When Hao Ren set out from White City with a silent, peculiar "follower" to search for the whereabouts of the Husky spirit, an unusually grave and oppressive atmosphere had settled over the high-ranking Priest Kalasios in the southern part of the Kingdom.
He stood with the leader of the wolves atop the towering walls of Black Raven Stronghold, his face dark with gloom.
He had been like this ever since he visited the dungeon and saw that inexplicably weakened smoke-and-dust monster.
Lily had never seen her own military adviser—though perhaps calling a high-ranking Priest that all the time was somewhat inappropriate?—look so grave, or even nervous. Not even when he had led a large group of plane-crash survivors onto a magical beast's hot-air balloon and then fallen into the Black Forest alongside a bunch of magical beasts had the taciturn middle-aged man shown such an expression. Looking at him now, one would think the sky was about to collapse.
Or perhaps it already had.
"What's wrong?" Lily asked curiously. "Was what Smoked Big Meat said yesterday really scary?"
"It's the Shadow of the Nightmare... Forget it, Smoked Big Meat is the same," Kalasios gave up trying to correct the wolf leader's stubborn beliefs and sighed. "What it spoke of was a secret known only to high-ranking Priests and a very small number of scholars. Hearing that secret from a monster's mouth... was enough to send shivers down one's spine."
"What secret?" Lily twitched her ears. "Has that Lockmadon thing crawled out already? Or did the jailer betray us?"
Those terrifying words came so casually from the wolf leader that even Kalasios's heart began to race. Fortunately, he had not known her for only a day or two, and the high-ranking Priest had become quite adept at adapting to her. He