Dungeon

It had already been five days since the mission started. They had seen all kinds of things in this time; corpses of children and women and men, raping of child, massacring of innocents. They had slain hundreds of devils, feeling angry and frustrated and helpless. "How did so many people turned into these abominations?" asked Qin Meng.

"Some of them submitted on their own," replied Yueyan, "and some of them were forced to do it. The stronger the human is the stronger devil can descend into his body."

"They have a terribly powerful organization in this world," said the princess. "Humans are like a livestock to them; they use humans worse than we use animals, for their pleasure and for infiltrating the human society. We can recognize ordinary devils, but the higher ones have high intelligence. They could transform and mix among us and we won't even recognize them."

"Then why did they suddenly attack?" said Qin Meng. "They must have a purpose. Furthermore, why we haven't encountered any powerful devil, all of them are weak; if what you have said is right, then shouldn't there be many powerful devils, strong enough to kill us?"

"Yes," said Yueyan. "But it doesn't concern us; we just follow the orders of academy. If there are stronger devils then the academy would take care of them. It's none of our business."

Qin Meng shook his head. He looked up, towards the sky, and frowned. "What's that?"

His companions followed his gaze and found a white signal in the distance. Yueyan frowned and said, "Is the mission over?" The white signal means that the academy was summoning them to gather on the same place.

"Let's go and see what's going on," said the princess. Everyone nodded and trod towards the area from where the signal had been sent. It took around half a day to reach their destination. The path was filled with twists and turns; they also had to cross a river that took much time, as there was no boat available nor any boatman. They had to cross the river by swimming; however, Qin Meng didn't know how to swim—that was embarrassing moment for him as even fatty Yan Yunjie also knew how to do it.

Anyways, with the help of his friends he also crossed the river.

On the way they encountered other teams. However, what was strange that they hadn't noticed a single devil—as if they had vanished out of thin air. Not even a single devil could be found.

Qin Meng looked in front of him at the village from where someone had sent a signal to gather all the students. He didn't know the name of this place, and didn't bother to look into the map either. It was not important.

He spotted Li Yan walking behind a group of people. Seniors, Qin Meng assumed. Though, he had no idea if they were second, third, or fourth year students. He also found Yu Cheng, Tan Qi and He Chen, following their own teams; no previous arrogance could be seen on their faces. It seemed they had learned the lesson of hard life on this journey.

Qin Meng hadn't spotted any villager. The academy must have evacuated the place and sent them to some place safe.

"Everyone needs to gather at the village alter." Qin Meng heard someone speaking.

"I heard the signal was sent at Vice Principal's order," another student walking beside the speaker said.

"Yes," said the first student. "Though, no one knows the reason. There must have happened something major for Vice Principal to take action."

Qin Meng frowned, hearing the conversation of the passerby. He exchanged glances with his companions and sauntered toward the village alter. When they arrived, it was already crowded, and as the student had said the Vice Principal was standing on a high platform. Her beautiful forehead was scrunched into a worried frown, her beautiful hair teasing the sides of her soft cheeks and the hem of her dress danced with the every passing gust of wind.

Qin Meng looked around and spotted many unfamiliar faces that he had never seen before, whether they were teachers or students; amongst them he found Su Zian as well, but the man's attention was somewhere else at the moment as he was discussing something with other teachers.

Qin Meng continued to browse through the crowd. Then he spotted a pair of eyes glaring at him. Fu Renshi. He could see loathing disgust for him in those eyes, but he chuckled and ignored him, caring little about that arrogant prick, looking towards his hot master—cough.

They continued to wait patiently and half an hour later, Meng Xiurong began to speak, "You must be wondering the reason behind this sudden summon," she paused, scanning the crowd. "I won't beat around the bush—this is because we have found devil's real motive behind the attack."

The students started to murmur, the Vice Principal then continued, "The real motive to attack this time was to distract us. They sent low-level devils to assault the outskirts of the kingdom while the stronger devils went to the dungeon inside the Burning Wilds."

The surrounding burst into an uproar. The Vice Principal let the shocking news sink through everyone's skull, only then she began. "However, we were already prepared for something like this; our people were already spread across the entire kingdom, including the Burning Wilds, so when some suspicious people were spotted there, our people immediately sent the news to us. Later we realized that those suspicious people were high-level devils, and we realized the entire plot.

"However, they didn't know that the dungeon doesn't allow anyone above Golden Rune Devil inside it, if we compare it to our cultivation levels it would be around Manifestation Stage."

Now everyone was completely silent, wanting to know more about the situation. Meng Xiurong smiled and said, "We have decided to send our students into the dungeon as we could not enter it ourselves. Take a step forward if you are interested, and those who don't want to go, take a step back. However, before making your decision you need to know that the place could be very dangerous and no mentor would be able to come to your help at that place at the time of peril. Now make your decision."