Connor and Death left the castle. It was now evening; there was little more they could do that day, and they needed to take out a room at an inn before nightfall.

Death assiduously didn’t mention Connor’s failure to examine the witch with his Yang Eyes. She was willing, sure, to tease him in a general sense, but only nicely, and she could tell from the tortured expression on his face that he’d take any teasing on this matter the wrong way. Instead she’d simply given him a pat on the shoulder, and told him he’d done his best.

They were nearly outside of the castle when they met him. Death froze, staring in shock and revulsion at the man facing them. His lips quirked up in a smile, and he curtseyed.

“Well well well well, if it isn’t the lady Death. How are you? Have you graduated yet? When last I met you, you were a wee intern.”

And he moved his fingers into a ‘small’ sign to connote just how teensy weensy she’d been when last they met. Death’s face contorted in pure disgust.

“Why are you here, Zhi?”

“Is that any way to address your seniors? I prefer Yin or, better yet, Yin Lao.”

“And I don’t rightly give a hoot what you want to be called, you crazy cockamamie bastard.”

Connor’s eyes widened. He hadn’t Death known for long, but he’d never seen her this irate, nor could he quite see the reason for her rage. The man was admittedly… unpleasant to gaze upon, but that alone hardly merited the censure, even if he was a little smarmy.

He was dressed all in black, his robes worn and raggedy, with limbs as spindly as a scarecrow. Drawn grey skin hung close on his bony frame, clawlike hands grasping at nothing in thin air. His eyes were a dark grey and strangely pointed, sitting astutely in his long, withered face.

He fluttered about and uttered a greasy laugh, bowing once, twice, thrice in mocking deference to Death’s authority. “My good lady, this is an entirely disrespectful way to address one who has come all this way as a wise man, set upon solving this nation’s transmigrator problem.”

Death snarled nastily at him. “Well I got bad news for you. The king doesn’t want help - he thinks any cultivators he calls in will betray him for the Otome Game Villainess.”

The man’s lips split in a grin that, somehow, reached from ear to ear, in one of the most revolting displays Connor had ever seen. He leaned in close, until his lips were nearly touching Death’s ear. “And will he turn me away once he knows who I am?”

Death leapt back, cringing. Before she could argue further, however, Connor interrupted the conversation.

“And who are you?”

The man looked at him over his shoulder, his neck bones bending to accommodate the uncomfortable manoeuvre. “I? Who am I? Why, haven’t you heard of me - Yin Zhi, the travelling wise man?!”

“‘Travelling wise man’ is certainly one phrase for you, one among many - and less accurate than all the rest,” Death swore. Yin merely fanned his fingers in surrender.

“Methinks you doth protest too much, to quote an excellent transmigrator poet,” he mocked, “but your protests are, at any event, totally irrelevant - you cannot stop me, as well you know, and if you have nothing productive to say to me you’ll excuse me for ending this conversation now. I have monarchs to talk to, after all.”

Death spit on him, or at least tried to - her saliva stopped an inch from his shirt. He looked at the spittle in disgust, but chuckled once more, a slimy baritone sound. Then, without any further ado, he departed, off to sell his services to the king.

“So, we’re on a timer now, eh?” Connor commented to the still furious Death. The latter shivered.

“Worse than that - so’s the Otome Game Villainess. For her sake as well as ours, we need to stop her before he does.”

Connor didn’t question this inscrutable remark. He knew little about cultivation worlds, but the little he knew was more than enough to know he didn’t want to know any more.

Their inn was in the middle of town, on the outskirts of the noble district. It was a charming little thing, a small two story building with white walls interspersed by wooden beams, and with flower baskets decorating the windowsills. The innkeeper, a plump woman, took their money with no questions, and better yet asked no questions when they expressed their desire not to be called to dinner or breakfast (Connor had yet to develop organs, and Death was uncertain about their being any edible fruit).

“So,” said Death, as they sat awkwardly in their bedroom, “what are we thinking?”

“It’s probably the witch.”

“It’s probably the witch.”

The two looked at each other.

“What, not even a word for the saintess?”

“What, not even a word for the fiancée?”

They burst into laughter.

“Honestly,” said Connor after a moment, “we really should investigate the both of them. Murphy’s Law, if we check out the witch, it will turn out to be the saintess.”

“No,” Death returned, “Murphy’s Law, it will be whomever we check out last.”

“Pffft. Fair. So, who are we thinking of checking out first, then? The witch again?”

“Maybe. The best thing to do, so far as I can guess, is question the locals. They’ll have a pretty good outside view on this, as the Otome Game Villainess, for all her kindness to the few common people she comes across, confines her dark magic to mortal nobility.”

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Connor scratched at his vaguely formed chin. “Makes sense.”

Unfortunately, however much sense it may have made in theory, in practice the situation proved to be decidedly different. Contrary to expectations the common folk didn’t know much, not because they were unaware of the problem, but because few of them had spent enough time around the nobility to know what their characters were usually like.

“The prince’s fiancée? She’s an infamous villainess,” the innkeeper said. “Met her? No, I never have - we don’t get nobility in here, you know.”

“It’s definitely the saintess,” said the shoe shiner outside the inn, as he shined Connor’s boots. “I saw her once at church and let me tell you, I did not like the look of her one bit.”

“Oh?” Asked Connor, intrigued.

“Yeah. Her face was plain - not at all what you’d expect from a so-called saintess - and those a-”

“Well then, thank you kindly for your assistance,” Connor interjected, tossing the youth a coin.

“It’s the witch, of course,” said a nearby guard, when asked. “Why? Because it’s always the witch.”

“Nah, I have two coppers that the Otome Game Villainess is the prince’s fiancée. I hear she pays her workers ten percent more in living wage than other nobles, so you know she’s trying to buy their secrecy.” Interrupted a shopkeeper, who hadn’t been asked.

And those were among the most useful responses. Others gave them weird conspiracies involving all three women being parts of the Otome Game Villainess; or asserted that it was the prince himself; or denied that there even was an Otome Game Villainess, defending the claim that the regency ball gowns and suits of mediaeval armour were curses sent by the gods for impiety.

When at last our intrepid protagonists tired of the peasantry and turned to the nobility, they found that answers there were scarcely better. Every noble had piles and piles of gossip to share about the fiancée - her dressing habits, her favourite colour, what music she liked, her favourite dishes, cutesy stories from her childhood and bits of scandal… and all of it contradictory.

Had they chosen to trust any of what they’d heard, they would have had to conclude that her favourite colour was red, green, and robin blue; that she preferred light and airy dresses and also corsets; that she only listened to the highest in classical music, that she enjoyed bar tunes; that she supped on nothing bar the finest of fine food and also ate only dry bread. She loved the prince, she hated the prince, she was cheating with his personal assistant, she was trying to kill his personal assistant…

“You know, you’d think that for people who spend half their lives gossiping, they’d actually know something about what they gossip about.”

“Apparently not,” Death concurred, as they left another noble’s house, no smarter than when they’d first arrived. “We’d have more success with divination at this rate.”

“Seriously. Hard to believe that even with all that nonsense” - for the noble lady whose house they’d been in had spent the better part of an hour trying to convince them that the prince’s fiancée was really a mad genius inventor and also an ascetic who was leading a group of daemoniacal scientific hermits in overthrowing the country - “it still made more sense than the absolute idiocy we heard on the saintess and the witch, which I don’t even want to repeat.”

“Indeed. There’s only one thing for it, then - we’ll have to question the chief suspects directly.”

Connor groaned. They’d tried to do that, when they’d realised quizzing the common folk was a waste of time, and it had proven a frivolous and frustrating endeavour. The prince’s fiancee would take no guests, out of concern for the appearance of her virtue; the saintess only appeared at church functions, and they’d been rebuffed from their attempts to visit her in her private quarters.

The witch had normally been in the practice of holding séances three times a week, but had stopped shortly after their arrival, claiming a pain in the head. This just screamed “suspicious,” but it confirmed nothing, and (as Connor liked to say) one was always innocent until proven guilty.

“So, who are we harassing first?” Connor joked. Death rolled her eyes.

“Don’t put it like that. This is a legitimate police investigation, technically - we have a writ from the king.”

“And his kingdom has no police,” Connor pointed out reasonably.

“Had no police. It has us now.”

Connor raised his hands in surrender. “I won’t say boo. Who are we visiting politely if against their will and even knowledge?”

“Har har. I say the fiancée; it’s easier to break into her house than the church, and anyways it seems nobody likes her.”

This was true. While they’d heard all sorts of patently ludicrous things about the witch and the saintess both were reasonably well-liked; the fiancée, on the other hand, appeared to be universally despised. Of course rumours were rumours, and those rumours could very well have been started by the Otome Game Villainess herself, but still, if they didn’t investigate, how could they call themselves investigators?

To provide a slightly larger number of biographical details to a woman who has yet to be identified by her proper name and has, alas, been defined only by her relation to the prince: the lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia had been engaged to the prince at a tender young age, well over a decade ago. By all accounts it had been a loving engagement, if only on one side - she was completely obsessed with him; he could barely give her the time of day.

The lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia held little to no social power in the Kingdom of Yore, but much political power - she was the eldest daughter of Duke Robin Robert Robespierre de Potencia, the only duke in the kingdom (which, if we’re being frank, could barely support the one). This power she showed not the slightest of interests in wielding, rarely stepping out of her house except when it concerned her beloved prince.

It didn’t take long to find her house, a mansion on the far edge of town. It rose like a garish colossus into the sky, a tower of layered floors in various slightly offensive colours. Bright yellows, and hot pinks, and baby blues all found their place amid crenellations and concrete the colour of cream, with the windows done up like lace.

This rather absurd monstrosity was surrounded by a tall white picket fence, guarding extensive rose gardens and the occasional well tended orchard. Gardeners there were in plenty, but all of them easy to avoid, especially for a cultivator and his ethereal, immaterial partner.

They examined the gardens at length, looking for any sign of the lady Irene. Then, having failed to locate her in any of the likely spots - pleasant glades, lawns, overhangs, etc. - they scaled the walls, carefully breaking into the house near the top floor. (Without damaging anything, because that would be rude.)

The pair of them floated immaterially about the house, listening to the servants speak, till at last they determined that the lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia was at present serving tea to a guest in the sitting room. This was on the bottom floor, necessitating another journey, but at the end of the matter they stood outside a pair of grandiose if unnecessarily colourful doors, opening onto the sitting room.

They looked at each other as one, nodded as one, and threw open the doors as one. There, on the other side of the door, was a blonde who must have been the lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia. She leapt to her feet, face furious, and demanded an answer as to why the doors had opened of their own accord and who was there.

From the pair of intruders there was no response. This was not because they were choosing not to reply - they had already betrayed their presence, even if only indirectly, for it was clear that somebody had opened the door and in a cultivation world that implied the door openers were invisible - but because they were staring in astonishment at the other inhabitant of the room.

Said other inhabitant of the room was staring back at them, equally astonished.

“Who in the Blazing Blue Baboon are you?” swore the saintess.