Food of the Gods

Kas did not rashly light the furnace. The air did not circulate here; one torch was already the limit of oxygen consumption.

He quickly scanned the stone cavern, his gaze settling on the arrowhead being polished in the male skeleton's hand.

The arrowhead was triangular, straight-edged, and grooved for blood. It was a style Reshman hunters favored, specifically for hunting unarmored, medium-sized prey. It matched the wound on the gray wolf's neck.

So the question was, why had Nosa built an identical "house" beneath her dwelling?

First of all, these three people must have held an extraordinarily special meaning for her.

She claimed to have been raised by her grandmother. Assuming her grandmother had been a witch, was it possible that the three skeletons before them were Nosa's family?

Kas felt that this guess was very close to the truth, yet he could not infer the exact course of events. What had turned Nosa into a witch who kept man-eating pets?

He glanced at Ancestor, who was wandering around the stone cavern. "Old man, any thoughts?"

"I have plenty of thoughts..." A trace of barely noticeable sorrow seeped into Morse's voice as he sighed. "I can be certain that this is related to a witch, but I cannot infer Little Red Riding Hood's relationship with these three deceased people..."

"What about their 'spirits'? You can sense them, can't you?"

This was the first time Kas had wanted to use spirits to solve a problem. His ridiculous plan to capture Seneya earlier had merely been meant to give himself a little confidence.

"Mm..." Morse inhaled the cold, stagnant air as if intoxicated by it. "I can sense them, but who can make a dead man drowned in sorrow speak?"

"Shaman..." Kas murmured. He could not possibly bring the remains back to the tribe, seek a shaman's interpretation, and only then deal with Nosa. Ancestor's words surely meant something else.

He recalled the night he had crossed over, after drinking the old Chinese doctor's hallucinogenic mushroom soup and lying on a bed in the ritual hall.

The square, dim room had been lit by only a few oil lamps. It had happened to rain that day, and a crack of thunder had illuminated the ritual hall as bright as day.

He had screamed that there were ghosts. The dozens of skulls displayed in the stone shrine had split their mouths into grins, eerie lights igniting in their hollow sockets as they floated around the room like a parade of a hundred ghosts, nearly scaring him to death.

"The recipe."

His low murmur made Morse laugh smugly. "Lip-Blue Berry. It is food for the gods. If someone wishes to speak with you, the gods will naturally open the gates between reality and dreams for you."

Lip-Blue Berry was also known as the Colonna mushroom. Colonna was the god of wine, music, and revelry in Reshman legends.

It was a highly hallucinogenic poisonous fungus with addictive properties. Long-term consumption caused violent rage, intermittent delusions, and other symptoms. No one but fanatics devoted to the gods would willingly consume it.

And Kas happened to have one Lip-Blue Berry in his tool bag.

He took out the thumb-shaped, milky-white mushroom from a strip of cloth. Suddenly, he felt that this ceremony to find the shaman a wife might have been a trap set for him.

He had thought the War Chief had placed a Lip-Blue Berry in his tool bag to make it easier to bring Beauty back to the tribe.

But prompted by the old man, it seemed likely that this food of the gods was the key to communicating with spirits, an opportunity to reach the unknown.

He swallowed the Lip-Blue Berry in one bite. Its smooth texture and sweet taste were strangely intoxicating, while a drunken numbness rapidly spread from his fingertips toward his heart.

A fierce dizziness, mixed with suffocation, rose from his abdomen. He felt as though he had smoked an entire cigarette without a filter.

His lungs, throat, and head refused to obey him. His body swayed before crashing to the ground, his eyes slowly closing.

His mind, overflowing with inspiration, automatically came up with a brilliant plan.

[Plan: Who Is Little Red Riding Hood]

[Status: In Progress]

[Inspiration: What is life, and what is death? I seem to see you still suffering after death. Answer me, who is she?]

In his daze, he felt someone forcefully tugging and shaking his shoulder. He struggled to open his eyes again.

A woman like moonlight stood before him. Her loose hair, draped like thin clouds, resembled silver gauze. Behind her hazy eyelids were scarlet moons stained blood-red, and her rounded, sculpted chin was the most perfect creation he had ever seen.

"Seneya?"

The blood-glowing eyes of the werewolf overlapped with the woman like moonlight.

Kas laboriously raised a hand and stroked her smooth cheek, covered in soft fur, voicing the complaint he had kept bottled up for two days. "You really can eat..."

He felt as though something heavy had smashed into his head. Amid familiar wild laughter, he sank completely into the hallucinogenic effects of Lip-Blue Berry, darkness filling his vision.

"Welcome, Kas of the Zagwell Clan. Even hunters dwelling deep in remote forests have heard the resounding name of your clan."

A hearty male voice made Kas open his eyes. He looked around and found himself still in the dark, frigid underground stone cavern.

The three skeletons, Morse, and Seneya had vanished. A humanoid aura of black and red floated beside the furnace, with an extremely vague outline of a face visible at its top.

So this is a spirit? It's very different from what I imagined... I always thought it would be a dove with a stalk of wheat or an olive branch in its beak.

Kas shook his head. Lip-Blue Berry still left his mind somewhat muddled, and the drunken dizziness would not fade.

"Do you have any alcohol? I need a drink first."

"Where there is a guest, there is wine."

The man handed him a horn cup filled with ale. Kas gulped down several mouthfuls and noticed something interesting.

Faint points of light floated at the edge of the stone cavern. Sparks crawled upward along the rock walls, spreading irregularly into fragments of varying sizes, like shattered glass.

The black and red on the man's body reflected in the fragments, and the glass began to flow, turning the stone cavern into a ceaselessly churning black-and-red ocean.

From the dreamlike flowing glass, he could sense regret and love...

The man lit the furnace, folded his arms, and leaned halfway against the blazing coals. "I am delighted to meet a respected shaman. I have truly forgotten how long it has been since I heard a sound other than hyenas barking."

Strictly speaking, a shaman did not refer to a spellcaster with extraordinary magical abilities.

Unlike Kas's fixed impression, Reshman shamans specifically referred to those who could communicate with spirits. It was more like an identity than a profession.

As long as a child who had just learned to speak displayed the ability to communicate directly with all spirits, even without any talent for spellcasting, they would still be respectfully called a shaman and enjoy immense esteem.

This had nothing to do with ability. It was a form of recognition.

It recognized them as a medium between mortals and all spirits, something of enormous importance to the tribe.

Spellcasters who could not form a direct connection with all spirits were instead called witches. They were deeply unwelcome in the tribe, as people believed that many misfortunes and sins were the work of witches.

"I am not a shaman. I merely used food of the gods to establish some connection with you." Kas wanted very much to distance himself from those mystical, superstitious shamans, but after thinking it over, he shook his head and did not wish to dwell on the matter.

"All right, sir. Let us first discuss Nosa."

"Who are you?"