"Macao and Wakaba will handle this job."
As soon as Makarov finished speaking, Lin Yuan reached out and pressed his hand against the job request on the counter.
The trace of aura at the edge of the page had faded almost to nothing, yet it stirred a hunger in his palm that he had only felt when devouring space.
"I'm going too."
"You haven't even done an official job before," Macao said.
"Then I'll start with the investigation."
Mira squeezed in beside them, a fork between her teeth. "Then I'm going too."
Lin Yuan looked at her. "You know how to investigate?"
"I'll keep an eye on you, so you don't eat the church too."
The two glared at each other across the request. Lisanna had just started to raise her hand when Makarov's mallet came down on the counter.
"You and Elfman will stay at the Guild. You haven't started learning magic yet, and this isn't a job that can be solved with numbers."
Lisanna was a little disappointed, but she nodded. For once, Mira didn't argue either. She simply told her younger siblings not to wander off.
Makarov turned to Lin Yuan and Mira. "You can go with them, but Macao is in charge. No acting on your own. If you encounter magic you can't assess, retreat immediately."
"Why doesn't she have any special conditions?" Lin Yuan pointed at Mira.
"Because I can fight."
"Because when she causes trouble, you'll definitely help clean up after her," Makarov said.
Laughter immediately filled the hall.
That evening, the group boarded a carriage bound for Sunken Bell Town.
Mira claimed the window seat and stuck her demon arm outside. Even after it was struck three times in a row by branches coming toward them, she refused to change seats. Lin Yuan sat opposite her. Whenever a wheel rolled over a stone, he briefly stretched the distance between the carriage and the rough patch in the road.
The carriage glided along as smoothly as if it were traveling over ice.
The driver looked back several times before finally asking Lin Yuan in all seriousness whether he would be willing to accompany the carriage regularly. Mira immediately named his price: two slices of strawberry cake a day.
"Why do you get the payment?"
"You still owe me interest."
The two argued all the way to the town entrance, where Sunken Bell Town had already appeared in the gathering dusk.
It was much smaller than Magnolia, its stone houses crowded into a few narrow streets along the foot of the mountain. There were hardly any pedestrians in sight, and strings of copper pieces hung in front of every house. Whenever the wind blew, the pieces struck one another with a tinkling sound.
The mayor was a tall, thin old man. He welcomed them into the council hall, and the first thing he did was lock the doors and windows.
"The bell rings at midnight," he said. "The first time, everyone thought the wind had stirred the old bell. The next day, the mill owner was gone."
Macao asked, "One every day after that?"
"Sometimes one, sometimes two. The doors and windows weren't damaged, and there were no signs of a struggle in their homes. It was as if they'd walked out on their own."
The smoke Wakaba exhaled curled into an eye beneath the ceiling, then quickly dispersed.
"Did anyone see it happen?"
"The baker's apprentice saw his master walking toward the mountain in the middle of the night. No matter how he called out, his master wouldn't turn around. The next day, all we found was a shoe on the church steps."
The mayor brought out a list of the missing. Nine people had disappeared in seven days, with no pattern to their ages or occupations.
Lin Yuan looked over the names one by one. "What do they have in common?"
"Nothing. Some were rich, some were poor. Some were locals, and some were merchants who had just arrived."
Mira pointed to the top of the list. "They all lived on the east side of town."
The mayor froze, then hurriedly spread out a map.
The Sleeping Church stood halfway up the mountain to the north, and the eastern district was no closer to it than anywhere else. But when the nine missing people's homes were connected, they formed exactly half a circle.
Lin Yuan completed the other half with his finger.
The center of the circle fell on an unremarkable little chapel.
By the time they arrived, it was completely dark. The chapel had long since fallen out of use, and its lock was red with rust. Macao burned through the chain with purple flames, and Wakaba's smoke slipped through the crack in the door first, confirming that there was no one alive inside.
Dust covered the benches, but fresh footprints marked the wall.
The footprints continued all the way behind the stone lectern.
Mira grabbed the edge of the lectern and exerted a little force with her demon arm, lifting the entire stone slab. A narrow hidden compartment lay beneath it. There were no magic tools inside, only an old, worm-eaten booklet.
Mira leaned her head over. "What does it say?"
Lin Yuan opened the first page.
It was a record of sacrificial rites held at the Sleeping Church decades ago. The first few pages listed only grain, lambs, and wine, but the handwriting grew more and more untidy toward the end. The last priest had written the same sentence over and over.
The bell awakens the gods, and fear offers up the sacrifices.
"Using the townspeople as sacrifices?" Wakaba frowned.
"It looks more like someone restarted the ritual by following this booklet," Macao said.
Wakaba suddenly felt a newly written sheet of paper folded up deep inside the compartment and pulled it out.
The ink on the paper had not yet dried completely. Nine names were listed in order, exactly matching the list of missing people. A black line had been drawn after each name.
The tenth name had not been crossed out.
The mayor's face changed instantly when he saw it clearly.
"That's the grocer's child. Only nine years old."
A long section of the paper remained folded.
Lin Yuan unfolded it completely.
The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth names all belonged to children.