The yellow-toothed man was talking about Ina!
He had seen Ina.
Mira immediately became alert, and a torrent of questions raced through her mind. When had he seen Ina? Was it before or after they encountered that girl?
Ina hadn’t mentioned any strange individuals. It’s possible that he had been observing her from the shadows without ever showing himself to her.
The yellow-toothed man noticed the change in Mira’s expression. His lecherous grin grew even wider, and he took a step closer to her. “Don’t be scared, little sister. This might be the safest place in town,” he said, his voice dripping with malice.
As he got closer, Mira could smell the sour stench emanating from his body. She hadn’t seen any clean water sources in town, and the miners, who worked in the mines daily, carried the sour stench of sweat and dirt, which had fermented into a pungent odor on their bodies and clothes.
She couldn’t fight with the media crystal Lance had given her. Mira reached into her pocket to find the media crystal she had brought from the Mana Nexus, as well as the scroll Lance had written.
Mira feigned fear, glancing around nervously. The act seemed to excite the yellow-toothed man even more, his eyes gleaming with a predatory look as he scanned her up and down.
Since the earthquake and the landslide, there had been no living women left in the town. Most of the men left here were not the town’s original residents. Many were outsiders hired by former mine owners or people who had been brought here, drawn by the rumors of the town’s wealth and stayed out of greed.
There were drunks, gamblers, and all kinds of perverts, all of them seeking riches from the mines.
It was still shift change, with the day workers not yet back, and the night shift miners were resting upstairs.
Meanwhile, that blue-haired man had sneaked into the mine for an investigation. If he really encountered the monsters inside, it was likely that he wouldn’t return alive.
The yellow-toothed man let out a crude laugh and slowly inched closer to Mira.
Suddenly, a flash of light streaked across, like a blade slicing into his forehead. It didn’t hurt, but all the evil thoughts in the yellow-toothed man’s mind vanished instantly. Not only did his thoughts disappear, but he even lost control of his own body.
“Are you a mage?” His pupils dilated uncontrollably. He couldn’t move his eyelids, but his pupils reacted instinctively.
Mira gripped the crystal tightly. She looked around. They were standing in front of the inn.
Most of the movements in the town now were from the deceased, but Mira couldn’t be sure if someone might suddenly return or wake up.
“Go,” she commanded, her voice stern as she directed the stiff yellow-toothed man. “Head to the kitchen.”
Unable to resist due to the magic, the man’s stiff body leaped up and hopped towards the long-abandoned kitchen.
Dust was kicked up with each hop. Mira waved her hand to disperse the dust in the air, then ordered the yellow-toothed man to stop.
“What exactly happened in this town?”
From the information Mira had gathered, Ghillian town had once been a wealthy town, but now it lay in ruins.
The yellow-toothed man could not resist the effects of the magic, so he began to tell Mira everything he knew.
He had arrived in the town before the earthquake. He had worked odd jobs in the mines, first at an open-air stone quarry.
He had always heard that Ghillian town was a wealthy town because their mines supposedly contained endless amounts of gold. As long as people worked in the mines, gold would continuously be brought up from the ground.
It was this rumor that had drawn the yellow-toothed man here, but after working for a year and a half, all he had done was dig stone.
Although the work was tedious and physically draining, the mine owner was fairly generous. The mine never delayed wages, and the food provided daily was prepared by women hired by the mine owner, brought up from the town. The food wasn’t exactly tasty, but it was clean enough.
With no gold to be found, he had simply continued digging stone for three years.
Then, things began to change.
Because he had worked there for a long time and had performed adequately (though not outstandingly), the overseers had recommended him for promotion, and he was made a group leader, gaining the right to enter the mine.
It was then that he learned the truth. The mine didn’t just have an open-air stone quarry—those were just a distraction.
The real money came from the underground mines.
He should have figured it out earlier.
The first time he entered the underground mine, he discovered that there was no gold in Ghillian’s mountains. The material they extracted was just ordinary stone to most people, but for mages, it was a priceless treasure.
Mages were very wealthy, and the Mage Guild, a gathering of powerful mages, was the mine’s only customer.
Mana Nexus. The yellow-toothed man remembered that name.
Afterward, he continued to work in the underground mines, where the environment was harsher and the pay better.
He kept digging, but the deeper mines were different from the open-air quarries. There was an unusual rule—whenever they reached a certain depth, the overseers would order them to stop mining, even though there were still many Magic-Nullifying stones. The mining crew would abandon the site without hesitation and search for new locations.
This explained why they had frequently switched mining locations before. The reason for moving around so much was to cover up the real work happening deep underground.
The yellow-toothed man had always been puzzled. Why stop when they reached a certain depth? Aren’t these Magic-Nullifying Stones?
It was time-consuming and laborious to start new mining shafts, digging through several meters of dirt—it seemed like a foolish thing to do.
But the local miners were extremely cautious. They had an absurd reason: it was an ancient rule passed down from their ancestors that no mine should be dug deeper than four layers, or disaster would strike.
The yellow-toothed man remembered what an old overseer had said: “You greedy outsiders will bring disaster to the town.”
Whether the disaster was caused by the outsiders was unknown. But one thing was clear: the town had indeed fallen into crisis.
The local miners were quite comfortable with their work. They worked fewer hours, and every day they returned home to rest.
But the yellow-toothed man and the other outsiders had to live in crude shelters near the mine.
There were no rivers on the mountain. They had to carry water from the base of the mountain.
One evening, after finishing work, they were about to head down to fetch water when the earthquake struck.
The yellow-toothed man had barely managed to crawl into an open area of the mine to avoid the worst of it.
However, after that, rain and aftershocks came one after another. The mountain was barren, and frequent mining activities had caused massive landslides.
The landslides occurred repeatedly over two days, eventually burying the town below.
From Mira’s earlier judgment, the town’s people had perished in the landslides caused by the earthquake. But from the yellow-toothed man’s account, she began to piece together the fuller story of the town’s downfall.
The town had not died from a single earthquake, but from the terrible weather caused by the earthquake. With the mountain roads blocked and no way to escape, the people were trapped in their town, dying from fear, despair, and helplessness.
Despair, fear, and death—these were the key ingredients for the formation of dark magic.
Like other forms of magic, dark magic was born from nature, and these forces were harnessed, forming a terrifying area-of-effect spell that enveloped the ruins of the town through the natural conduit of the Magic-Nullifying stones.
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This was the real, shattered Ghillian town that Mira and Lance had witnessed.
But who had created the illusion of the prosperous town?
Mira asked the yellow-toothed man, but this time, he didn’t answer immediately. He struggled for a long time before finally whispering one word.
“I don’t know.”
Mira narrowed her eyes. “You really don’t know?”
“Tru—true, false—false…” The yellow-toothed man’s body suddenly trembled, and his expression twisted in agony.
He had previously been unable to move because of Mira’s spell, but now it was as if he had broken free from its control. He grabbed his face in madness.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” he screamed frantically, his tears and snot mingling with the blood as his fingernails dug into his face, tearing at the flesh in an obscene and horrifying manner.
Mira was worried that his screaming would wake the miners upstairs. She took out a media crystal, recited a spell, and cast a Silence spell at the yellow-toothed man.
But unexpectedly, the crazed man suddenly turned, his blood-streaked face twisting into an eerie smile.
The direction of the spell shifted. The Silence spell flew toward Mira.
Mira’s eyes widened, instinctively trying to dodge, but mages weren’t as physically strong as heroes.
Mira’s attempt to dodge was in vain, and she was struck by her own Silence spell.
The girl could no longer speak, and most magic required incantations.
She watched in horror as the yellow-toothed man rushed toward her. In a panic, Mira pulled out a magic scroll from her pocket.
She didn’t even know which scroll she had grabbed in her frantic state, but she hastily unfurled it and threw it.
A silent freezing rain howled out from the thin scroll, much like the rainstorm from the night before, but this time, the raindrops carried magical energy.
It was an immensely powerful area-of-effect spell.
The raindrops hit the yellow-toothed man like hot oil splashing on skin.
The sizzling sound was deafening as Mira continued to dodge.
She recognized this as the Freezing Rain spell, a seventh-ring area-of-effect magic. It could freeze those caught in the rain, rendering them immobile for a short time.
But she had never heard of someone suffering the intense pain of being submerged in boiling oil from this spell.
Who was this yellow-toothed man?
Back in the mine, Lance felt the energy pulse as the scroll was activated. He quickly transformed into a small blue dragon and sped toward the mine entrance.
A blue portal appeared next to Mira, and Lance’s towering figure emerged from the doorway.
He looked at Mira to make sure she was unharmed, then reached out to grab the scroll she had released.
He whispered a few words, and the Freezing Rain spell stopped.
But the yellow-toothed man’s body lay crumpled on the ground, twitching occasionally.
Sobbing.
Lance turned back to Mira.
He immediately noticed she had been silenced and couldn’t speak.
He chuckled lightly. “We’ll have to wait an hour.” The Silence spell wasn’t a high-level magic, but there was no way to undo it.
It originated from a casual act of discipline by his mentor when dealing with unruly students. It was a type of magic that came into being naturally, through intuition.
Mira lowered her head in dejection, making a gesture to indicate that she was fine.
Lance settled her to one side, then moved closer to the yellow-toothed man on the ground.
He wasn’t dead yet. The first target of the Freezing Rain spell wasn’t the yellow-toothed man, but something inside his body.
A type of magic born from the dark side of the world.
That’s why he had large burn-like marks on his body. The cold rain falling on him felt like hot oil.
Lance didn’t hesitate for long. He reached out and traced a series of patterns in the air toward the yellow-toothed man.
A blue magic circle formed, and Lance extended his hand through the circle. He grabbed something gray-black and clump-like from the man’s body.
Turning to Mira, he said, “Come, Mira, we’ll know the answer soon.”
Mira couldn’t speak, so she expressed her confusion with her expression. Lance smiled and reached his hand out to her.
“We’ll go back and take a look.”
A time-traveling spell! Mira’s eyes widened in surprise. She quickly placed her hand into Lance’s, gripping it tightly to convey her expectation.
As the magic surrounded them, Mira suddenly realized—it wasn’t a spell to return to the past, but rather, they had entered a memory of the yellow-toothed man.
This memory would answer the rest of Mira’s questions.
The illusion outside the town had been cast by the magic caster who had come here on orders. He had used the magic energy nexus to project a past image onto the cursed town of Ghillian.
The Magic-Nullifying Stone was an incredibly rare natural medium, an essential material discovered from goblin technology in the Magic Hub. Aside from the destroyed Goblin Camp, Ghillian town was the only mine for the Magic-Nullifying Stone.
Therefore, for humans to continue using magic, Ghillian town had to remain in existence.
To maintain the illusion of a thriving town, the magic casters from the Magic Hub had cast a secret spell, projecting the past prosperity of Ghillian onto the cursed town.
For the Magic Hub, whether the town had any inhabitants didn’t matter. What mattered was the mine, and whether it could continue to yield its Magic-Nullifying stones.
After the earthquake destroyed the mountain roads, the casters arrived through magic.
They rescued the trapped outside miners and resumed the mining operation. However, because all the town’s residents had perished in the earthquake, there weren’t enough people to meet the Magic Hub's demand for Demon-Extinguishing Stones.
The head of the mine decided to seize young and able-bodied men from nearby towns to make up for the manpower shortage.
Because Ghillian town wasn’t far from the Dragon Tower, and the Dragon had always had a bad reputation, the daring miners suggested they take advantage of the Dragon’s name to capture people. It was best to find those involved in gambling, drinking, or vice, as having leverage over them would make it easier to control them. This way, they would be drawn in by the town’s wealth and be willing to work as miners.
The Magic Hub turned a blind eye to their actions. The casters’ indifference gave the miners a great deal of freedom, which is why, in recent years, people from the surrounding towns had frequently gone missing.
Even the miners working there didn’t realize their colleagues were behind the abductions. The wages were high, and everyone had their own reasons to need money, so they had gradually stayed on.
Almost everyone believed that this was the Dragon’s mine, and the reason they were paid so much was to extract crystal ores for the Princess.
In reality, there were no crystals here. Most of the workers thought the accompanying energy crystals were what they were mining for. In truth, those unassuming stones, which they sent out as rubble, were the truly valuable Demon-Extinguishing Stones.
Yellow-teeth and a few of the foremen were part of the first group to stay.
But without the warnings from the original townsfolk, these greedy men soon dug past the safe limit.
They had always been short-handed. To earn more money in less time, they did not dig new tunnels as the original townsfolk had done. Instead, they kept digging deeper and deeper. Fourth layer. Fifth layer. Sixth layer.
There was no sign of punishment, so the greedy men continued digging, until the seventh mining shaft.
That was when the monsters appeared.
The memory vanished the moment they encountered the monsters. Mira and Lance opened their eyes simultaneously, looking at each other.
Unable to speak, the girl gestured, asking Lance what the fleeting darkness was at the end of the memory.
Lance answered, “It was a shadow.”
A shadow?
Mira looked down at her own shadow in confusion.
“It’s not the kind of shadow we understand,” Lance said. “To be precise, it’s an ‘Eclipse,’ the opposite of nature magic. All evil magic originates from shadows. The stones they mined, which have long been in contact with these shadow energies, naturally began to exhibit the violent side of magic.”
“They dug too deep. The depth wasn’t the key factor. It was greed, laziness, and lies—things like these aggravated the shadow. These are the perfect food for a shadow,” Lance stood up. “His body has been corroded by the shadow.”
Mira’s remaining doubts were mostly cleared.
But there was still one thing she didn’t understand.
If they needed more miners, why specifically target young men with leverage?
What about the men from the Hero’s Town? They were descendants of heroes, each with some degree of the Hero’s Soul.
The Hero’s Soul was the embodiment of all justice. If the shadow touched the Hero’s Soul, it would surely be harmed, wouldn’t it?
Suddenly, Mira understood everything.
The reason they captured the heroes was to eliminate the shadow.
Seeing the expression on Mira’s face change, Lance knew she had figured out the key.
This was still something the casters were involved in.
An unknown force had told Yellow-teeth and the others that the Hero’s Soul could eliminate the shadow deep underground.
That was why they had abducted people from the Hero’s Town.
What about the heroes?
Mira, covered in dust, wrote something on the ground of the abandoned kitchen.
“They’re still in the mine.” Lance looked at Mira. “Shall we go rescue them?”
Mira wrote: Will the heroes be in danger?
Lance shook his head. “We don’t know yet.” He hadn’t yet found the mastermind, the caster behind it all, and that person was the key to everything.
Lance would deal with them.
As the King of Blue Dragons, guardian of nature magic, he would never stand idly by and allow someone to exploit the power of shadows.
"He's running! Someone's escaping!"
"Catch him quickly! Someone's escaping!"
While Mira and Lance were dealing with the situation involving the man with the yellow teeth, something unexpected happened at the abandoned mine where the young people from the Hero's Town were being held.
These young men, still in their adolescence, were at the height of their rebelliousness. Ever since they were captured and brought here, they had been planning how to escape.
After observing for a few days, the young men discovered that every time food was delivered, only two miners came to serve them.
Tonight was no different.
So, they planned to strike when the miners came to deliver food, overpower them, and then escape under the cover of night.
They were going to split up and run in different directions—ensuring that they wouldn't be caught all at once.
The plan was going smoothly. The kids surrounded the two miners delivering the food and knocked them out. Then, one by one, they rushed out of their cages, splitting up and running in different directions as planned.
The plan was nearly flawless, and the leaders of the group, the "kid kings," thought victory was within their grasp. However, when they managed to escape the abandoned mine and stepped outside, the scene before them left them stunned.
There were no trees on this mountain.
These children had grown up in the town beneath the high tower. The mountains near the tower were filled with dense forests, and they often played in the woods, knowing how to use the tall trees to conceal themselves. But now, when they truly needed to blend in, they found themselves in a barren mine, where there were no tall trees.
The low bushes offered no cover for their shadows.
Unfamiliar with the terrain, the boys, even when trying to scatter in all directions, were quickly caught by the miners, who knew the area well.
Most of them were still teenagers. The oldest was sixteen or seventeen, while most of the boys were around fourteen or fifteen years old.
Even though some of them had learned swordsmanship, they had no weapons, and against the miners, who had been doing physical labor for years, these young kids stood no chance.
The miners had anticipated such a situation. The food they provided the boys was just enough to keep them from starving, but it was insufficient to sustain them for long, especially under the intense physical strain they were enduring while trying to escape.
As one child after another was recaptured by the miners, the leader, Ellin, made a decision. He darted into an abandoned mine shaft.
If one could escape, it was worth trying. If he could find the uncles and elders from the town, they could team up and make their escape together.
He gritted his teeth and hid alone in the dark mine shaft.
He would wait for nightfall and, when the miners slept, sneak out and try to find the adults who were imprisoned somewhere in the town.
What Ellin didn’t know was that a shadow was slowly emerging behind him.