The old woman shuddered violently.
It was also the last missing part of her.
It was the last stand she could make for this friend of hers, for all the innocent people in the town, because she knew how cruel a mindless vengeful ghost could be. She truly would be unable to stop herself from killing every living thing here, regardless of whether she wanted to.
This was the only way she could do it.
She had left that ever-burning lamp in her best friend's hands.
Whenever she could no longer resist the urge to leave the courtyard, her friend would use that flame of kindness to drive away the darkness in her heart.
Lynn gazed at her and said:
"Ordinary people rarely live this long. You've survived until now because that fragment sustained you. Or perhaps... your own obsession was just as deep. You weren't willing to die so soon, because you knew that if you died too, there would be nothing left to restrain her..."
The old woman sat there in a daze.
Then, at last, she broke into anguished sobs.
Her aged body was on the verge of withering away, like the dead leaves carpeting the ground.
She was just an ordinary person. She had never received a good education, and she had never even left this town in her entire life.
Yet because of a single childhood promise,
she had kept watch here for a hundred years.
Until her beauty faded and her hair turned white.
Perhaps any affection had long since disappeared, because, as she had said, that child had killed many people against her will. Every time she appeared over those decades, she must have thrown the town into turmoil. Perhaps her relatives and friends had been among the dead, yet she had still