Seeing Lucimia at a loss, Hart added, fear clinging to him like damp wool, “I’m hiding here because I’m scared, uh, chewing smoked meat like campfire fog.”

He shoved another piece into his mouth, grease shining like dusk on water.

Fair. The logic settled like a stone in a stream.

Lucimia didn’t push the topic; her voice cut through the room like a blade in mist. “You count as the god-fearing side. If they go extreme, they might hit you. So I suggest the merchant ship sails early. How’s that?”

She turned to the captain, her gaze an arrow seeking a target.

He licked dry lips like old parchment and rubbed the back of his head like ruffling straw, thinking. “We can, but only one day early. Some merchants haven’t sold out and need time.”

“No problem.” Lucimia nodded, relief loosening inside her like a knot untied in rain.

One day would do; before the first Reversion, they’d dodge the monster tide like fishermen beating a storm to shore.

Maybe this time they could sidestep the Plague Followers’ new plan, like stepping past a snare in grass.

She looked at Hart, her eyes asking quietly like ink soaking paper.

Hart seemed to catch her meaning. “No problem,” he said, his answer dropping like a nail into wood.

He agreed fast. No ripple at all? Did he truly have no ties with the local followers, or was his face a smooth lake hiding stones?

Whatever he was, he stood with those who honored gods, and the Plague Followers might finish their plan faster than before. One day early was fine; Hart still felt his hand held winning cards like a gambler in lantern light.

After a breath, Lucimia realized he likely didn’t know she’d guessed there was a plan, that she wore a mask he understood.

From his angle, she was also god-believing, saw Plague and Purification as proper gods, thought the Independents were lunatics; Hart feared a blade and wanted to leave early. It fit like a pattern woven tight.

She’d even refused to show up for the money, leaving coins cold as moonlit metal; fools wouldn’t get it, but the clever could read her stance in that shadow.

Of course, she had no proof Hart was tied to local followers; it was only a guess, a thin thread tugged in fog.

She wouldn’t reveal her guess; better to keep cards pressed to her chest like heat under a cloak and let him think the water was still.

Yet she had to consider the worst—if he had ties, he might whisper to them to send knives after her, cold as moonlit reeds.

Remember her first visit to buy a ticket and ask about Gendi? The lie she wove then was silk over thorns.

When Hart asked why she wanted Gendi, Lucimia spun her story, said Gendi stole from her, a shadow hand snatching in the crowd.

So she showed strength to keep trouble from her door, making them believe Gendi stole and smashed into an iron wall, a fool punished by his own sprint in darkness.

I didn’t know he was a Plague Follower; his death has nothing to do with me, she told herself, the thought clicking like stones.

After that, she turned invisible right in front of them, air rippling like clear water, and slipped away from the merchant ship as a mosquito with needle-thin wings.

“Next, watch Gendi’s gathering place and his home,” Lucimia decided mid-flight, her plan chalking a white line across the sky.

She had marked her stance, so the chance that Plague Followers sought her out felt low, a wind bending away from her. But Emongaha had likely read her stance too; would he target her like a hawk circles a lone hare?

Lucimia had to guess, clouds of thought rolling like a storm bank.

She could explain her absence as no time to spare, yet she believed Emongaha wouldn’t let a foreign strong mage roam his grounds like a wild flame.

He treated this city like his own tight empire, the kind of man who wanted every thread of silk twisted in his grip like a net.

She might already be exposed to Lev’s gaze; if he saw her after she turned invisible, and then learned a mage had taken Gendi, he’d tie those threads into a knot and guess she was an Eighth Rank Mage.

Maybe he’d find her inn tonight, night a velvet sheet holding quiet blades. Would he send assassins? Or offer an olive branch first, sweet as honey on a hook?

Lucimia sketched his possible moves in her head like ink strokes on rice paper. Send an extremely strong hand to slip into her room at midnight, press her to join them, swear to Emongaha; if she refused, strike fast, the dark a held breath.

It wasn’t impossible; the possibility hung like a shadow under a lantern’s rim.

“Because I grabbed Gendi, both sides have their eyes on me, wolves in tall grass. It feels awful. Luckily, I still have Reversion.” Lucimia sighed, her breath trailing like autumn smoke.

If not for searching the pale-green girl’s trail, and her promise to Desty to protect the city’s people, gathering threads early and watching their weave, she would’ve reverted already, slipping back like a fish into deeper water.

Heavy-hearted, Lucimia suddenly caught a crucial thought in mid-flight, a spark in fog. “I have a Teleportation Array. Why am I still flying?”

Damn, bad mood makes mud of the mind.

She stopped aloft like a leaf held by a still wind and cast Teleportation Magic, her figure vanishing in a blink like lightning swallowed by cloud.

When she opened her eyes, she stood before the towering withered giant of a tree, a pillar of ash against the sky.

She looked up at its vanishing crown and sighed. “Hard-won years to grow this tall, now withered like autumn grass. What a pity.”

She laid a small hand to the bark, rough as old bone, then circled behind. On the back of the trunk, several places showed tread marks like bruises on wood.

Gendi’s hideout lay in the middle of this tree, a hollow heart behind living rings.

Lucimia became a mosquito and flew to the trunk’s middle. Several massive branches forked like antlers in winter.

Along a branch, she saw a hole carved into the trunk’s core, its mouth screened by woven twigs like a thatch gate.

She slipped inside, and Gendi’s memories rose before her eyes like lantern-lit scenes.

The treehouse was stuffed with stones, more cave than woodhouse, earth’s ribs piled under green skin.

The room was simple: a bed, a desk, spare as winter fields.

They weren’t normal furniture, but cut straight from the trunk’s flesh, wood bones laid bare.

He’d hollowed the middle and left right-angled planes on both sides, turning them into bed and desk like cliffs squared by chisels.

Lucimia moved left; that was Gendi’s desk, a perch for secrets.

Nothing lay on it but a sheet of parchment, weighed down by a small statue like a paper trapped under a river stone.

She crouched and peered, breath held like a candle under a cupped hand. “Is this… a worm?”

She’d expected it, but seeing it struck cold, shock rippling like ice water down her spine.

The statue matched the blood-red worm she had seen, a ring of teeth around its mouth, two feelers crowning its head like antennae of hunger.

She could now confirm it: the worm was an Evil Entity of the Plague God, and Gendi was truly a follower. What was he doing under these branches?

She shifted her focus to the parchment beneath the statue, lines crawling like snakes across sand.

A Magic Array sprawled there, unreadable to her: triangles, circles, S-shaped lines crossing, dense as vines.

From a step back, the array looked like a worm, the whole pattern writhing in stillness like a frozen serpent.

“Is this the Plague God’s Magic Array? A sacrificial array or a summoning array?” Lucimia bit her lip, the sting like a thorn.

Were Gendi and other followers laying arrays in the town? Where could they hide them, like nets under reeds?

Jaha Town had no sewer system, unlike Elyssus, so they couldn’t mirror that underground weave.

Arrays set too far failed to drink energy, like a dry well; usually, they needed to cover a town like a cloak.