CH 23

Chapter 23: Master (1)

“I’ve had all the experiences of the stars.”

The coachman who drove the carriage wandered off.

I’d gotten to know the carriage driver well, having used him a few times outside the academy.

“Why do you want to go to a place that’s hard on the eyes and has no roads this time?”

The coachman’s incessant grumbling was so loud that I gave up trying to get some sleep and spoke softly to him.

“…My master house is there, and I need to pick up something.”

“Well, did you say your name was Zetto? I don’t know who your master is, but why don’t you tell him to move?”

“…Well, that’s not possible now.”

‘Residence’ wasn’t wrong, but ‘grave’ was more correct, since it was also the place where she died.

“Eing, eing.”

The coachman clicked his tongue, then returned his attention to pulling the carriage in silence.

‘…I wonder what Kaen is up to.’

The Kaen I’d seen last time hadn’t been acting much differently since then.

Sometimes I think I caught a glimpse of her pink hair through the bushes, but I’d like to think it was just my imagination.

I have no idea what Kaen is up to since this didn’t happen in the game.

‘Something that didn’t happen in the game….’

As I watch characters like Aizel and Kaen take different paths, I realize that the future may have become twisted.

‘Aizel was especially…’

Different from the game but she wasn’t a completely different person.

‘What if……’

An ominous feeling of foreboding quickly flashed through my mind.

“Ha…”

I sighed heavily, trying to ignore it.

Knowledge and past information don’t change… I could only take comfort in that and move forward.

If I stopped, that was it.

***

The chattering coachman quieted for a moment, allowing me to catch a few minutes of sleep.

[Thump.]

Suddenly, a knock on the carriage jolted me out of my slumber.

“Get out. We’re here.”

The coachman’s voice came from the front so I opened the carriage door and slowly got out.

As soon as I step out of the carriage, I am greeted by the sight of countless bamboo trees standing tall.

It’s nighttime, and the scene is eerie.

“Is this a bamboo forest?”

“When have I ever taken you to the wrong place?”

In the midst of my idle conversation with the coachman, a gust of wind blew in, rustling the forest.

“…Judging by the sound of the wind, this is the right place.”

“So… Should I wait here like you asked earlier?”

The coachman looked at me and confirmed my earlier request.

Before boarding the carriage, I had asked the coachman to wait at the arrival point for an additional fee.

The area is off the beaten path, and I’d have to walk a long way to get another carriage.

“Sure. It shouldn’t take too much time, and if I don’t return for a long time, as I said, you’re free to go.”

“How will you find the way then?”

“Don’t worry, my master taught me those things.”

“Please be careful.”

I gave the coachman a smile, reassuring him as much as I could.

I just needed to get the goods anyway and I had a general idea of the location, so it shouldn’t take long.

I left the carriage behind and walked slowly into the bamboo forest.

This vast bamboo grove, some distance from the Innocence Academy, had a very complicated path.

I looked around and saw bamboo everywhere. In fact, there was no path at all.

‘But…’

She, the spirit I would seal in my Spectral Sword and whom I would refer to as my teacher to others, had decided to do her closed-door training here since it’s a place where few people come and go.

‘Somewhere in these bamboo groves is her cave.’

I made my way through countless overhanging bamboo.

In case I need to return, I tear a piece of white cloth from my pack and tie it in a conspicuous place on the bamboo I often encounter.

There are no people around here anyway, so there’s no point in pretending to be blind.

There was one hint in the game to find the cave.

In this large bamboo forest, there is a large waterfall, and her cave is hidden behind it. The location of the cave was obvious, but finding the waterfall was the problem.

I had a way to make finding the waterfall less time consuming so after walking in circles for a while, I decided to listen to my surroundings.

I could hear the sound of the bamboo forest wind and the sound of bamboo leaves swaying along with the occasional bamboo bumping against each other.

I trusted my sensory skills and concentrated on my hearing, then after a while I could hear the faint sound of a waterfall in the distance.

It was a huge waterfall, so I figured I’d be able to detect it by now, and I was right.

I walked in the direction of the sound and as I continued walking, the sound gradually got closer and finally I spotted the waterfall.

I followed the ravine and got closer to the waterfall.

“Hmmm…”

There’s no way around it, so I’m going to get my clothes wet.

I plunged into the raging waterfall and as expected, the cave was behind the waterfall but it was pitch black with no light.

‘I don’t think I can feel anything in there….’

I pulled out a small, portable lamp from my backpack.

‘A blind man lights a lamp because it’s dark…’

I chuckled at the irony of the situation, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t going to be seen by anyone.

As I wandered through the cave, her tracks gradually became apparent.

‘How many years did she spend in this cave?’

Her seclusion was quite long but why was it so long?

‘Swordsmanship.’

She wanted to create a sword technique to defeat a single opponent.

She had been defeated countless times by Sword Saint, and that was why she chose to train in seclusion.

As I traveled deeper into the cave, traces of her life here began to emerge as objects of unknown use and tattered pieces of cloth were scattered throughout the cave.

‘How many years have passed since her death?’

A rough calculation told me it had been close to ten to twenty years.

She trained in seclusion before she died so there was a gap in time where she could have taken me as her disciple.

Her death was an unfortunate one, as she didn’t tell anyone about her closed-door training, but I knew she was gone.

In the game, there were a limited number of souls that could be sealed in the Spectral Sword, an essential tool for practicing the Ghost Slayer Technique.

Each soul was different, but most of them were powerful sword-wielders in life.

‘To die of a long-standing illness just before the end of her training…’

Moreover, many of them had suffered unjust deaths like hers.

As powerful as they were, their souls would become grudge-bound ghosts, unable to leave the earth and stay where they were.

‘The question is, where is the soul bound?’

In this world, as in the game, everyone’s body contains mana.

When a person dies, they leave behind a corpse, or at least a skeleton, even if their flesh decomposes.  Of course, after many years in the ground, even the bones can disappear…

Mana played a unique role here. In this world, the mana remaining in the bodies of the dead decomposes even their bones.

In the game, it was said that after five years, the corpses would disappear without a trace.

This was a tidbit of knowledge that I gained while playing as a Necromancer. Until then, I hadn’t really paid attention to what happened to corpses in the game, and I didn’t have much information.

Of course, graves still existed.

It’s said that the body of the dead disappears completely, but shouldn’t it be honored?

The question is where do these powerful spirits, the ones I’ll be sealing away when I practice the Ghost Slayer Technique, reside since there are no bodies or skeletons left behind.

The answer is the object most associated with the dead.

In the game, it’s called a “memory item”.

As I walked along, thinking about the object, I came to the end of the cave. There were miscellaneous objects with unrecognizable shapes and what looked like crude bamboo furniture.

She had been a swordsman in life.  Perhaps the object with deep connections would be a sword but in her case it wasn’t instead it was the thing on the table.

I picked it up.

‘…It’s got a soul in it, and it gives me a chill when I pick it up.’

As soon as I picked it up, I immediately felt goosebumps all over my body, but I shrugged them off as it was a normal thing to do.

I took a closer look at the object.

It wasn’t rusted or worn in any way that would suggest it was special despite its age.

The necklace with a gemstone still looked brand new. The gemstone aside, the chain of the necklace was also rust-free. It was a pendant she’d worn around her neck her entire life, a pendant that now held her soul.

‘The Pendant of Sierra.’

When this pendant is used to forge a sword, a sword containing her soul is created.

From then on, the soul inside the sword would be completely sealed and contracted, preventing it from wandering off at will, and the sword would be truly complete.

I searched the floor a bit more and found her journal, stuffing it into my backpack and tucking the pendant into my arm.

“Hmph…”

As I walk out of the cave, I can’t shake the eerie feeling that lingers with me.

In the game, the sentence “I felt creepily scared” was simply written and didn’t feel real, but this was different.

‘It’s kind of scary…’

I must be mistaken.

I reached the waterfall at the entrance to the cave and put the lamp back in my backpack then I jumped over the waterfall.

The ground is firm as before.

‘Finally, this is over,’ I thought.

I looked up, thinking to myself……but suddenly   I saw a ‘person’ with her face right up to my nose.

It was a woman with long, dark hair. Her strange, violet eyes stared back at me.

The dress she wore was plunging down to her breastbone, and the design seemed Eastern but upon closer inspection, her body was half transparent.

No, the lower half was almost transparent.

After staring at me for a while, her mouth opened.

[Why do you want to take the dead’s…precious things…?]

Her voice, sounding somewhat shy, was not coming from the front where she was, but from inside my head.

The white bandage covering my eyes, the Blindfold That is Beyond Reason…seems to have literally pierced a line that shouldn’t have been crossed.

Her name was Sierra and she looked exactly as when she was alive.

She was my ‘fake’ teacher and the soul that would enter the Spectral Sword.