant back at the dungeon town, but the people of the caravan were hard to replace. After all, they were all loyal subordinates that had been trained up by Yue Lan and it would take a long time to train their replacements.
As for the reason why Yue Lan sent her trusted subordinates, that was because these first few trades were the most important and she wanted to make sure that it was handled well.
But in the end, an incident like this happened…
The scouts that Lin Fan sent showed that there weren’t any humans that were around the area that the abandoned carriage was, so Lin Fan moved closer to take a look at the situation of the attack site.
When he arrived, he could smell the faint scent of blood in the air.
Even though two days had passed since the bandits had been here, there was still the scent of blood in the air.
Lin Fan came closer to the abandoned carriage and found that as he had expected, the goods had already been emptied out of the carriage. There were also bodies that were scattered around, much more than just the two guards that had been lost.
Luckily it hadn’t rained that much over the past two days, so the corpses hadn’t rotted that much and could still be recognized.
Looking at these bodies, Lin Fan found that many of them had rough clothes and even rougher looking faces. There was no doubt that these were the corpses of the bandits taken out by the guards before they died.
But the strange thing was that he hadn’t found the corpses of the guards at all.
It was almost as if they had been taken away…
Could it be that they were captured alive?
No, when he thought about it, he felt that this was very likely.
After all, the subordinates under Yue Lan were all female and all of them were quite beautiful. Beautiful girls like that were prime targets for bandits, especially bandit groups filled with men like this one.
He knew this because all of the corpses on the ground were males.
After this thought passed through his mind, Lin Fan decided to move faster.
He had already found traces of the bandits long ago, but he had wanted to find more clues in this place, which was why he had been slowly looking over the abandoned carriage. However, with the stakes raised like this, he wasn’t able to continue waiting any longer.
So he quickly called out Hi again and headed off following Greeny’s instructions.
With the speed that Hi had, it didn’t take them long to arrive at the hideout of the bandits which was actually quite far away from where the caravan had been attacked.
The first thing that he did was naturally send out Greeny’s scouts to see what the enemies were doing.
To his surprise, he found that the bandits were currently unpacking everything out of their own carriages.
It seemed that even though they had attacked the caravan two days ago, they had just arrived back at their hideout. It wasn’t that they had arrived for a while, they had almost arrived at the same time as Lin Fan and had just started unpacking their things.
However, when he thought about it, he realized that this made sense.
After all, there was a large difference in luggage between the two sides.
Lin Fan was traveling alone and these bandits were carrying the loot that they had gotten from the caravan that they had attacked. Also, Lin Fan was traveling on a fast mount like Hi while the bandits were using normal carriages and horses.
So there was no doubt that Lin Fan would be faster than the bandits.
While he was scouting out the area, Lin Fan also used the scouts to see if he could find the hostages that they had taken from the caravan, but he found that there were no traces of them at all. It seemed that the hostages had already been moved into the cave that the bandits were hiding in.
As Lin Fan watched the bandits moving the goods that they stole into the cave, he raised his hand and pulled out a small toad from his Pet Storage Space.
Ever since he found out that he could use Greeny’s seeds on the monsters that he summoned in the dungeon, he had already started planning ahead. This toad was one of the monsters that he had summoned, but this toad wasn’t a normal monster.
In fact, it was quite cheap since it only had a single ability and that ability was what Lin Fan was planning on using here.
This toad had the ability to explode into deadly poisonous gas at any time, so as long Lin Fan controlled it and sent it into the bandit’s cave, he would be able to kill them all without much effort.
Because this toad had nothing other than this poisonous gas, the poisonous gas that it released was naturally very powerful. It was even able to take down Foundation Realm Cultivators if they were caught off guard.
Of course, Foundation Realm Cultivators would have enough energy to block off their noses to stop themselves from breathing in this poison, but it was still more than enough to prove how strong this poison was.
But after holding it for a few seconds, Lin Fan still put away the toad.
There were still the hostages that were inside the cave and they were Yue Lan’s loyal subordinates. He couldn’t just use this plan that would accidentally kill them as well.
They were innocent after all and they didn’t deserve to die like this.
So Lin Fan stopped scouting out the area that most of the bandits were in and started scouting out the cave.
Since he was going to take them down the old fashioned way, he would want to know everything that was special about this cave to make it easier for himself.
But after he had the scouts search the cave for a bit, he found something very interesting. After learning of this, he decided that he had to see this thing for himself to see if he could use it.
So he ignored all of the bandits and walked to the back of the mountain that the cave was in.
He walked around for a bit before coming up to a random spot on the mountain and he started tapping the stone in front of him.
After tapping and listening for a bit, he suddenly revealed a smile as he said to himself, “This could work.”