Eun Won.
Eun Won.
“Finally dealt with.”
The next morning the trumpeter of rest spoke to me in a dry tone.
“yes.”
He stared at the exact spot where the old man’s body had been.
“The traces of the dead are really weak. It’s hard to find if you’re not focused. But did you kill him with your own hands?”
“It was.”
“Right.”
After that answer, he remained silent for a long time. As the silence grew awkward, he reached out and poked at my chest.
“Don’t kill people for any reason unless it’s unavoidable.”
“Did God tell you to do that too?”
“no.”
The pure white mask swayed slowly from side to side.
“This is just personal advice. Killing someone means that you may end up carrying a thread of unwillingness without your knowledge. It’s like a spider’s web you encounter while walking. So whenever you kill someone, think and think again.”
“I will remember.”
“Remembering or forgetting is your choice, so there is no need to answer me. Then I’ll go.”
“Then see you next time.”
A hand clad in a thick glove tapped my shoulder.
“I hope to see you again after a very long time has passed, enough to shatter the sorrow of the dead.”
He blew a soundless trumpet and left with the dead. Dakia, who was watching the conversation from the side, poked me in the shoulder.
“When did you two become so close?”
Are you close? That trumpeter of rest and me?
“I don’t know if I am close or not. Rather, isn’t that the message that you don’t want to see that greeting again?”
Dacia tilted her head and replied.
“I heard it was a greeting telling me to eat well and live well for a long, long time.”
Dacia’s interpretation also made sense. As the trumpeter of rest is responsible for retrieving the bodies of the dead, isn’t a life that is not related to him, in a way, the most distant from death?
But what kind of virtue is it all of a sudden? I don’t think I did anything special for him, but was it because of the way he was contemplating the death of the old man? If that’s not the case…
Suddenly, a thought passed through my head.
Just as it is, every time we meet, something bothersome happens, so maybe it was his sincerity that we just didn’t want to see each other for a long time?
Feeling complicated and subtle, I watched the group of dead go far away.
After parting with the trumpeter of rest, we looked at the map with Giselle and roughly marked the coordinates she found out on the map and drew the optimal route.
“I’m going to look around like this, how about it?”
I showed Giselle the map we had worked hard to draw.
“Look where you are.”
Giselle, who was lying on her sleeping bag, stretched out her bandaged hand to check the map and immediately frowned.
“Are you really going to go like this?”
“Are there any problems?”
“A lot. A lot. hey! Jamel!”
“Yes?”
Jamel, whose name was suddenly called, blinked his eyes and tilted his head.
“Why?”
Giselle glared at Jamel and narrowed her one-sided eyes.
“No, I can understand that other people have never been to the Northern Empire, so they would have drawn this tasteful route based on this rough map. But you are not! hey! Have you already forgotten about traveling around the Northern Empire with me? huh? I trusted you and lay here like this!”
“Hehehe…”
Jamel laughed awkwardly and scratched the back of his head.
“Well… I just follow you wherever you go, so I can’t remember…”
“Ha…”
Giselle picked up her head and lay down again, shaking her head.
“I really can’t live. Just hand me a Jamel pen.”
“huh!”
She stood up, took Jamel’s pen, glanced at me, and began drawing lines on the map.
“Look Carefully. This place is roughly represented as a mountain on this map, but unlike the rough drawing, it’s a really high mountain range? Have you heard of the Ards Mountains?”
“I am hearing this for the first time.”
“I thought you wouldn’t know. If you explain roughly what the Ards Mountains are like, it’s a place where the snow is piled up on top that doesn’t melt even on the hottest summer days in the Northern Empire. Do you have a sense of where it is?”
It means that the ice caps are piled up.
“It would be impossible to pass as it is.”
“that’s right. To be precise, it’s possible, but it’s too risky, and there’s no need to go to such trouble.”
Giselle drew a small ‘X’ on the line we had drawn, and then drew a curve that went round around the outskirts of the mountain range not marked on the map.
“It looks like it’s going around, but there’s a wide river in the middle? It’s a canal to be exact. Do you know what a canal is?”
She was extremely concerned that I might not understand her. If that’s not the case, you’re measuring my common sense and intellectual level.
“I know most of the terms, so there is no need to ask every time.”
“okay? If so, it’s fortunate… But instead, you won’t say anything else later?”
“yes.”
“Anyway, since the Pantra Canal runs through the Northern Empire, maritime trade is brisk here, right?”
“I’m thinking of getting a boat and moving along the canal. As maritime trade is active, it will be easy to find a ship. Moreover, if maritime trade is active, a lot of money will come and go, so security won’t be bad thanks to the nobles of the Northern Empire keeping an eye on it.”
“Uh um… yes that’s right.”
Giselle stared at me with her eyes wide open, cleared her throat a few times, and then resumed her explanation.
“You should be able to roughly search the coordinates around you while moving along the canal like this. Instead, there are a few unreachable locations, but these are so remote that it would save much time to find them after searching all around the city through which the river that leads to the canal passes. how is it?”
After all, Giselle was the only person here who knew the proper geography of the Northern Empire. Jamel seemed to know, but… I don’t think it’ll help much.
Turning her head to look at Dakia, she watched Giselle with eyes full of admiration before opening her mouth.
“You’re very smart, unlike your friend Jamel, aren’t you?”
Giselle responded quickly with a very disgusted look at the comparison with Jamel.
“Thank you for the compliment, but if you compare it to Jamel, I wonder if anyone is a smart person.”
“hey! Do you really want to do that to me?”
“Then did I say something wrong… Ouch!!! Why are you pinching the injured person!!!”
Jamel ran away and hid behind my back, glaring at Giselle.
“If you keep threatening my position as Priest Marnak’s confidant, I can become heartless no matter how close you are to me!!! Be careful!!!”
“That dumbfounded jean…”
Giselle spat out a thick bowl of curse words, looked down at me, and swallowed up the savory curse words that were about to spill out. Although Gisele had put Jamel down here and there, it was the first time Jamel had shown all of her emotions without adding or subtracting anything.
It seems that these two are really close.
I briefly mediated between the two and pointed to a map full of all sorts of lines and dots.
“Then, where do we go first?”
Giselle cooked and marked a dot on the map.
“Ebedos. We have to go to this city, the most northerly of the cities connected by the canal. Since this is one of the coordinates I have memorized, I wondered if it would be a good idea to look for the whereabouts of the sacred object that may be here while arranging a good ship.”
We unanimously decided to follow Giselle’s advice and head to Ebedos.
***
A few days after Marnac and his party left, a man appeared at the place where they were staying.
Black hat and coat. With his mouth covered and two sword sheaths at his waist, the man knelt down and picked up a handful of dirt from the floor and rubbed it.
“They are the traces of the dead… But you camped? It’s bizarre.”
The trumpeters of rest, who roamed around as friends with the dead, never lit a fire, no matter how dark the night. However, if traces of camping remain here, it means that there was someone other than the trumpeter of rest.
“hmm.”
The mark left by the master who had not been contacted for the past few days was cut off here. If so, that means only one thing.
“You got it. old man If I was that old, I would have advised you to rest. He didn’t listen and ate it.”
There were no tears. The man collected the soil around him for a long time, then roughly cut down and trimmed the surrounding trees to make a tombstone and put it in front of it. He stood in front of the tombstone, closed his eyes, and murmured briefly.
“Looking at it, it seems that he died without leaving a body. I didn’t bother looking for it. However, it was Master who explained to us that it was difficult to leave a corpse behind anyway, so if you criticize us for not pretending to look for it, then you really know you will get hit.”
The man took out a bottle of alcohol from his luggage. He glared at the bottle for a long time, sighed deeply, opened the lid, and sprinkled it over the grave.
“This is what I saved and saved to drink when I was dying…”
In the end, he couldn’t let go of his last lingering feelings and managed to break the bottle right before it all fell onto the grave and save a sip of alcohol. The man smiled as he alternately looked at the bottle and the grave.
“If I drink alone, it will be suitable, so I only take one sip.”
After roughly pouring alcohol into his mouth, the man frowned and threw the bottle away.
“They say it’s a very expensive and delicious drink. Nicely written, really. Hey, why are you using this?”
Standing alone, he muttered the words, “I’m going to use it,” and picked up the bottle he had thrown away and took it back.
“I take it with me because I am afraid that someone will say that I threw out the trash while sleeping later. And…”
The man pulled down his black hat with one hand. Dirt from his gloves dripped onto the cap of his sword. He closed his eyes and muttered in a low voice.
“Master, I will soon send the guy who made me like that, so please wait a little longer. There hasn’t been a single one that this proud disciple ‘Ultor’ has failed to hunt because he’s undeserved of you.”
***
“Are you really going to use that?”
At Jamel’s question, Giselle sat down on Terzio’s cart and tapped a pair of weapons consisting of an iron skewer and a sword.
“Then why don’t you just throw this precious thing away? If I look at this in the first place, I have to lose. I said that the dead old woman took all the money and luggage I had. So you should take care of this.”
Jamel frowned at the sword and skewer next to Giselle, who was wrapped in bandages.
“Something… I feel uncomfortable…”
“Okay, what happened to the bandits?”
“Ah, Priest Marnak and Prince Dacia… No, Dacia took care of everything herself.”
Dakia asked Jamel several times that it was okay to speak comfortably, but Jamel still used to use honorifics when calling Dakia by her first name out of habit.
Sitting on top of the cart, Giselle watched from a distance as Marnac turned and absorbed the corpses into a handful of divinity.
Absorbing divinity from a corpse and using it without complicated preparations. That was a monster that literally broke the existing system. And the green-haired woman who flutters beside him and the evil god who has fallen on this earth.
mother of corruption.
Giselle almost fainted as soon as she realized that she was a god disguised as a human. It’s a story that makes no sense.
Although the methods of ‘descent’ and ‘fall’ pursued by the two factions of the liberatio are slightly different, they both share the same goal in that the goal is to summon the gods residing in the high heavens to this place.
Giselle thought seriously.
‘Oh, I want to convert…’
Quickly brushing off the blasphemous thought, she frowned at the great canal and city in the distance.
“Did something happen to Ebedos, banditry within a few hours of the city?”
Jamel, who was standing next to him, smiled broadly as if he had waited for his friend’s muttering.
“With Priest Marnak, accidents happen in every city you go to! By any chance, if there is no accident, it will happen soon! Surely something has already happened over there?”
“You think that makes sense?”
Jamel chuckled.
“You know when you go through it too!”
