"Miss Galina even suspected whether I was really a man."
Shade stood on the slope before the entrance to the bridge, watching the river and searching for the occasional red halos as he explained to Luvia:
"That's ridiculous. Even the gods personally acknowledged that I'm a man."
"That's good, then."
Luvia looked as though she wanted to laugh.
After entering the Lower District in the northern part of the city, Daknis finally stopped swimming along the bottom of the river channel and instead moved swiftly near the surface. When he finally chose to come ashore, he likewise used the Darkness Vortex to avoid being discovered by The Church, moving directly from the water onto land.
With the water no longer obstructing their view, it was easy this time to spot the direction in which those blood-red halos were moving.
Shade and Luvia chatted as they turned from the Tree-lined Avenue by the river into a nearby alley. Rather than crossing over other people's rooftops, Daknis used his dark talent to move whenever he encountered an intersection, leaving absolutely no traces there.
He cautiously circled the area several times, to the extent that the wandering Shade and Luvia nearly drew the attention of nearby residents.
At last, Daknis suddenly emerged from an alley and headed east.
He did not leave the Lower District, but perhaps believing that he had already shaken off his pursuers, he stopped circling around. In the end, he slipped into Rotten Fish Alley, the alley where the blind musician Mr. Mandis had once lived.
They passed beneath the gray suspended corridor between two towers, went past an empty building that had suffered a fire, and entered a slightly more open alley. Continuing eastward, they crossed between the dilapidated apartment buildings with peeling walls that towered over the