A Lewd Cultivator in Brockton Bay 64

A/N: hope y’all are enjoying your Thanksgiving weekend!

A Lewd Cultivator in Brockton Bay

Chapter 64

-VB-

First, Slaughterhouse Nine. They liked to hide and carry out their misdeeds and slaughter away from prying eyes unless they couldn’t hide when they attacked (or were recruiting). For example, cities tended to be where they held their all-out battles while towns and villages in the rural countryside was where they had “fun.”

Second, New England was the least populated of all regions at just over ten million people and most of whom lived along the coast (Providence, Boston, Hartford, and New Haven).

Third, New Hampshire might not be the least populated but it was certainly less populated than Massachusetts, and so it was very easy for a small band of marauders like the S9 to roam without being found.

Which was what I suspected they were doing and, if canon timeline still applied, what they were doing prior to hitting Brockton Bay.

What I was doing right now was to essentially act as a scout, find the S9, and call down the artillery by contacting the PRT by providing them with active, real-time tracking of the Nine.

I first started my scouting not with the main roads and highways leading in and out of Brockton Bay but the more rural areas, starting from the southern areas between Brockton Bay and Boston.

The thing about New Hampshire most people often forgot was that it was a very sparsely populated state. Out of one or two areas like Brockton Bay and Manchester, the capital city of the state, there were very few towns, nevermind towns, that had more than twenty thousand people. It was a state that could be described as “self-sufficient do-themselves,” Brockton Bay excluded. This self-sufficiency, not only in their homes but also economics, made it one of the least impacted states from the declining global trade. Again, Brockton Bay was excluded, of course.

This also meant that unless something went truly wrong, these people were less likely to call for help, especially if it was something they could fix on their own.

I checked those areas first.

When I found nothing in the south, I moved to the southwest. Southwest was even less populated than the area between Brockton Bay and Boston. Between my speed and sparsity, I finished up my search even faster than I did in the south. Then I checked the east, the area between Brockton Bay and Manchester.

That’s where things got interesting.

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The thing about being a cultivator?

If you live long enough and advance far enough, then you become that sage. You know, the tree-walking, beard-stroking, leaf-cutting with intent, glaring at you with raw intent to make you pass out, and all of the other stuff sage. The “holy” man.

Well, I couldn’t do all of that, yet, but I could jump really far, really fast, and land on branches that had no right to remain intact when a two-hundred-pound, six-foot man landed on it.

Yes, I had reached the tree-walking stage of cultivation but I was putting that to full use now as I zipped across the forests of New England while blasting a very rudimentary life-sensing pulse to find any place where a group of people were moving on the road or where life was being snuffed out.

I marked off any area that I visited by grids using the GPS on my phone, too, so I wasn’t just running around like a lunatic. I always made sure to stay out of sight, though, which was easy enough with the forest obscuring line of sight pretty effectively.

Oh, and most people don’t look up.

It’s also been twelve hours since I left home to look for any signs of the S9 passing through, and this deep into the night, most people had stopped moving around and had gone to sleep, so it was easier for me to detect towns and villages.

So when a town that should have been asleep was on fire and its members disappeared from my senses rapidly, I knew I found the Nine or at least a copycat.

I … didn’t attack.

No, I wasn’t an OP character in some bullshit xianxia or wuxia. I was strong, yes. Strong enough to fight all of the Nine? No. I might be able to sneak kill one or two, maybe even brute-force my way in and kill two or three.

But I couldn’t win against Crawler and Siberian.

No, the best I could do was call it in and have someone else deal with them before they reached my home.

With those thoughts in mind, I jumped as close as I thought I could get before detection and grimaced as I saw Slaughterhouse Nine at work. Burnscar was burning people and houses, Jack was talking the ears off of one already too-fucked-up elderly, Crawler was rolling over a car in obvious boredom, Siberian was munching on the severed limbs from the same elderly Jack was verbally torturing, and Bonesaw … where was Bonesaw? I also didn’t see Mannequin, Shatterbird, and Cherish.

I pulled out my phone… and just started posting, alerting not just the PRT through their anonymous report system with pictures of the Slaughterhouse Nine but also on PHO.

I put my phone away with the intent to update my status thirty minutes later.

“And let the storm gather…” I muttered to myself with a grimace as Jack finally killed the old guy he’d been taunting to death.