Priest Moro closed his eyes and pressed his hands against the heads of several wild men, sensing something.
A long time passed.
Only then did he open his eyes again and quietly say something to Ned.
"These Cave Dwellers are extremely afraid of you."
"They weren't lying."
Ned glanced at the fearful eyes of the few Cave Dwellers watching them from nearby.
That kind of look.
He had seen it often before.
It was the awe people felt when faced with something so powerful they couldn't understand it.
In the eyes of these Cave Dwellers,
he, with his Shell Insect, was already practically a god.
But Ned paid no attention to their gazes.
He simply turned and asked Priest Moro,
"What do you think?"
"About that Black Bird they mentioned."
From their conversation, Ned had learned what the Cave Dwellers meant when they spoke of "it."
It was a gigantic, one-eyed black bird that had once circled the skies above the island.
It was roughly ten times larger than an ordinary One-Eyed Giant Bird. Its enormous talons were razor-sharp, capable of tearing through even the hard shells of monsters from the sea.
It also seemed to possess some mysterious and formidable power.
But
that wasn't the point.
From the Cave Dwellers' account,
the black, one-eyed giant bird was different from the others. It seemed to possess considerable intelligence.
It ate people, too, but it didn't hunt them of its own accord.
Instead, it accepted sacrifices of living human flesh.
When the Hermit Crabs invaded,
the Cave Dwellers' king offered up a large number of his people for the god to eat, praying for its protection.
After devouring one living sacrifice after another,
the enormous Black Bird answered the king's plea and protected the people on the island, fighting the Hermit