"No?"
Anvis frowned as he looked at the thin bartender before him.
"Mr. bartender, this joke isn't funny."
As he spoke, he raised a hand and placed the Black Copper Key tied to the Number Plate on the solid wooden bar. Beside him, Chom made the same motion.
"How about this? As long as you tell us the exact route taken by the Black Paddle Steamer that brought me and the other travelers here, you won't have to refund the remainder of our room fee—"
On one side of the bar, a Fish Oil Candle on a wooden support pillar flickered with an unsteady flame. Its slanting light fell over the two keys on the counter, casting gloomy, eerie shadows.
"Black Paddle Steamer?"
Lowering his eyes to the two keys, the bartender's gaze was utterly dead. His strangely pallid face showed no change in expression.
"My apologies, the three of you. There was never any Black Paddle Steamer, nor were there any travelers from the mainland."
"Perhaps you merely had a dream. Everything you saw may have been part of that dream."
A dream? Anvis suddenly understood the source of the faint sense of discord he had felt before.
The state of the surrounding environment seemed vaguely similar to the Dream World.
And as he listened to the bartender's words, a detail he had never paid much attention to suddenly came back to him, sending a chill through his entire body.
In the days since they had landed on the island, aside from that bishop, he truly had not seen any of the others who had arrived here on the same ship—
Staring at the deep, empty tavern hall beneath the dim yellow candlelight, and at the detestable bartender, whose face bore strange shadowy contours that inexplicably filled him with