Chapter 17 The Great Cemetery

The Great Crow Ridge Cemetery is just north of town, and a grass-covered, abandoned road leads straight to the cemetery’s large, closed iron gate.

The metal iron ornamentation on the iron gates and railings was quite intricate and beautiful; this place had probably been very busy in the past, and Jace could even imagine what it had been like before the great Karazhan explosion.

A large graveyard where countless veterans and nobles who had died in previous wars were buried, and from time to time the families of the dead heroes, or pretentious noble princes and lords drove by in their beautiful carriages to pay their respects, and the inhabitants of the town of Crow’s Ridge thrived on these wanderers, as well as the careful care given to the dead, and the large graveyard was a gold mine for them.

Of course, this was all wiped out with the creation of the Big Bang, the spread of the Dark Shelter and a series of horrific legends if nothing else.

Jace moved closer to the bars and peeked inside, where rows and rows of tombstones of varying sizes and specifications were all laid out, with the occasional family crypt of one or two standing between them.

There is a hut on the far side of the hill where the so-called grave watchers, or morticians who groom the dead, probably live.

Judging by the dilapidated state of that house, it had probably been a long time since anyone had been in there.

There’s a final target here in the game for a series of quests called Moradim, a skeleton warrior who can unleash holy light spells and is very tough.

In the early version here, the players practicing leveling were more than 20 and less than 30 level trumpets, and he patrolled the area as a level 35 elite level monster, and if he wasn’t careful, he would be lured by the players doing quests at a lower level.

Once the hatred was attracted, rushing into the crowd with two swords and a little friend, he would soon kill corpses everywhere.

Moradim actually had a very tragic experience, early on he was a valiant paladin involved in the war against the Celestial Invasion a decade or so later, after the war he returned home to find his wife and two of his children dead, and his last daughter unaccounted for.

After searching in vain, he went mad at his wife’s gravestone and accidentally killed several night watchmen who were kind enough to console him. Realizing his madness, he ends up in a state of remorse and despair, and wanders around as an avatar of vengeance with no vengeance to avenge, making the already horrific Raven Ridge even more horrifying.

Little did he know that his daughter, Sarah Raddimore, had left Raven Ridge for Grantown, later Nighttown, to join the Night’s Watch, a self-defense organization in the Twilight Forest, only for the two of them to never meet in the end.

Thinking about the story, Jess suddenly felt something strange.

“Grid.”

“Hmm?” The dwarf who was scrutinizing the dirt and weeds on the ground looked up and asked, “Found the herbs?”

“No.” Jace asked, “Do you remember the name of the guard from last night?”

“Morgan, what …… Moore, who remembers your weird human names.”

“Morgan Ladimore.” Jess said.

“Pretty much.” Grid had no interest in the subject as he walked off into the distance down a puddle of standing water, leaving Jace alone to look at the lone old house in the cemetery.

Yes, the boy who was about his age was later to become Moradim.

Jace’s memories of the fearsome undead warrior were that he had had three children and had died so long ago that even his wife had turned into a tombstone long ago, and his only remaining daughter had grown up to be a beautiful young woman.

Common sense then would suggest that he should also be a middle aged uncle figure, not connecting him at all to an 18, 9 year old boy.

“This way!” Grid suddenly shouted.

Jace was snapped back to reality with a bang, catching up with the dwarf’s footsteps to a barrow coiled with tree roots.

Grider stopped Jace by standing on a thick root that extended above the pit and said, “You don’t want to go down there, see, this is probably a resting place for coyotes or bears.”

“A resting place?” Jace asked, not quite understanding, “Isn’t that a nest?”

“Not the same.” Grider said, “A lot of wolf dens or bear dens are caves. Wolves like to live in natural caves, caverns and whatnot, and some bears like to dig their own holes …… In short, these animals live in caves. But they go out hunting sometimes a long way, so they will find areas away from the den that are good for seclusion, or more comfortable places to use as a resting place, similar to a stagecoach stop.”

He pointed to the pit below and said, “Look at the wolf fur there, I can even smell the stench from the wolf here, there should be feces or something around here. Anyway, we’ll just lay the trap here, that way we even save the bait.”

“Would a wolf look for a resting spot this close to the cemetery?” Jace asked.

“That means those rumors you heard are probably true.” Grid said, “That means the wolves here do eat human flesh, so they use the cemetery as their hunting ground. If our trap works …… the chances of finding the so called evil claws are much higher.”

“Let’s set the trap then.” Jace said.

The dwarf responded, flinging the iron beast clamps he was carrying off his back and sliding into the midden after him, setting it up and then making a simple burial with dirt and weeds and animal fur.

Jace asked, “But will the wolves smell you and abandon this resting spot?”

“You’ve got potential as a hunter, lad.” Grid said, “If I were in Sintran, I’d be draped in bear shit to do this, but it shouldn’t matter here. The wolves here shouldn’t have smelled a dwarf, and if they smell something unfamiliar, they’ll be suspicious for a little while at best, and let their guard down as soon as they observe that there’s no danger. But when they encounter a resting place that smells of a hunter who hunts them regularly, like you humans, they might just abandon the resting place and leave, like you said.”

He climbed up the side of the pit and patted the dust and dirt off of him and said, “We don’t need to worry about this place, just go look for herbs elsewhere, it can wait until tomorrow, did you find anything?”

“No.” Holding the handle of his felling axe propped up against an outcropping of boulder, Jace took a breath and said, “It’s still too close to Crow’s Ridge, and the townspeople here alone, or travelers passing through, would probably pull up all the herbs here. And most of the amateurs don’t know how to keep the roots, and uproot them when they say they pick them, so even if they had them in the first place, they’re all gone over the years. Anyway, there’s not much chance of having herbs here, we should go to a more remote place and take a look.”

Grid picked at the cemetery railing in the distance, hidden by the shade of the forest, and said, “What about cemetery moss?”

Jace glanced that way as well, and found that he was still subconsciously a little resistant to walking into the cemetery.

Especially after finding wolf tracks nearby, he thought this cemetery was weird.

After all, even if a wolf were to gnaw on a bone, it would gnaw on a fresh bone with meat on it, not a bone that had rotted out of shape from how much money had been buried in the cemetery.

That said, this cemetery has a fair amount of rotting flesh.

What circumstances could lead to a cemetery that still has meat that wolves are willing to eat so many years after the war?

It could only mean that there were not only undead creatures in here, but probably many, so many that the wolves of the forest used it as a hunting ground.

The good news, however, is that generally speaking predators don’t attack particularly threatening foes – wolves like to eat rabbits, for example, but will weigh in on a deer, which is, after all, still somewhat dangerous to wolves.

The purpose of a predator is to get food not to fight for their lives with anyone they see, they also have to consider the possibility of injury.

A serious injury to an animal often means death, and even if you’re lucky and the wound recovers, the effectiveness of the hunt can be seriously compromised.

If the wolves were using the cemetery as a hunting ground, it meant that even if there were necromantic creatures in here, they probably weren’t that powerful. At least not as terrifying as the jackals, and no wild animal would want to make an enemy of the jackals.

“It’s still morning.” Grider said, “If we move immediately, we’ll have at least six or seven hours before nightfall.”

Grid was right, Jace glanced at the sky that was obscured by the branches of the trees, in fact after getting used to the dark days here one would realize that there was still some difference between day and night in the Twilight Forest.

That last night had been especially dark, if not for the town’s ever-present lights it could have been said that you couldn’t see out of the corner of your eye. And now, at least some shimmering light that looked like sunlight was able to break through the layers of darkness wrapped in the shade of the trees and shine down, casting patches of light on the gray-green grass.

Jace shook the axe in his hand and said, “Then let’s go.”

“Take it easy.” Grid stared at the axe blade that swung back and forth and said, “Don’t forget what you said yourself yesterday, we only pick herbs, we don’t initiate fights, and if we don’t get to the most dangerous point …… don’t invite trouble.”

“I remember.” Jess said, “Even you remember it so well, how can a guy like me forget it?”

The dwarf gave a laugh and took the lead in the direction of the cemetery.

Jace followed, and once the two returned to the cemetery fence, they followed it for a long time without coming to the end.

It was worthy of being the largest cemetery in the entire Stormwind Kingdom, in fact it was probably the largest in the entire continent as well. At least in Lordaeron, Jace couldn’t remember a place of this size.

Grid was getting a little tired of walking, he grabbed the railing and shook it, the metal fence bars were still strong and solid even after years of abandonment, not something he could easily shake.

“How do we get in?”

“If those wolves can get in, then we should be able to get in too.” Jace looked at his feet and said, “Watch out for the bottom, there might be a hole they dug out or something ……”

“Makes sense.”

Grid nodded and continued on, and the two advanced for another ten minutes or so when Jace suddenly saw a large cluster of rather unusual plants on the roots of the wall stacks under the fence.

Its long stems grew densely outward, forming at the end clump after clump of fine leaf clusters, the leaves resembling coarse silvery-white hairs, and the clusters looking like daisies, crowded against each other, coming together into a tilted silver mass that rippled with the breeze.

Is this …… silverleaf grass?

His knowledge of silverleaf herbs basically only came from the herb illustrations he’d pored over in the library, as the ancient modeling formed by the rough mapping interspersed with each other in the game wasn’t much help in identifying most of the herbs in this world.

“Slow down.” Jace called Grid to a halt and flipped out the scroll, finding the sketch and description of the silverleaf grass and corresponding, it should be about right, “This is silverleaf grass, right?”

“Let me take a look.” Grid plucked off a small root, rubbed it in his hand, sniffed it, and said, “It’s quite possible, I know a brother who likes to use silverleaf grass dried and added to bitters for flavor, and it seems to smell like this.”

“A pound of silverleaf grass will fetch over two silver coins.” Jace pulled out his pocketknife and asked, “How much can I get for these?”

“Hard to say.” Grid turned the plant over and said, “But it definitely weighs far less than a pound, and will probably be lighter again when we’ve brought it back to Stormwind and the dew on it has dried.”

“Okay, but at least it’s a start.”

Jace said, leaned down and was about to cut a plant when suddenly the grass moved, causing him to cry out “fuck” and retract his hand, taking a step backward.

“What did you say?” Grid, who was looking around, looked back and asked, “What’s going on?”

Jace gulped and said, “Something just moved in there.”

“Are you sure?” Grid stepped forward and slowly raised his sword, the tip aimed at the silver-leafed grass.

He looked back and forth, not noticing anything out of the ordinary, and nudged Jace to take another look.

Jace nodded slowly probing his hand, the blade of the knife just poking through a leaf and the grass inside did indeed quiver again!

Greider stabbed his sword directly and accurately, and it seemed to stab something hard and let out a clicking burst …… The thing in the grass began to flop up haphazardly, and Greider picked it hard to pick the thing out of the grass and into the air, and it turned out to be a broken arm!

Grid saw this arm struggling like a big bug immediately his face turned white, so scared that he threw his sword out, and when he saw the arm off the tip of the sword flew far away by itself, he picked up the sword again in a hurry.

He cursed several times in a row in Dwarven, then said, “Quick, cut the silverleaf grass, let’s go!”

Jace hurriedly got down and started mowing the grass, and after finishing the large bunch, he was surprised to find a hole in the wall behind the grass that was almost big enough for a person to burrow through in the dirt!

“Greed, there’s a hole right here!”

“You go in first! I’ll be right behind you!”

Grid held his sword up and pointed at the arm that was rolling back and forth on the ground, and Jace glanced back at what felt like a large lizard shedding its tail.

Yet the association made him shudder; if the tail was here, where was the big lizard?

The thought just wavered from his mind for a moment as he decisively burrowed into the cavern, luckily he was lean and came through casually. When it was the Dwarf’s turn the barrel took a lot of work, and Jace plowed through quite a bit of dirt with his axe before he yanked him out whole.

The two men stood up and leaned against the wall for a moment’s reprieve, and Jace gave the dwarf a sidelong glance and asked, “Why are you so scared, too?”

Grider said unhappily, “I’m not afraid of a full zombie when I see one, and who doesn’t go numb when they see such an arm twisting around by itself?”

“On the contrary, it’s a shame that you’re scared like a kitten at the slightest breeze, heh, but I wasn’t expecting much from humans in the first place.”

With that said, the dwarf took a deep breath and stood up, took another look outside the fence, looked at the bag in Jace’s hand and asked, “Well, how much do you think this is?”

Jess lifted the bag and said, “It doesn’t feel as heavy as the bag.”

“Expected.”