*Creak… creak… creak…*
Outside the window, the massive windmill’s decaying blades turned slowly in the thin night mist, each rotation causing the mill’s structure to groan in complaint.
In the attic, the lighting was hardly better than outside. Only a few thin rays of starlight managed to seep through the grime-covered small window and gaps in the broken wooden boards, barely outlining two squat silhouettes.
Torin and Glenm, two young dwarves whose beards had yet to grow into proper tangles, were currently huddled ungracefully in the corner. They sat on burlap sacks torn from who knows where, four eyes wide as saucers, staring intently at the compass in Torin’s hands.
Inside the guide compass, the rune-inscribed needle spun around like a headless fly, never stopping its chaotic dance.
“Hey, Torin,” Glenm’s voice rang out in the dim space, confusion evident, “You’re supposed to be the young master of the Deep Furnace Clan, so how come you’re carrying such shoddy equipment?”
He tried to nudge his companion with his elbow, nearly knocking the compass right out of Torin’s hands.
Torin scrambled to protect the compass, growling irritably under his breath: “What kind of young master am I… But this came straight from my family home! Even if I have no interest in swinging hammers, the craftsmanship of the Deep Furnace family means even our slag is reliable! Maybe it’s the Guiding Stone outside that’s malfunctioned!”
“Pfft—!” Glenm sounded like he’d heard the joke of the century, nearly spitting out the breath he’d been holding. He quickly covered his mouth, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter. “As if the Guiding Stone wasn’t made by the Deep Furnace Clan too! Torin, did you get your head knocked by a miner’s lamp? That’s the ‘Three Clans’ Guarding’ Guiding Stone! Made from Mountain Heart Refined Gold! The runes carved on it are old enough to serve as our great-grandfather’s tombstone! It’d be a miracle if *that* broke!”
Torin was left speechless by his companion’s retort, unable to argue since the logic was sound.
He scratched irritably at the stubborn stubble on his chin, and after holding back for a long while, finally squeezed out another theory: “Then… then it must be that sneaky fox-person we ran into earlier! Ever since we encountered her, everything’s been going wrong!”
This time Glenm didn’t object, nodding instead: “That’s actually possible!”
Unfortunately, their speculation ended there. Currently trapped in this crumbling mill with their own lives at stake, there was no way they could go confront the so-called fox-person.
Outside the windmill, towering wheat fields stretched endlessly into the mist and darkness under the sparse starlight. Among the rolling waves of grain came abnormal rustling sounds—the movements of scarecrows and crows.
That’s what had chased them into hiding here.
Ordinary scarecrows might not actively break into the mill, but that hardly meant safety.
Never mind that the “farmer” with his pitchfork, who could freely enter and exit the mill, might return at any moment—just staying here and waiting was deadly in itself.
The longer they wasted time, the deeper into the layers they would sink.
This was also why they suspected the fox-person.
The two had entered the dungeon nowhere near the one-day limit. By all rights, they should still be wandering the relatively safe “edge zones,” but after encountering the fox-person, not only had the compass broken, they’d directly fallen one layer down to the “Wheat Field Maze.”
These were unprecedented accidents they’d never heard of before.
“What do we do now?” Torin’s face was the picture of despair, his voice full of indignation. “Am I, the future greatest adventurer destined to shake the continent, really going to rot away pathetically in this moldy attic? How tragic!”
“The ‘greatest adventurer’ who dies on his second adventure…” Glenm rolled his eyes. “How is that worse than me? I’m just here getting killed for nothing.”
“I paid you proper wages! Isn’t dying on the job what mercenaries do?” Torin stubbornly shot back.
“Then dying on adventures is what adventurers do too!” Glenm couldn’t be bothered to keep bickering and made a serious suggestion: “There’s still some options. We can try bribing the crows. Crows are the eyes of the farm, but not all of them! You still got any gems on you?”
Torin instinctively fumbled in his chest pocket and pulled out a pigeon-egg-sized, pure and translucent emerald: “Bribe the crows? Those drunk tavern rumors were actually true?”
“Of course they’re true! Why the hell else would I bring it up!” Glenm snatched the green gem away. The warm, smooth texture made him instinctively weigh it in his hand, and he immediately blurted out: “Shit! This is way better quality than that bag of crap you paid me with before!”
He decisively stuffed this premium stone deep into his inner coat pocket while quickly producing a noticeably smaller, murky and dull red gem to clutch in his hand.
Torin watched his companion brazenly “swap” the gems right in front of him. He pursed his lips but didn’t even raise an eyebrow—he still had a whole bag of emeralds of that quality…
Glenm gripped the inferior red gem and extended his arm out through the broken window. His fingers nimbly manipulated the stone, using its weak faceted surfaces to refract the sparse starlight into the fields.
Before long, a crow with glossy black feathers flew over, pecked the red gem from Glenm’s fingertips, then flapped its wings and flew straight toward a specific direction deep in the wheat field!
“That way, follow it!”
The two slid directly down the ladder to the bottom of the mill and burst out.
Glenm charged ahead, two gleaming short axes dancing in front of him in a blur. A blocking scarecrow had just emerged from the grain stalks when it was instantly shredded into several pieces of dry grass.
All around the wheat field, rustling sounds immediately arose.
“This way!” Glenm quickly identified the direction where the crow had disappeared and charged forward.
Torin swung his heavy warhammer close behind, smashing another scarecrow that lunged from the side into scattered pieces with one blow.
“Hey! Will following that black bird really get us out?” he panted heavily while running.
“Not necessarily!” Glenm replied without looking back. “Some crows belong to the farm, some don’t—we’re just gambling!”
“What are the odds?”
“Fifty-fifty—either it is or it isn’t!”
“What kind of fifty-fifty is that?!”
The two fled desperately through the maze-like wheat field, the rustling sounds behind them never fading. Suddenly, the dense grain stalks ahead disappeared and the ground dropped away beneath their feet—they’d charged right to the edge of a steep cliff!
Below lay bottomless darkness, while behind them, the scarecrows were about to catch up!
“Was it a bad crow?!” Torin’s heart sank halfway.
“No! It’s a good crow! A very good crow!” But Glenm suddenly pointed toward the opposite bank.
There sat the crow, leisurely perched on the twisted branch of a dead tree on the far side, the red gem still in its beak, its black eyes watching the two of them.
On the other side of the cliff, they could vaguely make out relatively sparse, low wheat fields—the telltale signs of the edge zones!
