Dago and the girl eventually made their home in a deep, secluded mountain forest untouched by human presence.
He casually gave the peasant girl, who had once not even deserved a name, the name "Tracy."
It was an almost cruel form of remembrance, and also charity bestowed from on high.
From that day onward, Tracy became a devout shadow, taking care of every aspect of his daily life in the wilderness.
In return, during those long and tedious years, Dago began teaching Tracy how to read, identify herbs, set traps, and even how to use the crudest weapons to engage in the most brutal hand-to-hand fights with the savage beasts of the mountains.
Other than providing the necessary lessons for survival, Dago threw nearly one hundred percent of his energy and processing power into studying the vast sea of Primordial Spirit Script.
Every so often, beneath the silent moonlight, a golden ladybug representing Alazan's will would appear through the air as promised, bringing new spirit-script patterns of extraordinary complexity that contained the laws of the universe.
Yet this calm did not mean absolute safety.
Appearing with almost exactly the same frequency as the golden ladybug was the Deep Drowning Church's Black Serpent Knights, who clung to their trail like mad dogs.
Every few months, these elite killing machines, armed to the teeth, would comb through the entire forest like a rake, frantically searching for the "Golden Canary" who had inexplicably fled from the bedside of the female pope, Sekajielin.
To avoid those keen-scented hounds, Dago and Tracy had no choice but to relocate again and again.
They retreated ever deeper into the abyss-like primeval forest, constantly moving farther from the fringes where they might encounter human settlements.
Five years later, as the cost of searching increased exponentially, the Black Serpent