"Someone's looking for me?"
When Ian heard the innkeeper say someone was looking for him, he could not help but pause in surprise. He was a stranger here; aside from Master Caleb, whom he had met yesterday, no one else should have known him.
Did Master Caleb know he was staying here?
Impossible. Ian had never told him.
Besides, he had left the man his contact information. There was no way Caleb would use such a clumsy method to find him. The more Ian thought about it, the more puzzled he became.
He had not even revealed his name to anyone in the market. Where had this visitor come from?
"Who is it?" he asked.
"A very troublesome fellow." The innkeeper seemed to see Ian's confusion and lowered his voice, a hint of warning in his cloudy eyes. "The guy outside is Babua, an information broker with no conscience as long as he's paid. If he suddenly came looking for you, someone probably paid him to investigate you. Be careful."
"That man... he'll sell information for money without a shred of conscience. He'd even sell the secrets of the ancestral spirits."
Clearly,
the kind-hearted innkeeper had misunderstood something.
And he evidently loathed this information broker as well.
"So it's him."
Ian immediately understood. It was Babua. It seemed that the "wealth" and unfathomable strength he had displayed yesterday had made this local snake unable to resist probing further.
After showing his strength yesterday, Ian did not believe anyone would truly be unafraid of death enough to investigate him just for payment. The idea that money could move even gods only applied before one was dead.
Information brokers were all clever people.
They would not take such risky, loss-making jobs.
At least, that was how Ian saw it.
"Thank you for