A God in a Xianxia world

Chapter 35 - Passing Through Acorn

After Rowan caught up and joined Tom's group, the rest of Tom's journey west was uneventful.

They made relatively good progress and in the end they reached a village 10 miles east of the town of Acorn, just as it was getting darker. Since Acorn town had a strict policy on their gate closures and Tom's group wouldn't be able to make it in time before the gates shut, they stopped where they were and slept at an inn for the night.

Actually, even though Acorn town was so close to the forest boundary, it wasn't that dangerous to sleep under the city walls at night. Many warriors would enter the forest from Acorn and also return to Acorn after they finished. Since hunts would take an indeterminate amount of time, this led to a situation where many warriors ended up camping outside the city walls. So long as one camped on the east side of the town, where all these late night warriors gathered, the danger would be reduced. It was a safety in numbers thing. By relying on each other, they could easily fend off the attacks of roaming qi beasts that travelled beyond the bounds of the forest.

The only real danger emerged when particularly fast or stealthy qi beasts roamed outside the forest and could pick people off under the cover of darkness. There was also the case where there were qi beast waves, where many qi beasts would charge out of the forest at once, but, such situations were uncommon.

After a good night's rest and a morning breakfast, the gang was all ready to go again. Since none of them had any particularly bulky equipment and their weapons could be put straight into the back of the wagon, along with food they had stored for the journey, they could leave straight away. There was no hassle where they had to wait for someone to put on armour or where someone needed help putting on their armour on.

Like this, they got an early start and proceeded along their way to Acorn town.

Finally reaching the town, Tom was impressed by the sight of it. It was larger than he had imagined.

Large, 20m high walls, the same as Hill city, surrounded the entire town and the 80,000 people inside. Tom could see many men patrolling on the top of those walls and at the bottom of them he also saw a large campsite with many warriors moving around.

Passing along the road and by the numerous warriors off to the side of it that were tending to their gear, Tom breathed in the sweet aroma of meat. Evidently some of the warriors were preparing a mid-morning meal. Tom couldn't help but salivate in his mouth. Since coming to this world, he had gotten to enjoy a whole new eating experience but at his core he was still a meat eater, a carnivore. It was a good thing that they were passing through the town first in order to get some fresh food instead of just going around it. Actually, because the main street was so wide and basically a straight line running from the east to west gate, it took about the same amount of time to go straight through the town as it would to go around it.

As Tom passed through the eastern gate and entered the town, the first thing that hit him was the noise. He hadn't realised it before he entered because the walls blocked most of the noise but the main street was very loud. Straight after entering the town, Tom was buffeted by the shouts of stall owners, peddlers and other small business owners.

The second thing that hit Tom when he entered the town was the smell. The previous sweet smell of meat was replaced by a whole litany of other smells, some good and some bad.

Clearly a lot of the people in the local vicinity were selling food and some of that was being cooked right on the side of the street. The fragrances, steams and smokes released from the various people's cooking all wafted up and intermingled with each other. The suddenly changing cooking aromas weren't particularly bad, just jarring to the senses, but, these were not the only smells on the street.