"And then?" Madeleine asked curiously.
Bruffin shrugged. "After Lord Monchi came here, he directly stated that a stronghold city could not be built here. He also issued an order: we may pass through this place, but we must never linger."
"As for what Lord Monchi discovered, he never told us."
"Later, many people came here to explore as well, but none of them found anything."
Madeleine frowned. "Is this what you meant by saying there was more to it? Isn't it still the same as before—saying something without saying anything?"
"Of course there's more to it. Aside from people vanishing, there was another detail. That companion of Guxia's mentioned it just now as well." Bruffin paused.
Angel recalled what that middle-aged man had said earlier and asked in a low voice, "You mean the hallucinations caused by hysteria, sir?"
Guxia had said that, at first, he merely heard someone calling him. But later, Guxia had also said that he saw the person calling him.
If Sinafa had judged Guxia's condition at the time, she would surely have asked whom he had seen. Yet Sinafa said nothing, which meant the people of the Frost Moon Alliance knew of this "caller."
Bruffin nodded. "That's right. We call Guxia's condition an irreversible inducement mark. We once studied those who had been marked and discovered that marked people had almost no way of escaping the fate of disappearance. And before vanishing, all of them had seen the person calling them."
"Some research revealed that the person they saw before disappearing should have been someone wearing a black crow cloak. According to textual investigation, this person in the black crow cloak is called Kurangduo by the Abyss natives—the guide of death from the Bottomless Abyss. Put simply, the god of death they worship."
"The Bottomless