Chapter 29: The Diary of Despair
"Rowen, you're back."
The words came from a man who was looking anxiously outside the window at the grim weather of the village.
"Yes, yes, I got the Soul Stone."
It was the hooded man. He stepped into the room, casually playing with the newly acquired Soul Stone, juggling it around like a ball and performing effortless tricks with it as if it weren't forged from human lives.
"So can we proceed with the plan now?" the man asked, turning his gaze to look directly at Rowen.
"Dally, hold your horses. We can't right now. There are too many unpredictable factors."
Rowen sighed as he threw his traveling cloak onto a wooden table beside him. Yet, despite the motion, you still couldn't see his face. He was intentionally standing on the dark side of the room where the shadows were thickest, leaving almost nothing visible.
"What do you mean?" questioned Dally, his brow furrowing.
"The knights from the capital. They're here. Unfortunately, it's better if we don't do anything to them. We really don't need Caelen on our backs. It would destroy everything we've been preparing for."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, yes. I saw them through the eyes of the villagers," Rowen explained smoothly. "Plus, we have another unwanted guest..."
"Who else?" asked Dally, his voice growing noticeably impatient. "Just tell me and stop beating around the bush."
"The Heretic. He's here too."
A dark smile escaped Rowen's lips, though the room was far too dim for Dally to see it.
"What do you mean he's here?!" This time Dally actually shouted, violently slamming his hand down onto the table.
"He's here. I can feel him. He does have quite the presence after all," Rowen said calmly, idly tapping his fingers against the wood.
"What are we supposed to do now?"
"Nothing much. As long as we keep him preoccupied, it should be fine. From what I understand, he doesn't care about what we're up to."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive."
With a big, heavy sigh, Dally stepped forward and snatched the blue Soul Stone right out of Rowen's hand, placing it carefully on the table next to another one. The second stone was purple, shining even brighter and more intensely than the blue one they had taken from the river.
"Is this going to be enough?" asked Dally as he looked down at the two glowing Soul Stones.
"Yes. It's going to be more than enough," Rowen said as he finally got up and stood beside the window.
As he moved, his pale face came clearly into the light. His black eyes seemed so completely endless that they looked as if they could consume everything in existence.
"Should we go to the church and prepare for the ritual?" asked Dally, looking back out at the darkening sky.
"I say we do it before the weather gets worse."
"Let's go," Rowen said flatly.
Without another word, the two men left the room, disappearing into the shadows of the corridor.
"Is there anything that can hint at what happened in this village?" Alina asked, her voice echoing softly as she looked around the dusty room.
"I would really like to say yes, but there literally is nothing," Elina said, a heavy frown on her face as she wondered what to do next. "It's as if everything here has been completely erased. It's not normal however you look at it."
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"Like look at this newspaper. It's two months old," Alina noted with a deep frown, rubbing her forehead in frustration. "Seriously, where did we get stuck?"
The situation outside the cabin wasn't getting any better. Through the cracks in the wood, they could see the blank-faced villagers continuously circling around the small perimeter, almost as if they could blindly sense the life forces of the knights trapped inside. If this kept going on much longer, they wouldn't be able to leave this place at all. They would be stuck indefinitely, until the mindless puppets eventually gathered enough force to break the front door down.
Nuri, noticing exactly what Elina was worried about, quietly walked over and pushed a heavy wooden table in front of the door. It wasn't a permanent solution by any means, but it would buy them some precious time.
"Let's go upstairs. Maybe there's something in the rooms," Nuri said, pointing his finger toward the creaking staircase. The wood looked so thoroughly rundown that it seemed like it could collapse under their weight at any given second.
As they slowly walked up, the stairs groaned loudly beneath their boots. There were about three rooms lining the upper hallway, each with its door already hanging wide open. Nuri gave a silent nod to the girls, and they each split up, taking a different room to search for clues.
There wasn't much of anything inside the room Nuri entered. Old clothes were scattered chaotically across the floor, as if the person living there had been frantically trying to pack and flee in a state of absolute terror. He really wondered what had ultimately happened to that person. It truly was a pity.
Then, his eyes caught on something on the desk. A diary.
It was left wide open to the very last page, and even from afar, he could clearly read the jagged words written across the paper:
> Please save me. Oh gosh.
>
Without even realizing it, Nuri's face twisted into a strange, unreadable expression, maybe because he simply didn't know how to properly convey the sudden rush of heavy emotions hitting his chest. He let out a quiet sigh.
"Guys, I think I might have found something that could help us." He called out into the hallway, prompting the girls to leave their respective rooms and hurry inside.
"Oh! What's this?" Alina asked as she walked over, looking curiously at the old notebook resting on the desk.
"It seems to be the diary of someone who stayed here. We might find some clues."
Elina didn't say anything at first. She simply clutched her weapon and gestured with her chin for him to continue reading.
Without wasting any more time, Nuri cleared his throat and started skimming through the journal from the beginning.
The first few pages were entirely normal entries, detailing the woman's cheerful daily life in the central village and how much she genuinely loved living there. She wrote happily about exploring different cultures and learning about the diverse people who inhabited the region. She explicitly explained that it had been an eye-opener for her, because she hadn't expected the local followers of the God of Sacrifice to have such remarkably different festivals and moral values. She wrote that she could genuinely feel the profound love these people had for their god, something she deeply admired, because in the distant land where she originally came from, people were slowly starting to distance themselves from the gods entirely.
There wasn't anything strange or malicious in those early passages. Reading them made the group feel a little bad, as if they were inappropriately snooping through someone else's private diary.
But as the dated pages progressed, they all noticed a sudden, chilling shift. The once cheerful handwriting was visibly becoming erratic, shaky, and frightened. The woman explained in a later entry that she had started noticing subtle, unsettling changes in some of the local villagers. Although they outwardly acted exactly the same as before, they were becoming noticeably less responsive to conversation. At first, it was only a few isolated people. Then, slowly, it spread to everyone.
She wrote that this all started when a group of strange, cloaked men first arrived in the village. They publicly claimed to be devout followers of the God of Sacrifice, telling the locals that they had come to spread his divine blessing deeper into the community. Everyone had welcomed them with open arms.
But after a while, the people who went to visit them at the main church came back looking as if something vital had been stolen from them. Like a piece of their very soul was missing.
But absolutely no one in the village questioned it.
While she tried desperately to warn everyone around her that there was something fundamentally wrong with those newcomers, none of the villagers believed a word she said. Instead, they completely shunned her, alienating her for speaking badly about holy men. She was forced to slowly watch everyone she knew turn into mindless, unblinking zombies.
The very last sentence of the entry read:
> Please someone take me away... I'm scared... I don't want to be here anymore...
>
Nuri didn't continue reading. He slowly, quietly closed the cover of the notebook. It was entirely obvious what had happened to the poor woman after that.
"So I assume the hooded man was one of the people who came to this village?" Alina whispered into the quiet room, her skin crawling.
"Probably... and judging by the diary, it's obvious he's not the only one here. We have to get to the church," Elina said, her knuckles tightening as she clutched the hem of her uniform shirt.
"But how are we supposed to do that?" Alina pointed toward the window. "We're surrounded, and the church is too far away from here..."
That was the real, glaring problem they faced. Under no circumstances could they step outside and reach that church without getting swarmed and seriously hurt.