19. Night Talk

"Talk?" Angron asked.

"Talk." Curze said.

"About what?" Angron asked again.

Curze shrugged and drifted about like a ghost. "Anything."

At this moment, everything was silent. Nuceria's nights were not known for their noise; day and night on this world seemed to belong to two entirely different factions, utterly incompatible with one another.

During the day, it was dry and scorching. If an outsider who knew nothing about the place came here, he would surely be shocked. And if he was ignorant enough, he would probably point at the giant scorpions and venomous insects in the desert and shout—this was hellfire!

But what about at night? Well, at night, this place was—

The most fitting word, the first adjective that should be used here, was quiet.

Then came cold.

And lastly, silence—graveyard-like silence.

This was difficult to explain. Only those who had experienced it firsthand could understand how fitting a description "graveyard" truly was.

Many renowned scholars, or merely curious busybodies, had tried to solve this problem, or at least understand it. To do so, they traveled far and wide, wandering everywhere, madly coming and going through ruins in deserts and forests like people without homes.

Those places were later protected and opened as tourist sites, with admission costing only twelve dollars—or nothing at all. But in the era when people had only just discovered them, the price of visiting such places was not money, but life.

Ghosts wandered through the slave masters' arenas.

An interesting claim. No sane person would believe it, much less try to determine whether it was true. But if you could return to that age of collective madness, then find one of the lunatics who had truly visited one of those thousands of ruins, you would understand that it was no lie.

Wandered?

Lingered.

Refusing