Allen and Domeron both looked confused at Rimold’s words. They looked over at Red for clarification.
The youth hesitated. “… Back when Rimold got possessed, the ghost in his body was obsessed with finding a dagger crafted from the bones of a powerful cultivator.”
“Not just any cultivator!” Rimold cut him off. “A cultivator that was on the verge of ascending! Do you know what that even means? Every body part of a cultivator at that level is a consummate treasure!”
Both Allen and Domeron’s expressions changed at this explanation.
“Where is this dagger?” Allen asked.
“Well, it’s not here, but I know where it is!” Rimold said.
The young master looked at Red with a concerned face. “I thought you managed to take out the ghost of his body.”
“I did.” Red nodded. “However, possession can leave lasting effects on people’s bodies and minds even after the host is freed. I can only imagine this is one such case.”
“I’m right here, you know!” Rimold glared at them.
Domeron frowned. “Do you even hear yourself, Rimold? Look at your appearance. How are we supposed to take anything you say at face value in these conditions?”
The rogue gritted his teeth. “I’m not going crazy! I know that the possession influenced my interest in this dagger, but I did my own research into it before going around searching through the forest! If I wasn’t confident about the existence of this dagger, I wouldn’t have come to you about it.”
There was a silence as Red and his companions exchanged gazes.
Domeron sighed and looked back at Rimold. “Even if we assume you aren’t going crazy, think about what you’re suggesting. As you said, every body part of a cultivator that powerful is a consummate treasure, so how could we find something like this in our rather remote forest? If it were here, it would have already caused quite a commotion.”
Rimold scoffed. “You think I wasn’t skeptical at first either? I was just wandering around a village, when I heard something that made me change my mind!”
Allen looked curious. “What did you hear?”
The rogue was just about to speak when he hesitated. He looked over at Red. “Can you tell if we are being watched?”
Red shook his head. “I can’t sense anyone else, but… There is something you should know before we go any further.”
The atmosphere around the room changed, and Rimold looked at the three of them in confusion.
“What is it?” he asked.
“We are being tracked by the imperials.” Red said.
“What?!”
…
A few minutes later, Rimold was completely caught up with the recent encounters Red had in the forest, including how Rog was infected and lost a limb. By the end of it, the rogue seemed quite disturbed.
“I have been hanging around the forest all this time!” Rimold said. “How come none of them attacked me?”
“I do not know.” Domeron shook his head. “Perhaps they didn’t wish to make themselves known or simply did not see any value in eliminating you. In any case, I can only tell you that you got very lucky.”
Rimold frowned with an ugly expression. “What about Rog?”
“He is stable.” Allen said. “However… I don’t think his mind is in a good place.”
Rimold gritted his teeth. “Damn it all! This is all the more reason we should find this dagger. That way, we can exchange it for the help of a sect in treating him!”
“I don’t think it is safe to go outside of town right now.” Allen shook his head.
“Before we decide anything, tell us what you know about this dagger.” Domeron said, leaning back against a wall. “You said you found evidence about its existence, right?”
“Yes!” Rimold nodded. “It was pure coincidence that I heard about it!”
The rogue sat on the bed in the corner and took the bag off his back.
“You know how these villages around the region all have their own local legends, right?” Rimold asked. “Real stuff like rare monsters and ghosts that people saw once upon a time in the forest and it got turned into a local legend, right?”
Domeron frowned. “Why are you asking us this? You’re the one who was investigating these places!”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“I just want you to follow my logic!” Rimold glared at him. “Either way, I have a habit of looking into these legends every once in a while. Most of the time it’s all bogus, but on some rare occasions there may be some truth to them, and there may be a hidden treasure trove or the bones of a powerful monster hidden somewhere in the forest!”
“How many times have those rumours turned out to be true?” Red asked with skepticism.
“Uh, not very often.” Rimold shook his head. “Either way, that’s not what matters! I get paid to look into these rumours by merchants too, so I still earn something at the end of the day.”
“Get to the point.” Domeron said with an impatient tone.
“I was trying to!” the rogue said. “Anyway, I was looking into one of those rumours when I heard something interesting. It was about people disappearing into the forest in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.”
Allen looked confused. “I thought that wasn’t that uncommon.”
“Shut up and let me finish!” Rimold cut him off. “I didn’t think anything of it either until I started hearing this same rumour in another village far away. I decided to look a bit more into it and learned from the families of these people that they were all having strange nightmares in the weeks leading up to their disappearance. They claimed to be hearing voices and seeing things that weren’t really there.”
“What kind of things?” Red asked with interest.
“Unfortunately, their families couldn’t clarify with me at the time.” Rimold shook his head. “They just said they were hearing conversations and seeing faint figures of people looking at them from amidst the tree. However, when they went to check, there was never anything there. Still, two different people with no apparent relation between them and living dozens of kilometers apart suffering from the same strange condition and disappearing never to be seen again? It was enough to justify further investigation… and that was when I found out this wasn’t happening in just two villages, but in almost every village in the region!”
By this time, Red and his companions were paying serious attention to Rimold’s story.
Rimold continued. “It was always the same thing! These people started to have strange nightmares and hallucinations weeks before leading to their disappearance without a trace.”
“Did this all happen around the same time?” Red asked.
“No, but it has been happening for years already.” Rog said. “Every few months, someone will disappear from a village under these strange conditions. I suspect the reason it never entered our radar was because it was happening rarely enough to be hard to draw any connections between them. As Allen said, these kinds of disappearances aren’t that uncommon in the region.”
“Did no one see them leave?” Domeron asked.
“That’s the weird thing! No one saw them leave their homes, which should be almost impossible! Yet no matter where I asked, these people all disappeared without a trace. No tracks, no farewell notes, nothing at all!”
Red frowned. “How long ago was this last case of a disappearance?”
“It happened just a few weeks ago, and yes, I did investigate their home but didn’t find anything.” Rimold shook his head. “There was also no apparent connection between any of these victims, or any correlation of gender, age or occupation that I could find. It seems to target them at random, as far as I can tell.”
Domeron massaged his temples. “This story is indeed strange and deserving of being looked into, but you have yet to explain how any of this relates to this dagger.”
Rimold smiled. “That is the thing, right?! These victims spoke to their family members about their visions and nightmares at the time, and although many of these people couldn’t remember it anymore or didn’t receive descriptive information, a few of them were very specific and they all described the same thing: a finger bone.”
“… A finger bone?” Allen looked confused.
“Yes, a finger bone! They all saw it in their nightmares.”
“Just a floating finger bone?” the young master asked.
Rimold frowned. “Well… I mean, I think so. They weren’t that descriptive.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” Red shook his head. “A finger bone is not a big enough bone to make a dagger out of.”
“It might be, but they could also use other things to craft it. They could have ground the bones into dust and then added it to some other type of metal. There are all kinds of crafting arts in the world, as you know yourself!”
There was a silence following these words. Even if what Rimold said could be true, Red and his companions knew it all sounded too farfetched. It seemed more like the rogue was trying to find a way to connect this supposed bone dagger into something entirely unrelated. As Domeron said, even if this was worth looking into, there was just no guarantee it would lead them to finding a bone dagger made out of the body of a heavenly cultivator.
“I know you don’t believe me, but I haven’t just been asking around! I have also investigated the forest!” Rimold said.
“What have you found?” Red asked.
The rogue responded by taking out a map of the region from his backpack. There were a lot of markings on the map, which Rimold proceeded to explain.
He pointed at a dozen or so spots, as well as a circle marking encompassing these spots on the map. “These are the places where these disappearances have happened. Outside of this circle, I have yet to find any cases.”
The circle easily encompassed a three hundred kilometer wide area of the map.
Domeron frowned. “Our town is inside this circle. Why haven’t there been any cases here?”
“I… don’t know.” Rimold shook his head. “Maybe they have happened, but we just don’t know about it.”
The swordsman seemed skeptical, but he just nodded. “It’s possible.”
“Either way, as you can see, if we take into account the villages where these disappearances happened and the order in which they happened, we can see that the first cases occurred close to a certain area before spreading outwards towards more distant places. It’s a pattern!” Rimold looked over at Red. “You know what that means, right?”
Red hesitated as he looked at the map. “You suppose that you can use this information to find this dagger?”
“Yes! The spread of these disappearances seems to form a steadily growing circle, constantly expanding! So if we find the center of this circle close to where the first few disappearances happened, we will find the dagger! I have already narrowed it down to this smaller area here.” Rimold point it out. “It’s still a large area, but if we do a thorough search, we may be able to find it!”
“If you know where it is, why haven’t you looked for it already?” Allen asked in confusion.
“Well, it’s still a big area and… I didn’t feel comfortable going to that place alone.”
“What do you- Oh…” Allen trailed off in realization.
This was because the area Rimold pointed to was the place where, seven years ago, a large section of the forest and its fauna had died under mysterious circumstances, and it was still yet to recover. Red, who was indirectly responsible for it by hiding his then infected insectoid core beneath the earth, was very familiar with that place.
It was where he first met the necromancer, the lizard demon, and also where he and the crimson mist became one. More importantly, it was also the place where Red had first emerged from the underground.
Suddenly, the youth felt this entire situation became far more complicated than before.