“Do you understand these words?” Xiao Lin asked.
Gu Xiaoyue started to nod softly, but quickly shook her head as she said, “I can understand the words, but the texts are quite damaged. From the few sentences I can see, there seems to be a deal between the elves and the orcs, but it’s very vague. Are there any more papers?”
The two of them had temporarily put aside Gu Xiaoyue’s problems, and chose to focus on the examinations for the time being. Xiao Lin brought Gu Xiaoyue into the command room, bringing out all the Elvish texts.
Those must have been letters to the orcs from the elves, but after trying to compile them, there did not seem to even be 10% of the originals remaining. Xiao Lin brought the lamp closer to Gu Xiaoyue to help her read the contents in detail. It took a while before Gu Xiaoyue finally raised her head, furrowing her eyebrows before slowly starting to speak.
“It’s impossible. There’s too much content missing, and there are a lot of specialized words that are hard to understand, especially since Elvish is not my best language.”
Pausing for a moment, Gu Xiaoyue added hesitantly, “However, this word appears very often. I just regretfully don’t recognize it. It looks like an abbreviation of a few words.”
Gu Xiaoyue pointed at a set of words, and Xiao Lin gave up on trying to read it after just one glance. Those words were even harder to recognize than Ancient Normese.
Gu Xiaoyue was still trying to dissect the meaning of that abbreviation. “Based on just the words, the phrase has a lot of different meanings, but it could be referring to something evil. No, it could also mean demons. After that, those other words should mean some sort of building. Evil building? Demonic building?”
Xiao Lin had a strange look on his face before slowly saying, “Resurrection tower!”
Xiao Lin recalled that the high priest kept on talking about some demonic power when he was in The Final Land. It was quite easy to imagine that the power to resurrect people would make them seem like demons when the resurrection towers were first built.
With those words, their expressions started to change.
Considering the fact that they could be facing an attack from the orcs the next day, they did not linger too late, and went to bed quite early. That night, both Gu Xiaoyue and Xiao Lin had heavy thoughts in their heads, even if the two of them were not thinking about the same things.
Surprisingly, the fortress was completely peaceful the next day, which was their eighth day defending the fortress. The remaining orcs were all camped out far away, not looking like they had any intention of attacking.
The acting class monitors all breathed sighs of relief. They had been worried after failing to completely eliminate the orcs thanks to elven interference. Currently, it seemed that even though there were some surprises, the results had been satisfactory still.
Since the orcs were not attacking, everyone took the opportunity to rest and reorganize. As they kept an eye on the orcs, the engineers started to repair the towers outside the fortress. At the same time, they started to build even more archer towers. Spell towers took a lot longer, and there were not that many spellcasters among the new students, so they were set aside for the moment.
The archer towers actually put a lot of pressure on the orcs. Everyone had begun to realize the difference between those large arrows and the bows they had. When the towers were utilized in volume, the rain of arrows that covered the skies with darkness had a devastating impact, both physically and mentally.
The engineers did not lack resources thanks to the materials in the warehouse, but the problems arose with manpower. The acting class monitors requested that the engineers focus all their men on building the defense towers, but were rejected.
“You idiots! Don’t you know what the resurrection tower means for this battle? If we finish building the tower, those orcs will stand no chance!”
The academy sent the engineers on this mission in order to construct the resurrection tower. That was the basis of colonization, which placed any territory influenced by the resurrection tower under the control of Dawn Academy. So long as the Law of Immortality existed, their defense of the fortress and even the entire area would become a lot easier.
If not for the papers they found last night, Xiao Lin would have felt the same way as well. That unsettling feeling he had at the back of his mind since the start of the examinations started to rear its head. He still could not confirm anything, which was why he took the chance to raise a question to Captain Yu during their next meeting in the command room.
Captain Yu represented the engineers for that meeting. Even though the students could pitch in when it came to physical labor, the technical aspects still required supervision by the engineers, which was the cause of their current dilemma.
“Captain Yu, I wish to ask something that isn’t related to the main topic of our meeting.” Xiao Lin considered his words for a moment before continuing, “If, and I’m saying if, we fail to defend the fortress. What would happen to the resurrection tower if the orcs take the fortress?”
“What would happen to the resurrection tower?”
“Xiao Lin, we’ve already defended this place for eight days. Why are you trying to destroy our morale?”
They started to chatter among themselves. No one seemed happy with Xiao Lin’s pessimistic words, but Captain Yu seemed to have understood what Xiao Lin meant, motioning for everyone else to keep quiet before saying, “I understand. You’re trying to ask what the orcs can do if they had the resurrection tower in their hands, right?”
“That’s right, the Law of Immortality should have just been established, and it’s quite obvious that the various races of Planet Norma have no way to deal with it. They would definitely be afraid of it, but the more afraid they are, the more they would want to understand how we revive ourselves, whether it is caused by certain spells or by the power of demons. They might want the resurrection tower for that purpose!”
That was the conclusion Xiao Lin had arrived at after a whole night of deliberation. Following that train of thought led to even more horrifying conclusions.
The orcs and the elves might be allying themselves in order to get a hold of the resurrection tower. It was possible that this entire war against the orcs was a ploy by the orcs, and their main goal had always been to obtain a resurrection tower from the war.
However, those questions had already exceeded the scope of the examination, and Xiao Lin was not too concerned with a war that had happened almost a hundred years ago. What happened had already happened, and he could not do anything about it, neither could he do anything to change Dawn Academy’s strategy for the war, so Xiao Lin could only speculate all that by himself.
That was why Xiao Lin only had one question he needed answered, which was if the orcs could actually do anything if they got their hands on the resurrection tower.