Two Letters XIII

When Freya returned to the estate, it was already deep into the night. Yet after seeing that young man off, Antitina had waited until this hour.

When she heard Freya's account, she immediately understood what had happened. She was also somewhat surprised, thinking that things had coincided so perfectly. With her sharpness and intelligence, she quickly realized that the people the lord had captured were probably the same group of outlaws Dian had encountered. She told Freya to wait a moment, then returned to the house to fetch her shawl and the necklace without a pendant before setting out to meet Brando.

When the two arrived at the hunters' camp, the Patrol Cavalry had wasted another two or three hours without getting a single word out of the Cultists. They searched the hunters' camp over and over, turning it almost completely upside down, before finding another sixteenth-format book with a black cover—the Codex of All Things—and a wooden statue carved with an ouroboros. The statue had clearly been used frequently in various rituals. Its surface had long since been polished smooth, yet it had been wiped exceptionally clean, without a trace of dirt, forming a stark contrast with these filthy, disheveled desperadoes. As for the Codex of All Things, Oujin hurriedly tossed it aside after flipping through it once. It was the [***] that the Temple of Flames expressly forbade reading and circulating. He looked as though he feared the book might come alive and bite him, bringing trouble upon him.

The young men under him were more careful. They first opened the Codex of All Things and flipped through several pages, confirming that nothing had been hidden inside. Then they felt around the cover, and after taking it apart with a sword, they really did manage to extract a