NeoRealm - Staring back into the Future

Of course, as Jason had started the cult quest even if not officially accepting a literal quest, the System felt perfectly fine throwing everything related at him. Sure, on a normal day across a stretch of road like this, you might run into a bandit group, maybe two. After the first though, he had run across two other similar sized groups and likely had one or two lone bandits who, despite the System urging them decided to not attack.

This should not be happening. Not only from the perspective of someone traveling on the roads, but also from the perspective of the bandits. While there may or may not be a bandit king or what have you in the area, only the stupidest of people wouldn't realize this much activity would draw in the local garrison to do a bandit sweep.

With Jason's new found knowledge, though, it points towards a troubling possibility. Things might be going down soon. After all, who cares if the local city finds out if you've already summoned some kind of maxed evil from beyond space and time. Not that any being truly from beyond space and time would want to be summoned in, they tend to prefer staying outside of it all, you mostly deal with their minions.

So Jason ran. Bandits would jump out at him and he would avoid them. Maybe if a larger group had decided to attack there would have been trouble, but those groups didn't want to bother coming out of hiding for only a single mark. Though Jason was certain they were there as the road wasn't as empty as it had been.

At first, it was small traders with one to three wagons. Small time operations being beaten down by bandit groups with at least three times the manpower of generally greater average level. Easy enough to avoid, though more than once as Jason dipped into the forest to go around, he would come across more broken wagons that must have been from previous targets.

Then, before the end of the first day as neared the next small town, Jason came across his first major trade caravan. This one the bandits weren't taking any chances and had at least five times as many feet on the ground. Sure, the bandit's low end was quite low, but the high end powers in the group were higher.

Worse yet, they cared a lot more about Jason's presence than the smaller attack groups and while none of the fourth break bandits went after him, more than just a few third break ones did. If Jason had ended up fighting them, things likely wouldn't have gone well for him. Good thing Jason never planned to stop in the first place.

Instead, Jason put all of his Energy into his body, especially his lungs. Up until now, it hadn't really mattered, but now that he was facing a sustained run, the ritual circle in his lungs and their 'Efficient Breathing' effect was showing its worth. This was especially true with his Energy running through the ritual. He couldn't be certain, but it felt like each breath he took was having as much oxygen stripped out of it as possible.

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Beyond that, though, his entire body was starting to gel together as his cultivation base began to churn. Behind him, the bandits trying to catch him are soon lost. Though part of that comes from a strange quirk of his movement ability. As soon as he got out of sight, keeping track of him fell onto the head of a tracker, except his skill couldn't tell where Jason had gone.

See, the skill that the tracker was using detected disturbances in the natural power. This tends to be fool proof as basically everyone uses one form or another of the three powers and they all disturb each other. A mage walking through an area would attract the Mana and Energy while pushing away the Qi for instance. Jason however was using his own Energy to pull himself through the soup that is the world's natural power field and so while not entirely traceless, it was more like a small fish slipping through the shallows of a pound instead of a human trudging through the mud and stirring everything up.

Not that the bandits needed to worry about him warning the next village. As the sun began to set, billowing black smoke clouds became visible ahead of Jason. Though they should have been visible from much further away if not for some force dispersing them much lower than natural.

Jason was more than capable of putting together the obvious clues and so didn't even bother trying to approach the town, instead bypassing the place by a decent margin. Not that he was completely able to avoid the danger. The bandits, or more rightfully, the cultists, had set a number of people to continually search the nearby area.

Of course, Jason had somewhat assumed they were cultists right away, but the burning village was the last bit of proof he needed. No bandit gang would burn a trade village on a major route. Sure, they might loot it, demand 'protection' money, or maybe even live there. Burn it though? That was going to call down a real army and not just some local force. Besides, if they burned a village, who would send a trade caravan along that route? No, the area would be avoided until the bandits had left, willingly or not.

So Jason continued to run as night fell. The good news is that while keeping to the roads was more dangerous, it seemed not only were there fewer cultists along the road now, but they weren't keeping as close an eye out now that it was dark. On the other hand, Jason saw the first hints of what kind of cult he was dealing with. Because while the cultists themselves were less than observant, they had more than a few summoned minions to help.

Though much to Jason's relief, it wasn't the classic imp. Not that he would have been stopped by them, it would have just brought up memories best left forgotten, but no, not imps. Rather, it was in his opinion a much more annoying form of summoned minion, the Quasit. Or as some would put it, Imps but chaotic.