Domeron looked over at him, and this time Red didn’t avert his gaze. The maggots in his face seemed to have multiplied, popping out of all orifices, and his eyes were nowhere to be seen. It felt as if it wouldn’t take long for them to eat up what remained of his walking corpse. Despite all that, he was still able to form words even as his lips hung onto his mouth by thin threads of flesh.

“Why do you say that?” The swordsman asked with a curious tone.

Red took a deep breath to calm himself down as he looked at this grim sight. “The girl... There was something wrong with her.”

Elisabeth. The youth still remembered the name she gave them. He couldn’t see her true appearance back then beneath her rotting flesh, but he knew that just looking at her made him feel extremely uncomfortable. He thought this was just his body’s natural rejection towards the sight of seeing a child in that state, but after everything Red went through, he could look at that interaction with new eyes.

Domeron seemed skeptical. “I didn’t notice anything strange about her.”

Aurelia was also staring at him with a frown. “You asked me about her before. I told you, I didn’t feel anything wrong with her, and I checked multiple times.”

Red shook his head. “The look she gave me… There was no reason to suspect it as anything more than passing interest at the time, but I never managed to shake off this uncomfortable feeling I got from it. We still had better things to do, though, so I chose to ignore it back then.”

The youth could feel through his crimson sense that Domeron was still confused, but he seemed willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. “What changed?”

Red could also feel Aurelia giving him a quizzical and intense look from the side, waiting for him to elaborate.

He continued. “Before I entered the… illusion, I saw the woman in white hair and black dress.”

“The illusion produced by the dagger all those people who disappeared saw, I presume.”

Red nodded. “Yes. It was a terrifying sight looking at her eyes, and now I know why I felt uncomfortable looking at the girl, too… Both of their gazes looked very familiar.”

There was silence following that. Generally, mentioning such an outlandish reason as grounds for suspicion would be absurd and laughed at in most situations. Yet, they were all cultivators. They dealt with outlandish things all the time, and their instincts were well-honed to detect certain strange things before their conscious self could even pick it up.

How the air felt, how the light bounced off of a surface, the feelings behind a stare. Minute things that most people would miss, but they were things that cultivators, who had a deep connection with Spiritual Energy, were very attuned to. As such, they would notice the slightest changes from what they were used to.

The youth, most of all, was very used to those sensations, and they had saved him and his companions many times in the past. He was a rational person above all, which was why he had learned to pay attention to his instincts.

As he mentioned this Aurelia expression became ugly, while Domeron seemed to be in deep thought.

“I inspected her myself.” the woman said with a severe tone. “I didn’t feel any undead presence inside her body.”

“I can’t say I have definite proof of what I’m implying, but when we look at things from a different perspective, you will find many curious aspects.” Red said. “Back then, she looked at me for a long time and I felt her… surprise through my detection powers. It was only after this that she decided to mention her mother, as if she noticed something about me.”

Aurelia’s expression became even uglier. “It could have been mere infatuation!”

“There’s also the fact she is the only witness to her mother talking to ghosts and carving a message on the table.” He continued. “It doesn’t mean that she’s lying, but it is a convenient opportunity to come up with a lie.”

The woman’s expression continued to worsen with every passing second.

The youth shook his head. “That’s not everything. The place she mentioned her mother was heading to was also very convenient. Where the Moon meets the earth… It was as if she knew exactly what to say to capture my attention, a place that only I could possibly know the location of. And yet when we got there, we found nothing, and I was instead captured under an illusion that led me to the real location of the dagger. It feels as if I was set up for a trap.”

Perhaps Red had misinterpreted the message and there was another place where the Moon met the earth that he didn’t know about. Yet, that seemed too convenient to be true. One might argue that she could have sent him instead to the exact location of the cavern with the dagger, but she wouldn’t have been able to provide a convenient landmark and attract his attention in that case.

Both Domeron and Aurelia were now silent with contemplating expressions.

“There’s also the matter of the grey aura.” Red said while he looked at Domeron. “It didn’t affect you until we got to this village. Previously, we thought this was the product of the dagger’s far-reaching influence, but what if it’s instead something that came from this village? We don’t know when Rimold got it, but we know for certain that he passed through here, too. What if this was its way of marking its victims?”

Domeron grunted in thought. “The mercenaries and the necromancers didn’t have these auras on them.”

“Maybe they were working together… Maybe the ghost left this message behind for the necromancer himself.”

The swordsman fell silent again, his head hanging low in thought.

Red took a deep breath to calm himself down from staring at his companion’s terrible visage and continued. “We previously assumed that these disappearances were all a product of the dagger’s influence throughout the region, but the being possessing it was in a weakened state when I found it. What if, instead, someone was sending sacrifices over to the dagger, perhaps in an attempt to free it?”

Aurelia frowned. “I thought that maybe the ghost was using the image of the cultivator the bone came from to attract its victims. However, it would also make sense if it was a separate being doing these abductions. It would explain why none of the victims saw any images of this many-armed ghost.”

The youth nodded at her invisible figure, an act that would have been strange in Domeron’s eyes, but the man was too preoccupied with his thoughts. “This being, likely unable to take the dagger itself, might have thought that the only way to free it was by sending more sacrifices in its way. The ghost possessing the dagger certainly seemed to have gotten stronger from feeding on all the bodies there. The necromancers, the mercenaries, they might have all been unknowing sacrifices to the dagger, too.”

Domeron laughed, maggots falling from his open mouth. “But then, it met you, and it saw something in you that convinced it there was a better way to accomplish what it wanted.”

‘And I suppose I proved it right.’

The man stopped laughing and shook his head. “There’s a lot that still doesn’t make sense. If this girl and this ghost that abducted people are one and the same, how would it have taken people all over the region? Rimold would have noticed if the same girl was in all those places.”

“Ghosts can shed their bodies on a whim.” Red said. “The girl might have been recently possessed, but in any case, it’s not impossible.”

“What about her mother?” Domeron asked. “Why change her methods right now?”

“This… I don’t know.” Red shook his head. “Maybe she wanted to attract someone’s attention, or perhaps she used her mother to lead the way for the necromancer to the cave or to send him a message. I can’t say for sure.”

“Then what about the dagger?” the swordsman asked. “It’s free now, isn’t it? Why hasn’t the spirit come to take it? Why wait here in the village and set up this kind of trap?”

Red hesitated and looked over at Aurelia. The woman scowled at the ground as the conversation got to this point.

The logic was evident. Since the ghost left a message for Aurelia telling her to not interfere, this meant that the woman could potentially mess up its plans, in which case it wouldn’t opt for a straightforward assault. Instead, planting the seeds of doubt in her mind and preparing for an ambush instead would have been a far more effective method.

“It probably has some reservations in taking me on a straight forward confrontation.” Red said, looking back at Domeron.

The swordsman sighed. “While what you proposed is indeed possible, there is no evidence to support that things happened as you are proposing.”

“None of what I said is what matters.” the youth shook his head. “It could have happened in many different ways, and there are still a lot of details that don’t add up. What matters the most is what I saw - the girl’s eyes and the eyes of the ghost I saw invoked the same feeling within me… If we go after her, we will probably die.”

The more Red spoke, the more confident he was in this. Everything he said up until now was a way to convince both Domeron and Aurelia about how things could have happened if the girl and the ghost were the same being, but what mattered the most was the same feeling of dread that he felt in the child that was then multiplied tenfold in the white-haired woman. They belonged to the same being.

Despite all he said, the swordsman still seemed hesitant. “You know, if you are wrong, we could end up leaving an innocent girl to die, right?”

Red nodded. “I know.”

“Even if she is indeed possessed by a ghost, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a moral obligation to try and save her, does it?” Domeron asked.

The youth frowned. “The being is probably banking on this exact reasoning to ambush us, even if its intentions were to be made… Truth is that she was likely already doomed.”

There was no guarantee they would be able to exorcise her, not even with Red’s abilities or Aurelia’s help. After someone has been possessed for long enough, their original consciousness would be wiped out, and even if the ghost was removed from their bodies, their minds would be ruined. Who knew how long the girl was possessed for already?

The swordsman sighed. The conflict he was going through was evident even past his rotting visage. Red never took Domeron to be someone with a strong moral compass, much more so with his past. However, the decision of leaving an innocent girl behind was weighing on him, even if all logic told him that she probably couldn’t be saved.

The youth knew that nothing more he said would serve to convince him, so he simply waited. It took almost a full minute for the swordsman to make a decision.

He nodded in a severe manner. “We won’t go after her.”

As soon as he said that, Red felt his vision twist. He was in a daze for a few seconds, but it quickly passed. When he looked up at Domeron again, though, he was at a loss for words.

The swordsman’s human appearance seemed to have been restored.