In the official rhetoric of the social language of the Padrosi Empire's aristocratic circles, whenever thieves are involved, they are basically described as thieves and opportunists equivalent to two notorious creatures: rats and dragon lizards.
"They are the most despicable scum. Yes, yes, they don't kill. But that's only because they are afraid of the imperial army. What they do is the same as killing people." If you go and ask a Parney If you pull a knight, he will definitely tell you this: "Don't think that bandits who don't kill people are just that good. They can even plunder the property and rations of babies who are waiting to be fed and old people who are too old to work. Not a penny is left. Rather than starving to death like this, wouldn’t it be more satisfying to just seal your throat with a sword?”
"Thieves or something, ah, so scary." And in a big city with high walls and safety, the delicate aristocratic ladies will cover their mouths and whisper like this - and then when you ask why it is scary Sometimes, they will choose to remain silent because they need to avoid saying words that are inconsistent with their status.
Even if you move to a different class and ask the citizens, their opinion of thieves and other desperadoes will not be much better.
He is extremely vicious and does all kinds of evil except killing. This is the answer you would get if you asked residents of big cities with good security such as Parnilla - but not all civilians in the entire Padrosi Empire agree with this view.
The good public security and peaceful atmosphere throughout the empire were brought about by the iron-blooded approach to dealing with crimes with unforgivable force. However, despite such strong pressure and heavy punishment, thieves have not completely disappeared. In the final analysis, the root cause has not been solved.
"If you didn't have no choice, who would want to live a life where you have to be careful not to be recognized when walking on the street when everyone yells at you?"
Youdao means that poor people come from poor places. Although the overall prosperity of Padrosi is obvious to all, just as light is inevitably accompanied by darkness, in fact, there is still a lot of oppression by nobles and the gap between the rich and the poor in various parts of the empire. The vast majority of thieves come from these remote areas.
There was no harvest in the land due to natural disasters, but the tax collectors still levied heavy taxes. Your child pulls at the corner of your clothes and says he is hungry. What can you do?
Go up and report to the noble lord, asking the officials to do something for the people. In the eyes of the citizens of big cities, it is their natural right, but in remote villages, it is a life-threatening adventure.
Once or twice is okay, but if you disturb the "busy" serious work of noble gentlemen again and again - such as praying, enjoying food or beauties - in the end, it will not be the problem that is solved, but the object that caused the problem, that is, The farmers themselves.
How many people went to express their love to the nobles and then never returned, no one knew, and no one cared.
The only weaklings worthy of the imperial knights' use of chivalry to protect them are beautiful ladies and upright citizens. The villagers in these remote villages who speak Lamani with strong accents are not even human beings in their eyes.
This is also the origin of the stereotyped impression that Lamanite civilians in prosperous areas have on thieves as "all outsiders".
The empire's territory was too vast, and the differences between the north and the south, the cities and the countryside, caused this deep-rooted prejudice.
Instead of trying to understand each other and help each other, we resort to confrontation, prejudice and exclusion. The end result is that no matter how much the iron-blooded policy is applied, thieves will still exist.
If they can live a peaceful life, few people would want to become bandits. Even if there are some thieves families, if you look up, most of them are still the old-fashioned government-forced people to rebel at the beginning.
This is a delicate situation that only exists in Padrosi, the Millennium Empire. Due to deep-seated prejudice, although the crimes committed are not as cruel as their counterparts on the west coast, the reputation of thieves here is even more embarrassing.
There were troubadours who wanted to go against the mainstream society and wrote stories about thieves and desperadoes. In those stories, they praised thieves as heroic figures who robbed the rich and gave to the poor without fear of power. Their lives were accompanied by Singing is full of freedom.
But like many other stories, there is more bullshit than fact.
Real thieves will never do things like robbing the rich and giving to the poor, because they cannot afford to offend wealthy nobles or big businessmen. I chose this very risky job because of the pressure of life. How could I take the risk of losing my life and destroying everything just to complete a good deed?
It is true that they are not extremely evil, and they are definitely not "innately evil" as officially promoted, but there is no relativity between so-called good and evil in the eyes of ordinary people.
They are two opposites, black and white.
In the eyes of mainstream society, there is no buffer zone.
Barrow recognized this long ago, which is why he never does any good deeds.
By thieves' standards, he was an anomaly.
Barrow, who speaks standard Lamanite, is nearly forty years old and has brown skin that is rare among Lamanites. With a big bald head and a height of 1.87 meters, he can be considered a medium figure even in the north. In the south, where the stature is generally shorter, with his muscles, he can be regarded as a top-notch hero.
Such a person is more suitable to be a centurion in the army or simply become a knight, but the first rule in the thieves' industry is not to ask where they come from.
People follow him and respect him as the leader of the thieves group, because he is decisive and never sloppy, and he is familiar with the pain points of the nobles and knows how to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages.
And he has his own set of rules for doing things.
"We are not good people and do not do good deeds to comfort ourselves because no one will buy it. But we only act to survive and only take what we need. We are not greedy and do not cause personal harm, because this will bring endless consequences. Revenge." This is what Barrow often says to those who follow him, and it is the core of his strong leadership and cohesion.
Although not everyone buys it, most thieves are just ordinary people. Whether they make excuses or deceive themselves and others, they need some creeds to restrain themselves and maintain themselves to avoid becoming desperadoes.
In this way, within a few years, many people who heard about Barrow's reputation came to join the bandit group, which made the bandit group grow a lot. However, a big tree attracts attention. In order to prevent the group from becoming too large and attracting targeted encirclement and suppression by the imperial army, they started to move towards a bigger group at the beginning of this autumn. The base camp was moved in the remote south.
And when it took half a month to finally arrive here, the first "job" encountered a setback.
The target of the robbery was a three-carriage caravan with little profit. Because they were not familiar with the place, they cooperated with local bandits even though they started a small-scale operation. The conflict originated from the aftermath of the successful robbery. The actions of several local bandits.
"Let her go." Barrow used his physical advantage to stop the sly-eyed thief from misbehaving against a girl who happened to be in the caravan.
"You don't care about me so much." The other party obviously didn't buy it, but seeing that Barrow's band of thieves had a large number of people, he gave up in the end.
"I've heard it before, what on earth are you pretending to be a decent person, hypocritical, and pretentious!" The man spat, and then he and his companions turned and left with their share of the loot.
There was friction with local snakes, and it was foreseeable that they would be in a lot of trouble by these colleagues in the future, but when the elf girl with black eyes raised her head and looked at Barrow, he felt that all this was no big deal.
He could understand why that person had lusted after her.
The girl is indeed very beautiful, with long black hair and equally black pure eyes, fair complexion and short pointed ears. But what he had for this girl was not possessive desire. Even though his fellow thieves were joking behind him that the boss had finally figured it out, Barrow frowned and observed the alien girl carefully, but the only emotions he had in his heart were caution and curious.
She obviously did not belong to this caravan, and she must have been picked up by the merchants somewhere.
Barrow noticed her when the thieves rushed down the hillside making noisy noises, but it was not because of her beautiful appearance, but because of her calm and unmoved posture as she sat among a bunch of panicked businessmen.
Everything anyone says or does has a certain purpose.
Barrow has the ability to figure out the interlocutor's thoughts from his expressions and eyes. This is his talent to a certain extent, but he can't see anything from this silent girl.
Maybe his skills were not good enough and the other party hid it too well, or maybe she was really as pure as a diamond without any impurities.
He couldn't understand or understand what kind of existence this girl was. He was just instinctively attracted. Although he was different from those guys who were attracted out of love between men and women, he was still attracted to her after all.
So he took her back to the cottage, and under the snickers of his companions, he took her with him day and night, but nothing happened like what they thought.
What exactly is this purity, and is it the difference between elves and humans? Any communication was ineffective for her. The girl would only stare at him quietly, and then occasionally smile. And every time like this, Barrow always felt an inexplicable chill from under the other party's pure and beautiful face and from those impure black eyes.
It was as if there was a giant creature with sharp fangs standing behind him, ready to tear him apart and devour him.
'Maybe bringing her back wasn't the right decision.' He suddenly had an ominous premonition, and it soon came true.
Four days after the black girl arrived at the camp, all the dogs in the camp disappeared inexplicably.
"It must be those people!" Due to the friction that had occurred before, the thieves aggressively wanted to seek revenge on those local snakes.
But how could it be possible for a few thieves to do something like making more than a dozen dogs disappear overnight? Barrow's suspicion was placed on the girl, and he began to pay more attention to her actions, but in the end he could not find any trace.
"There are wild beasts out there!" The thieves who were chopping wood discovered bloody claw marks on some nearby tree trunks. The size was so large that people suspected they were large dragon lizards.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, and this is the correct answer. Barrow thought this way after requiring the thieves to team up in the future for safety reasons.
But before he could put his doubts to rest, things changed again.
The girl disappeared.
When Barrow woke up on the sixth morning, she had disappeared.
The door was locked and the windows were closed. No one saw any sign of her leaving. Barrow used his own experience to observe the nearby soil and found no footprints, as if she disappeared out of thin air.
"Michelle!"
"Isaac!"
Shouts one after another echoed inside the camp.
Also disappearing with the girl were all the children of the thieves.
"Everyone, armed!"
His instincts were trembling, and the ominous premonition in Barrow's heart became more and more obvious. This continuous strange scene could not be a coincidence. First, all the dogs, and then all the children. This was definitely the fault of the black girl.
"There are bloodstains here -" Walking through the mountains and forests on foot is a basic skill for thieves. The dozens of people who came out quickly discovered traces that were contrary to common sense.
"This way, this way!" A voice sounded from the right wing, and everyone turned around.
"What the hell is this-" The stench began to become thicker, and there were some slippery dark black objects on the ground.
"Hey, look at that, it seems to be a human -" The thief who spoke was named Parson. After saying this, his face immediately turned pale, because the clouds drifted past and the light became stronger, and the body The miserable and disgusting face of the corpse that had begun to rot was revealed.
——It’s the thief from before.
"There's another one, right here."
Everyone was there, and they had all been disemboweled and all their entrails had been eviscerated.
"Ugh..." The faces of some of the more fragile thieves turned pale. "It must have been the female elf who did it." Someone whispered to Barrow, and the thieves leader nodded sternly.
He hesitated no more.
"If she is found, she will be executed on the spot." The bandit leader made a decision.
Everyone has tightened their weapons. Just because they don't take the initiative to kill people doesn't mean they will still remain kind when they are violated.
The terrain began to become stable. From the bright light in front, Barrow guessed that it should be a piece of exposed ground similar to a forest canyon or a dry river bed, and that was probably their destination.
"Be careful." The extremely strong smell of blood made Barrow tremble, and when they finally got there, even though he had seen many, many, many others, the leader of thieves couldn't help but be stunned.
It was a whole world composed of rotting corpses.
Countless, countless wild animals lay on the ground in a circular shape, all disemboweled and died miserably. Flies and maggots were flying and squirming happily above them. The stench was already strong and gel-like, and it stuck to the nose and mouth after one inhalation, making people unable to help but retching.
Accompanied by the buzzing sound of flies that were as dense as a black cloud, in just half a minute, at least one-third of the team turned pale.
This is a magic circle - even if he is not a magician, Barrow can tell it.
The carcasses of wild animals are placed based on their size, with the largest ones on the outermost side and decreasing in size toward the inside.
They were all disembowelled, and their long intestines were pulled toward the center like some kind of lines used to form a magic circle.
The "parts" of the magic circle composed of countless rotten corpses are the missing children of the thieves.
The child with his eyes open, still stained with undried tears at the corners of his eyes, was covered in blood and had no voice.
The black-headed elf girl was wrapped in this huge sea of flesh and carrion, standing at the center point, like a flower blooming from the flesh. "You devil!" the angry parents roared and rushed in.
But Barrow just stood there stunned.
The stench and the buzzing of flies seemed to have gone away, and all the people became the background in his eyes. Nearly a hundred thieves, men, women and children, rushed from his side towards the black girl. But the whole world faded in Barrow's eyes, and he saw, and could only see, that at the center of it all, a scene that was extremely out of place, but in a way felt very harmonious.
The pure and white black girl turned her head, looked in his direction, and smiled again.
That smile was so pure that if she were placed in the background of beautiful mountains and clear waters, people would definitely mistake her for an angel-like existence.
"Ah——" The slippery and rotten sea of corpses exploded, and some ugly creatures that Barrow had never seen ran out of the pile of corpses and pounced on his men and his companions.
"I understand." The thief said.
"She is pure, but the reason why I feel so scared." He was thinking to himself.
"She meant no harm."
"She didn't realize that what she was doing was evil."
"She is."
"Evil itself."
"Roar——" The monster rushed towards the thief who was standing there blankly.
