Phantom Town

Gawain's shock was beyond words.

Yet he still maintained his concealment within the Mind Network and did not reveal his astonishment.

He merely studied Selina Gelvin once more and checked her information again through the network backend.

His first reaction was that the address recognition function had malfunctioned—after all, the system had only recently been completed and still had many areas requiring debugging. But he also knew that immediately blaming the problem on a system failure was the worst possible line of thinking.

Selina Gelvin was very likely truly in Cecil, lurking somewhere within the southern region!

And she existed in the form of a soul.

His gaze lingered on those words for a long time.

Archbishop (deceased), soul entity...

That information stirred something within him, though not strongly. Selina had merely been an acquaintance from Gawain Cecil's memories, and one from seven hundred years ago at that. It was hardly strange for a human who had existed for so long to end up in some unusual state—especially since Gawain had personally encountered someone capable of photosynthesis. He was rather accepting of such things.

What concerned him more was the state in which Selina Gelvin, who had "survived" as a soul entity until now, was hiding somewhere in the southern region.

As he pondered this, Daniel and the others' conversation was already drawing to a close.

"...That is the situation. This newly emerged overflow Contaminated Zone is still located in the Imaginary Zone outside the city. We are temporarily calling it Phantom Town," said the archbishop named Yuri. "Your Holiness the Pope believes the distorted and bizarre state displayed by this area is highly unusual, so an order has been given not to reset it for the time being, but to investigate it first."

Selina nodded as well. "The area