Negotiation

In the room that looked as though it had been through a fire, Sifa put away Sandy's Beyonder characteristic and saw that Childe's characteristic had begun to separate from his body.

He crouched down and first pulled the ring off Childe's hand, thinking he would have its exact functions and negative effects appraised later.

After putting away the ring, Sifa searched Childe's body for anything else of value. He soon found something at his waist. Childe had sewn a pocket into the waist of his skirt, and inside it was a palm-sized notebook.

Sifa opened it and found a jumble of notes that could hardly even be called a diary.

He flipped through it casually and found the following information on one page.

"Today, I heard the elder say that to advance to Sequence 5, we must seek opportunities at sea, because we've already lost all our mermaids. In other words, we once had them, but what caused us to lose them?"

"Now that we've lost them, can't we raise more?"

Mermaids? A Faceless needed mermaids to advance to Marionettist? Were they ingredients, or were they required for the ritual?

Sifa continued flipping through the notebook.

What followed were some brief notes by Childe, but they made it clear that he had come from Intis. This led Sifa to wonder whether the organization Childe had previously belonged to was the Secret Order.

The Secret Order was based in Intis, and it controlled the Seer Pathway.

In that case, the Secret Order once had mermaids, but lost them later. There's no telling how that happened.

Sifa turned another page, and his heart beat a little faster.

"Sequence 6, Faceless."

"Main ingredients: the mutated pituitary gland of a Thousand-faced Hunter, the characteristic of a Human-Skin Phantom."

"Supplementary ingredients: 80 milliliters of Thousand-faced