"It wasn't that I brought it out. It wanted to come out on its own..." Angel was speaking when he suddenly noticed a slender shadow dart past him. He instinctively turned back and, sure enough, Wood Spirit had run off again.
However, Angel had already blocked the door to the Stairway of the Hanging Prison, so Wood Spirit had no way to return. With the Earth Ringwall Black Earl had created preventing it from breaking through quickly, it could only run circles along the edge.
As it ran, Wood Spirit shouted, "Aahhh! There's a monster! A nose, a nose is talking!"
Black Earl: "..."
There was no doubt that Wood Spirit had been frightened by Black Earl.
Any ordinary person who saw Black Earl's nose would probably get a fright. But very few would likely be scared into running around in every direction like this.
Moreover, if an ordinary person truly saw the scene before them, they would most likely not be frightened by Black Earl, but by Wood Spirit instead. After all, from a distance, Wood Spirit looked remarkably like a naked scarecrow. And because scarecrows resembled humans, they often involuntarily called strange and eerie things to mind, making them an archetypal image that playwrights particularly loved to dwell on.
If they were being honest, Wood Spirit's appearance really was more frightening than Black Earl's nose.
Black Earl: "...I clearly went in earlier."
Angel said, "I asked Wood Spirit before. It had been hiding inside the central core all along. When you went in, it sensed you, but it didn't come out to look."
Only when Angel had gone in, because he obtained that log from the painting, did Wood Spirit sense that its derivative body had moved. It then gathered its courage and secretly came out for a