The "Soul-Loss Disease" curse, the Demon Lord Orcus, Pure White's research, a city cycling between life and death...
These seemingly unrelated pieces of information kept colliding in Renato's mind, faintly connecting into a hazy thread.
He seemed to sense something, as though reaching for a thread floating in the darkness. His fingertips had already felt its faint tug, yet one last veil of indistinct mist remained.
Waiting in the garden outside the Royal Palace had already cost him too much time. His schedule was tight, and with afternoon approaching, Renato could no longer spare the effort for conversational groundwork or concealing his intentions.
With a conveniently unguarded young mage sitting before him, someone who clearly had yet to learn the roundabout ways adults spoke, Renato simply began firing off his questions one after another.
Rafada seemed to find nothing amiss. On the contrary, the white-haired boy seemed not to have enjoyed a good conversation in a long time. Once his desire to talk had been rekindled, he could scarcely rein it in, answering Renato's series of questions about Nittel Royal City in full.
The boy's speech alternated between quick and slow, and occasionally he paused to carefully recall when something had happened.
"After Pure White took Nittel's crown a year ago, he immediately began work on lifting the Soul-Loss Disease curse." Rafada counted the months on his fingers. "On his seventh day in office, he summoned every member of the Royal Mage Corps and ordered them to set aside all their current projects to focus on studying the patients' symptoms."
"At first, nobody could even tell whether it was a curse or a plague. It took nearly three months just to establish a direction."
As Renato sorted out the timeline and silently committed the information to memory, he asked:
"So