“You can hear me then?” Red asked through his expanded awareness.

Aurelia grunted in annoyance. “I can hear you just fine! Now tell me, when did you learn how to do this?”

‘So she can communicate like this too.’

It wasn’t a surprise, considering she was once the prodigy of a sect. If anyone would know how to train and communicate through their consciousness, it would be them.

“I learnt it a long time ago.” The youth lied without hesitation.

“Stop lying!” The woman sounded angry. “If you knew how to do this before, why would you wait to speak with me until now? You must have just figured it out!”

“When would I have the time to learn such a thing recently?”

She snorted. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I was by your side the entire time and I would have noticed if you were practicing something like this, so this can only mean you figured it out while your mind was trapped inside the ghost’s domain. I thought you only managed to escape from the illusion because of a lapse in its focus, but it turns out you did something inside there, didn’t you?”

Like Red had come to expect, the woman was able to see straight into the heart of the matter.

Still, he remained unmoved. “Why should I tell you?”

“What do you mean by that? I thought we were beyond the point of shallow suspicions between each other!” Aurelia seemed taken aback.

“So did I. However, you have been keeping something from me, haven’t you?”

The woman didn’t respond.

Red continued to walk while he discussed with the woman through their consciousness. He needed to maintain his meditative state active while doing this, and as such, much of his external awareness was diminished. However, he could still at least maintain his vision to keep himself from hitting any trees as he followed behind Domeron.

Finally, a few seconds later, Aurelia spoke up. “I’m not hiding anything from you that you don’t already know or suspect.”

“That might be true, but it doesn’t mean I will accept these lies either.” Red said. “Were you after the dagger?”

There was a pause.

“Not after the dagger, but the power inside of it.” She said.

Red wasn’t surprised as he heard this. “Is that why you told me to come looking for it? You were after undead energy?”

“It’s the only useful thing I could possibly get from it. It would help me replenish all the undead energy I spent saving you from those ghouls and elevate my own ghostly strength.”

“And help you get free from the core, I presume?” He completed her sentence.

Aurelia snorted. “If only it was that easy. Despite what you’d like to think, I have come to terms with my situation and I am serious about trying to help you through your cultivation journey so that one day you can help me back.”

“Then why hide this from me?”

“Because you’re too cautious for your own good! Would you have let me come here if I told you my intentions?”

Red was skeptical about her reasoning, but he had to concede to her in this matter. He was already suspicious of her before, and if he knew she intended on strengthening herself through the dagger, he would never have allowed it to happen, even if she didn’t intend to betray him. The gap in strength and knowledge between them was already too large, and the youth couldn’t let it get any larger.

Only when the two parties were close in capabilities could a truly fair cooperation be created.

“What went wrong, then?” Red asked.

Aurelia snorted. “Nothing went wrong. There just wasn’t even a small fraction of the energy I was expecting to find inside that dagger.”

The youth was confused. “If that is the case, how come it was able to affect the entire region like this?”

“That wasn’t the dagger, that was the ghost inside of it.” she said. “It was using it as a host, or perhaps it was imprisoned there by someone. In any case, it was trapped in there, and without a way to replenish its strength to free itself.”

Red had a realization. “That’s why it was trying to attract people to it?”

“So it seems.” She grunted in affirmation. “Something must have happened for this ghost to have awakened when it did, and as soon as it could, it started to attract unknowing victims with its limited but far-reaching influence - mortal lives that could be corrupted and whose life force could be turned into undead energy it could use. An extremely slow but still proven method of energy conversion.”

“That’s not all that happened.” Red said. “I remember in the illusion, I wasn’t affected in the same way as the others. The ghost was trying to make me grab the dagger.”

“That’s not surprising. It must have felt the pure moonstone energy circling in your body and decided that you would make for a perfect host for possession. One that wouldn’t have started decomposing in the mere presence of its undead energy.”

Things were starting to make sense. Still, the youth had plenty of unanswered questions in his mind.

“What happened when I fell under the illusion?” he asked.

“It all happened like your friend told you.” Aurelia said. “You just started moving towards the cave, and nothing I did made you snap out of your daze, so I decided to stay hidden and see what happened. When we got there, I saw the ghost, and when it tried to attack you, I intervened.”

“Couldn’t you have helped with the necromancer outside, too? Domeron could have died.”

Aurelia snorted. “The only reason I managed to help against the ghost is because it is a being just like me. With my current powers, I am still limited in how I can interact with the physical realm. Besides, I would still have prioritized your safety in any situation.”

The woman’s words might have been misinterpreted as conveying genuine concern for Red, but the youth knew she only acted in that way because her own life depended on him.

“I saw something else.” he said. “A woman with white floating in front of me before I fell into that illusion. The same thing a lot of the other peasants were reporting.”

Aurelia grunted. “I didn’t see anything myself, but I assume this must have been the image of the cultivator whose bones were used to make the dagger. The ghost must have appeared to its victims as that woman, or else it would have scared them with its real form.”

Red hesitated. “… I found that form to be more frightening than the ghost itself.”

He could still remember that pale face, and the horrors it carried beneath it, so he described it to the woman.

“That… does sound strange.” Aurelia also seemed perplexed. “It might be the work of that tumor of yours. It could have seen through that image’s true nature and warned you about the danger it represented, just like the villagers back then.”

“Maybe so.”

The uncertain explanation was not satisfactory for him, but he couldn’t come up with any better ideas himself. All he knew was that the image of that pale, white-haired woman wouldn’t disappear from his mind any time soon.

“Was the dagger made from the bone of a near ascension cultivator?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t be able to tell you.” Aurelia said. “For it to be that sturdy, it must have certainly been made from the bones of a very strong cultivator, but you don’t just find the bones of someone near ascension just lying around. Besides, no one’s finger bone is that big, so there must be other materials mixed in.”

Red hesitated. “I checked it myself. It’s all bone.”

“Then it can’t have been made from a finger bone. It’s that simple!”

Although the woman said that, the youth could tell she seemed annoyed. From experience, he knew this was an indicator that she wasn’t so sure about her assumptions, but she couldn’t find any other explanations for the discrepancies in her theory - that being how a finger bone was even connected to all of this in the first place and why it was mentioned by several people under the influence of the dagger.

It was frustration, plain and simple.

“You don’t really know what is going on, do you?” he asked.

She snorted. “Bah! Everything I say is based on the knowledge and experience I gained in my sect!”

“Yet you don’t sound confident.”

Aurelia hesitated. “… I’m not a specialist in undead. My experiences in life with them were limited, and most of what I know comes from reading books in my sect that, while useful, were evidently lacking in certain kinds of informations.”

“So you’ve never seen this kind of thing before, is what you’re trying to say.”

“You can put it in whatever way you want.” she said. “But yes, I have never dealt with this before. I’ve never seen a ghost like that before, and I most certainly have never seen the strange kind of possession it put those people under. Even as far as undeads go, what is happening here isn’t normal… Everything that is happening here is strange.”

“… Are you scared?” Red asked.

“Scared?!” The woman sounded insulted. “Of course I am scared when I have no choice but to act under the whims of a reckless mortal who can’t help but attract disaster at every turn! I’m regretting leaving that floating head already!”

Before Red could do anything else, he felt a sudden force repelling his awareness back into his body. The youth was confused for a second, but when he tried to reach the core through his palm with his expanded awareness, he felt himself being blocked by a barrier that wasn’t there before.

No matter what he tried to do, he was unable to pierce through that blockade and was forced to give up.

It seemed like Aurelia wasn’t in the mood to talk for now.

‘In the end, I didn’t even tell her what happened in that sea of stars.’

The youth was still debating whether or not he should tell her about his experience there. On one hand, it was always good to keep some secrets from someone who already knew almost everything about him and whom he couldn’t fully trust, but on the other hand, her knowledge on the matter could prove useful if he was to visit that place ever again.

‘That person said it was dangerous for me to go there without opening my Spiritual Sea, so maybe it’s wiser to wait.’

Suddenly, a voice snapped him out of his meditative state.

“Oh, right.” Domeron stopped walking and turned around to face him. “I forgot to ask you about something.”

“Hm?” Red looked at him in confusion. “What is it?”

“The gray aura around my body - is it gone?” The swordsman asked.

Red nodded. “Yes, it’s… It’s…”

He trailed off, at a sudden loss for words. A veil seemed to have been lifted from his eyes, as if his vision was suddenly capable of detecting something that was there all along.

The gray aura was indeed gone, just like he thought. Howeve, what replaced it instead was the rotting visage of his companion.

Red felt a shiver run up his spine.