A God in a Xianxia world

Chapter 24 - 3 Months Later (3)

After finishing with his practice for the day, Tom went back to his room to clean himself up. He had worked up quite a sweat from his vigorous training, plus his clothes had gotten rather dirty from being knocked on the ground over and over again.

In truth, Tom's current state wasn't entirely his own fault. In order for Tom to get the most out of the training and improve as quickly as possible, Avery made the training quite intensive. Furthermore, Avery didn't pull his punches nearly as much as Pike or Lance because he was trying to push Tom to his limit, helping him stimulate his own potential and accrue as much battle experience in as short a time as possible. This resulted in the sorry appearance that Tom currently had.

As Tom was travelling through the Cardinal estate, he noted that the hustle and bustle had already completely died down since he first came here. This all had to do with how the Cardinal clan was dealing with the aftermath of the bandit incident.

After Tom had arrived at the city gates on that first night and relayed his tale of the bandit attack, the Cardinal clan went into somewhat of a frenzy as a response. Not only was the clan angry at having one of their members murdered, but, they also saw the actions of the bandits as a direct challenge to their authority.

Starting from the next day, the Cardinal clan launched a massive operation to hunt down the bandits and wipe them out for good. The clan mobilised the city guard as well as many of their own members in order to search out and hunt down the bandits. Rewards were even posted at the governor's building and at the nearby Iron fist sect for anyone who was able to find and kill bandits that were operating in the North West and around Hill city.

However, after 3 months, the Cardinal clan's efforts had only been met with mixed results.

Tom had heard about how the situation was developing through conversations with Adam, who was participating in the searches and would periodically return to the Cardinal estate.

Over the course of the last 3 months, a few Iron fist sect disciples and ordinary warriors had had some success in finding and killing bandits. But, these were all in areas far away from Hill city and involved small bandit groups consisting of low levelled cultivators unaffiliated with the larger group that had begun operating around Hill city.

Closer to home, the bandit group responsible for the attack on Tom's group was proving incredibly hard to track down. Adam had informed Tom that there were only two instances in which the clan's forces had come into contact with this bandit group.

The first was when some lower levelled city guards who were patrolling and searching the hills were killed. This was considered unfortunate but not wholly unexpected.

Although the Cardinal clan could mobilise a large force, and they had done for this particular operation, there was a lot of ground to cover and search through. Along with patrol teams with higher level cultivators in them, who would be responsible for the actual killing of the bandits, there were also search teams with lower level cultivators, whose job was to act as scouts, seeking out the enemy, uncovering their hideouts and reporting their movements. This led to a situation where groups without higher level cultivators in them that were searching through rural areas became vulnerable to attack.

It could be said that it was lucky that only one group was killed in this way, the death toll was expected to be higher; however, the behaviour of the bandits actually posed a problem for the Cardinal clan. The reason only one group were killed in this manner lay in the fact that the bandit group had retreated into its shell and was hiding away. This made it very difficult to locate them.