While Felix and Ith were talking, Orum's gaze quietly slipped past the bard.
His attention fell on the town behind the wall, shrouded beneath a gloomy sky.
Orum wanted to get a look at this border town first, wrapped in such an eerie atmosphere, and see what secrets it hid.
In that moment, Orum's senses spread out fully.
The special perception granted by his necromancer inheritance made him far more sensitive to the presence of death than any ordinary person.
Orum could clearly feel a faint, barely perceptible necrotic aura drifting out from the town behind the wall.
The sensation was extremely subtle.
It did not feel like the aura of any particular undead creature.
Nor did it feel like the stench of decay from heaps of corpses.
It felt more as if the entire town itself were a colossal corpse, desiccated like a mummy.
The thought made Orum's heart lurch hard in his chest.
He looked through the wall's entrance and into the town.
Most of the buildings inside looked quite old. The plaster on the walls was peeling away in layers, exposing mottled, faded stone bricks beneath.
Walls that should have been white or cream had turned a sickly grayish yellow.
The guild's stone walls looked especially dilapidated, their surfaces covered in weathering and moss.
The blacksmith's chimney stood alone on its roof, only a few thin wisps of black smoke drifting from its mouth, so faint they were almost invisible against the gloomy sky.
The doors of the roadside shops had rotted through. Some had even fallen off their hinges and hung crookedly, half open, half shut, their wooden panels covered in black mold and riddled with wormholes.
The town even had a tavern. Dim light seeped out through its broken windows, and it held no trace of life or vitality.
It was not the warm glow a lively tavern ought to give off. It looked more like a sickly, hopeless, dying light source.
Deep in the town, he could also make out a sanatorium and a brothel.
Both buildings lay shrouded in shadow, as if they had swallowed the light around them.
Greentown's population was about three hundred, yet the town was strangely silent.
Apart from the footsteps of the Ice Hawks Company members beside the wall, there was hardly a sound to be heard.
No voices.
No barking dogs.
Not even birdsong.
The silence was deeply unsettling, like approaching an abandoned dead city.
Orum studied the layout of the town carefully.
He noticed one crucial detail.
All the buildings in town were arranged radially around a central point, rather than in the grid-like street pattern common elsewhere.
Ith, standing nearby, noticed which way Orum was looking.
He followed Orum's line of sight, then added softly.
"This wall looks shabby, but it's actually quite sturdy."
Ith's voice was still gentle, carrying a hint of reassurance.
"It can hold off monsters, or an invasion by cannibals. It isn't much to look at, but as a defense it's quite reliable."
Felix took up the conversation with a smile.
"There are plenty of scars on this wall."
He pointed to the deep claw marks and arrow holes in the stonework.
"It seems this place gets attacked often."
"That's right. Everdusk Forest is extremely dangerous," Ith went on, a trace of complicated emotion in his voice. "Also, the buildings in town were all built around the church."
"If you keep walking, you'll see it. It's the most important building in Greentown."
"I'll take you to where you can rest."
As he spoke, the group had already followed Ith into the town.
From here, the town's interior could be seen more clearly.
Looking down the winding street, the spire of a church in the distance pierced the dark, heavy sky.
Its sharp silhouette was like a keen blade, about to slit the heavens open.
To Orum's surprise, the church was built in a classic Gothic style, with soaring spires.
Slender windows.
Intricate flying buttresses.
Every line of the building was sharp as a knife, filled with an aggressive beauty that stabbed upward.
Felix's steps halted abruptly. His emerald eyes contracted sharply, betraying an astonishment he could not hide!
"This is... the architectural style of churches from the age of the Great Empire."
Clearly, this ancient town could not have been built in the age of the Great Empire, ten thousand years ago.
It was at most a thousand years old.
Then why had the builders of this town, a thousand years ago, made Greentown imitate the architecture of the Great Empire's age?!
Cyrus had stopped as well.
The Gold-rank knight's voice turned low and grave.
"The Great Empire... that legendary ancient civilization said to have ruled the entire continent for two thousand years."
As a veteran adventurer, Cyrus naturally dealt with dungeons often, so he could hardly be ignorant of the Great Empire.
Ronald swallowed and asked with a frown, "But didn't the Great Empire perish ten thousand years ago?"
"Why would its architectural style be here?"
Orum looked more closely and noticed that, unlike an ordinary Gothic church, this one had walls carved all over with black emblem patterns.
The patterns stood out starkly against the gray walls.
Even from this far away, the black lines were plainly visible.
The lines looked as if they had been painted with some special black pigment.
In the dim light of Everdusk Forest, the black lines only grew clearer.
They were like black holes that swallowed all the light around them.
Orum studied the designs and found that they depicted an enormous black sun.
The image of that sun was peculiar.
It had the radiance of a sun, yet also a deep, dark quality.
It gave a deeply contradictory impression.
The rays spreading out from the sun's center were each straight and sharp.
Like the edges of blades.
Yet the rays were a deep black.
Not a pure pitch black, but a dark shade with a faint tint of purple.
Like the deepest region of the night sky.
This black sun emblem looked very much like the holy symbol of the Eternal Sun God, Amaunator.
Amaunator was one of the oldest deities of the Light pantheon. He had once been a god of great power, though for various reasons that divine power had since waned and declined.
His symbol was usually a sun radiating golden light.
It stood for the undying sun, for justice and law.
But the black sun before them gave off an eerie, gloomy air.
It felt as though Amaunator's holy sun had been dyed black.
The form and structure were kept, but the inner essence and meaning had been completely changed.
This black sun symbol filled Orum with an unease he could not put into words.
Orum had long since crammed religious knowledge from Felix and Ronald.
He had studied the symbols of the various deities in depth.
Yet this black sun felt both familiar and foreign to him. It belonged to none of the recognized gods.
"That is the symbol of faith for the people of Greentown."
Ith's voice suddenly sounded, interrupting Orum's thoughts.
His voice dropped lower, as though he felt some hesitation and unease even in discussing the subject.
"You mean this black sun?"
Orum turned to look at Ith beside him.
"Yes."
Ith nodded, his eyes also resting on the church spire in the distance.
"This symbol looks similar to the holy sun of the Eternal Sun God Amaunator, but they represent entirely different beings."
Ith paused, as if weighing how to put it.
"One is the embodiment of light and hope, while the other is..."
"The other is a deity just as ancient, but of a wholly different nature."
"The God of Eternity."
Ith spoke the name slowly, his tone growing heavier.
"That is what the residents of Greentown call the god they worship."
"He is as old as Amaunator, perhaps even older, but his divinity is utterly unlike Amaunator's."
Orum sharply noticed that when Ith spoke the name God of Eternity, his body trembled slightly.
The tremor was very faint.
If Orum had not been watching him the whole time, he would never have noticed it.
"A deity just as ancient..."
Orum silently repeated the words in his mind.
He realized that the strange state of Greentown might be deeply tied to this God of Eternity.
What kind of power did an ancient existence that stood on equal footing with the god of the radiant sun represent?
Ith said nothing more about this unfamiliar deity. He made a gesture inviting them to follow, then turned and led the Ice Hawks Company deeper into the town.
Clearly, he did not want to discuss more about the God of Eternity out here in the open.
The group followed Ith through the wall's entrance and formally stepped into Greentown.
The moment their feet touched the town's streets, an indescribable oppressiveness settled over everyone's hearts.
It did not come from the surrounding darkness, nor was it like the aura of death in the forest. It was a deeper unease, rising from the depths of the soul.
It felt like stepping into a forbidden ground they should never have entered.
Ith led them along the winding street toward the center of town.
This main street was paved with rough flagstones, and black moss grew in the gaps between them, crunching faintly underfoot. The moss was slick and sticky, and gave off a rotting smell.
As they walked, the door of a low wooden house by the road suddenly opened.
A few farm women in coarse cloth dresses came out, and when they saw Ith, warm smiles immediately spread across their faces.
"Young Master Ith!"
A plump, rosy-cheeked middle-aged woman was the first to greet him.
Her voice was loud and warm. "You're looking well today! You seem to be recovering nicely lately!"
"Sister Mary."
Ith answered gently, a sincere smile appearing on his face.
It was the first time today he had worn such a relaxed expression. "Thanks to you, I've felt much better these past few days."
Another woman, gray-haired with a kindly face, pressed forward as well.
She held a bowl in her hands, full of a thick liquid still steaming. "Young Master Ith, would you like to try the mushroom soup I just made? It's brewed from mushrooms picked fresh this morning!"
The thick mushroom soup gave off an unusual fragrance.
It mingled the scent of earth with the special savoriness of mushrooms, yet in this eerie town deep in Everdusk Forest, the aroma felt strangely unsettling.
"Sister Jenny, really, there's no need."
Ith declined tactfully.
His tone was still gentle and courteous. "I've just eaten and truly am not hungry. I appreciate the kindness, and next time I'll be sure to try your cooking."
Orum quietly watched the scene from the side.
He noticed that the townsfolk treated Ith with great respect, but it was not a simple relationship of superior and subordinate.
It was more like the sympathy and care given to a fallen noble, a mixture of respect and pity.
The attitude was subtle, but he could sense no hostility at all.
Orum's gaze swept over the farm women.
Their complexions were indeed rosy and healthy, not at all like people living in such an eerie environment.
That healthy glow made them look all the more abnormal.
This was deep within Everdusk Forest.
Even now, with no dense canopy to block it, the sky stayed in a strangely dim state.
It was not the pitch black of night, but a purplish-black, oppressive light that could never see true sunlight.
It was as if an invisible purplish-black curtain hung forever in the sky, filtering all light into this suffocating purple-black tone.
Orum raised his eyes to the sky.
That purple-black firmament reminded him of diseased skin.
Swollen, festering, pustulant, worsening.
Under such harsh conditions, only a very few especially hardy crops and various mushroom-type plants could barely grow in Greentown.
Orum noticed that the vegetable plots by the road were planted with strange crops he had never seen before.
The crops were all an unhealthy dark green or grayish white, their leaves covered with a layer of fine fuzz.
They looked as though they had mutated to adapt to the darkness.
It reminded Orum of certain special plants that grew in underground caves.
To survive in an environment without any sunlight, those plants had evolved all kinds of peculiar traits.
The crops before him had clearly undergone a similar adaptive mutation.
Ronald leaned closer, examining the odd plants carefully.
"Are these... edible?"
His tone was full of suspicion.
As the Ice Hawks Company's temporary cook, Ronald had a professional sensitivity to ingredients.
But no matter how he looked at them, these crops did not seem like normal food.
Hearing Ronald's question, Ith nodded.
"They are."
His voice was calm.
"The townsfolk live on these crops and mushrooms."
"They don't taste good, but at least they fill the stomach."
After walking a little farther, they passed the town's central square.
It was a small open area.
The ground was paved with broken flagstones.
In the center stood a dried-up stone fountain.
The fountain's sculpture was a scholar holding a book, but after long years of weathering, the scholar's face had blurred beyond recognition, and only a rough human outline could still be made out.
Thick dust and fallen leaves had piled up at the fountain's base.
Clearly, no water had flowed there for a very long time.
On a worn wooden bench at the edge of the square, an old man with gray hair and a thick beard lay half reclined, resting.
He wore a hat and a dark robe that was old but washed very clean.
His face was covered in deep wrinkles carved by the years.
They were like dried-up riverbeds, densely blanketing his face.
When the old man saw Ith approaching, he struggled to rise from the bench.
But he had barely pushed himself up.
"Ow..."
A cry of pain.
He sat right back down.
One hand pressed to his waist, his face twisted in pain.
"Young Master Ith!"
The old man greeted him in a somewhat hoarse but still booming voice.
An apologetic smile crossed his face.
"I'm terribly sorry. This cursed old back of mine is acting up again!"
"If it weren't hurting so badly, I'd stand up and give you a proper bow!"
"Grandpa Mayor Rom!"
Ith hurried forward.
His tone was full of sincere concern.
"Please don't say that, and you certainly don't need to rise and bow!"
"You and the townsfolk saved my life. I feel only gratitude toward Greentown. How could I accept a bow from you?"
Ith crouched down and looked over Mayor Rom's condition carefully.
"Is your back injury acting up again?"
"We still have some herbs left from the company's supplies. I can treat it and apply a poultice for you."
Mayor Rom waved a hand.
He let out a long sigh.
The sigh was full of helplessness at the merciless passing of years and the decline of the body.
"Ah, no need to trouble yourself. It's an old complaint."
"This body of mine gets worse by the day. I doubt I'll make it through this winter!"
The words had barely left his mouth.
A wiry farm woman hanging laundry nearby burst out laughing.
"Ha!"
Her laugh was hearty and plainly mocking.
"Old Rom, you're at it again!"
She went on, laughing as she spoke.
"This old fool started saying he wouldn't live out the year twenty years ago, and here he is still going strong!"
"Smokes his pipe every day, drinks his ale every day, tough as nails!"
Hearing this, Mayor Rom put on an awkward, unconvinced expression.
He glared, his beard bristling, and snapped back.
"You woman! What are you babbling about!"
"This time I really feel my body failing, and it's nothing like before!"
The townsfolk nearby, hearing the exchange, couldn't help laughing.
Clearly, Mayor Rom's claim that he was about to die had become a long-running joke in Greentown.
No one truly believed his gloomy predictions.
But Orum did not laugh.
He could sense something out of the ordinary about Mayor Rom.
The feeling was hard to describe.
It was like... an aura frozen by time.
He could sense that although Mayor Rom's life force was still flowing, it flowed in a strangely eerie way.
Like a frozen river.
On the surface it looked still and motionless.
But beneath the ice, the water still ran, slowly, almost imperceptibly.
And it was not only Mayor Rom.
Now that Orum carefully sensed the townsfolk around him, he found that they all carried a similar eerie aura.
The aura was extremely faint.
Without deliberately probing, it was nearly impossible to detect.
But once noticed, it turned out to be everywhere.
It was as if all of Greentown were enveloped by some invisible force.
That force was slowly, continuously sustaining everything here, including its residents.
After taking leave of Mayor Rom and the other townsfolk, Ith continued leading the Ice Hawks Company forward.
But this time he did not take the main street.
Instead he turned into a narrow alley.
As if deliberately avoiding places with many people.
The alley was deep and dim.
The buildings on both sides nearly joined together, leaving only a narrow passage wide enough for two people abreast.
The sky overhead was squeezed into a thin purple-black line.
Making the already gloomy surroundings even more oppressive.
The walls were covered with black moss.
The moss gave off a damp, rotting smell.
Shallow puddles lay on the ground.
They made a splashing sound underfoot.
Felix followed behind Ith, his emerald eyes scanning the surroundings.
"Ith, where are you taking us?"
His voice was calm, but it carried an undercurrent of wariness.
Ith did not look back, and kept walking.
"My residence."
"It's quieter there, suitable for explaining things in detail."
Led by Ith, the group twisted and turned through the streets and finally arrived before a hidden, half-underground stone house.
Most of the house's structure was buried underground, with only the upper portion above the surface, and the entrance was a flight of stone steps leading downward.
The steps were covered in thick moss, clearly rarely trodden.
The edge of every step was a little worn, but not severely, which showed that this was indeed no place of heavy foot traffic.
Ith led everyone down into the depths and up to a heavy iron door.
He took out a key, and with a crisp click, the lock sprang open.
Ith pushed the heavy iron door open with effort and walked in first.
"This is my residence."
Ith's voice sounded from inside the door.
He gestured for everyone to follow him in.
Once everyone was inside, Ith turned and closed the heavy iron door.
The moment the door shut, it gave a dull thud, completely cutting off every sound from outside and turning the basement into a fully sealed space.
"It's safer to talk here."
Ith paused, then said in a low voice.
"There are some things I can only tell you here."
Orum looked around. The room was wide, but the light was dim, with only a few candles in the corners providing faint illumination.
The furnishings were very simple.
A wooden bed, a desk, a few wooden crates for storing belongings, and nothing else.
After confirming that the door was fully closed.
Ith's usually gentle, calm face suddenly turned grave.
Ith took a deep breath.
His hands trembled slightly.
Clearly, what he was about to say weighed heavily on him as well.
Then Ith raised his head and swept an extremely solemn gaze across everyone present.
"I'm going to tell you a secret."
"A secret about every resident of Greentown."
"This secret may well be the root of all the strange phenomena here."
Everyone's attention was instantly seized.
All of them held their breath, waiting for Ith's next words.
Then Ith slowly opened his mouth and spoke a fact that shocked them all.
"Every single townsperson in Greentown."
"They are all immortals!"
The words were like a thunderclap.
Exploding inside the basement.
"Immortals?!"
Felix cried out.
His voice was full of disbelief.
"Are you saying."
"that everyone in this town has..."
"gained eternal life?!"
Felix's emerald eyes flew wide.
Shock was written all over his face.
Orum's pupils contracted sharply.
He had learned about this subject from Skull Sis, and he understood better than anyone present what the concept of immortality truly meant.
For ordinary people, immortality was not a blessing but a terrible price and a curse!
Ordinary humans who were forcibly granted eternal life.
Often fell into a fate worse than death.
"That's right."
Ith smiled bitterly.
"Eternal life in the literal sense."
"Mayor Rom says he's felt he wouldn't live out the year for twenty years now."
"But in truth."
"He has already lived for over eight hundred years."
Ith's voice grew heavier still.
"And it's not just him."
"Most of the residents of this town."
"have lived for five hundred years, or even a thousand."
"The middle-aged women who look only thirty or forty, and the sprightly old folk."
"are all over five hundred years old in reality."
Cyrus's face turned extremely grim.
The experienced Gold-rank knight.
immediately grasped the gravity of the situation.
"This cannot be a normal divine blessing."
Cyrus's voice was low and heavy.
"No true god would grant mortals genuine eternal life."
"It violates the natural order of life!"
His right hand had already closed around the hilt of his runic greatsword.
His whole body gave off a fierce air of vigilance.
"You're right, Sir Knight."
Ith nodded, his face even paler as he spoke. "It is not a blessing."
"It is a curse."
"A curse from the God of Eternity, from the age of the Great Empire."
"The residents of Greentown cannot die."
"They are trapped in this place forever, repeating an eternal, unchanging life day after day."
In the temporary lounge in the basement.
The clock on the wall showed that it was early morning.
Above Greentown, the purple-black light of the sky never lifted, making it impossible to judge the time by light. They could only rely on such mechanical devices to tell the hour.
This was the lodging Ith had arranged for the Ice Hawks Company. Though the conditions were crude, there were plenty of basement rooms, enough to house everyone.
Orum sat up from the crude plank bed.
He worked his slightly stiff neck.
The damp of the basement made for uncomfortable sleep.
But it was still far better than sleeping out in the wilds.
After Ith had told them yesterday the secret that every resident of Greentown was an immortal, the whole team had fallen into silence.
The news was too shocking.
So everyone needed time to digest it.
Felix had decided to stay in town for the time being.
Because the townsfolk, after saving Ith, had made only one request: that Ith be allowed to leave town only after this round of the Dark Conclave had ended.
The mayor had instructed this personally, saying there was an extremely important ritual that Ith had to carry out himself.
Until then, he could not leave.
So Felix drew up a plan: investigate the truth of Greentown while looking for a way to get Ith out.
And if that really proved impossible, they would have to take advantage of a moment when these eerie townsfolk let their guard down and take Ith away by force.
Orum, however, had another goal.
He meant to use this time to learn the combat art Jade Slash.
It was the last prerequisite combat art for the Blade of Military Path, and one of the biggest reasons for Orum's trip.
Ith had told him last night that there was someone in Greentown who knew this combat art.
And that person's position was a special one: the town's executioner.
Orum put on his gear.
He strapped the Flame-steel glaive to his back, then pushed open the wooden door of the basement and stepped out.
Ith was already waiting outside.
"Ready?" Ith asked. His face was still pale, but his spirits were better than the day before.
"Mm." Orum nodded.
The two walked along the alleys they had taken the day before toward the edge of town.
Greentown in the early morning was still silent.
Now and then they saw a few early risers among the townsfolk, who eyed the two outsiders with curiosity but soon looked away and went back to their own business.
Orum noticed that the townsfolk's movements all carried a mechanical, repetitive quality.
As if they were carrying out some preset program.
Day after day, year after year. To an outsider it seemed dull and tedious, yet they appeared to take pleasure in it.
Following Ith, Orum crossed most of Greentown.
At last they arrived at a relatively remote area at the edge of town.
The buildings here were even sparser.
Hardly a single other resident was in sight.
The flagstones on the ground were broken and worn, and in places the earth beneath lay bare, clearly an area that saw little upkeep.
A faint musty smell hung in the air, mixed with an indescribable odor of decay.
Before a stone house that looked especially solid, Ith stopped.
The walls of this house were clearly far thicker than those of the other buildings.
The black basalt blocks were stacked so tightly there was no seam between them, giving the impression of an impregnable stronghold.
The windows were small, and all were fitted with thick iron bars. The bars were covered in rust, yet still sturdy, lending the place an air of tight security.
The whole stone house was like a miniature fortress.
"Good day, Executioner," Ith called out to the owner of the house, his tone plainly respectful. "It's Ith. I've brought my friend Orum to call on you."
Orum followed Ith's gaze.
In the front yard of the stone house sat a hulking man.
He had a thick mane of brown hair like a lion's, which spilled untidily over his shoulders and gave off a feeling of wild strength.
The man's build was extremely massive, muscles bulging beneath his coarse clothes in clearly defined lines.
But the most striking thing was that the man wore an iron mask on his face, its surface gleaming like a mirror.