The two turned their heads towards the sound without blinking, but saw nothing. The rustling sound was not heard again either.

Eustar, who remained vigilant, spoke quietly.

“It might have been a small animal.”

But there was no response from Laila. Eustar knew she was trembling. And Laila reacting like this in this situation was never a good sign.

“Laila?”

Eustar called her name without taking his eyes off the ominous ruins that remained only half intact.

“Laila, snap out of it.”

Laila, who had been maintaining a calm silence as if entranced by something, startled and shuddered. The sound of her inhaling was heard. It was an urgent sound as if she had just returned from the brink of death.

“It’s there.”

Laila said. The moment Eustar turned to her, Laila suddenly shook her head.

“No, it was there. It’s gone now.”

“What was there? A sink?”

Laila shook her head again. She could feel her heart pounding.

It felt as if it was beating not in her chest, but in the palm of her hand. Yes. As if she was holding her throbbing heart in her grasp, the sensitive pulse at her fingertips was making her body thump, thump, thump…..

Laila swallowed dryly and took a step back.

“It’s not a sink. That… was there. I can’t explain it exactly. But I’m sure it was the ‘seeker’.”

“Did you see its appearance?”

At Eustar’s question, Laila frowned for a moment as if suffering from a headache, then nodded ambiguously.

“I didn’t want to see it, but… I just saw it. It was a young, young child. I’m not sure if it was a boy or a girl. But it was definitely a child under ten years old. I’m certain.”

Laila felt frustrated, not knowing how to explain in words what she had seen.

She felt like wanting to pull out her tongue, beat it on the ground a few times, stretch it out to make it soft, and then put it back in. Wouldn’t that make her speak a little better?

But there was no need for that – fortunately. Although Eustar hadn’t seen what Laila had seen, he could deduce a lot just from her reaction.

First, that there was something going on in these ruins, and second, that whatever came out of the sink was probably roaming around the entire village.

“Laila, for now, let’s…”

“Eustar, wait. Over there…”

Laila rubbed her bloodshot eyes with her palm and licked her parched lips.

“I want to go over there.”

Eustar looked straight down at her face.

“There’s no need to push yourself, Laila. We can come back with the other members after we find out more about this place.”

But Laila was stubborn. “No,” she said. It was a firm voice that had rarely been heard since leaving Rizikus.

Laila continued.

“There’s nothing there now. It’s gone. So I think it’s better if we go now.”

She looked up at Eustar. Her red eyes seemed to be asking, ‘Is it really not possible?’ No, it wasn’t a question. It was almost a plea.

Eustar shrugged as if he had no choice. And as he tossed the strands of hair that had fallen over his shoulder back to his back, the gesture looked so graceful that Laila couldn’t help but admire it a little.

“Alright. But remember. You need to stay right next to me.”

Eustar, after emphasizing once more, took out a small box from a leather pouch and handed it to Laila.

Laila could tell what the box was as soon as she saw it.

She also knew what would be inside when she opened the lid. It was the thin chain that Eustar had used. The one he had used to bind the ghosts of children in Rizikus, and to catch the ghost of his grandmother in the royal palace.

“Keep this with you. We don’t know what might happen.”

Laila opened the lid of the box and picked up the chain. Outwardly, it really didn’t look like much. It was too thin, and even discolored to a dark shade in places. It looked like a cheap necklace chain dug up from an old grave.

“I don’t know how to use this.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s designed to work on its own without using your own magic. It’s a magical tool that has its own magic, albeit a very small amount. I’ve been carrying it around anyway… It’ll be helpful. Keep it safe.”

After saying that, Eustar carefully stepped towards the ruins.

Laila put the box into the leather pouch attached to her uniform and then leaped over the nettles and thorny bushes with long strides.

Seeing with her own eyes that even the sharpest thorns couldn’t scratch her uniform, her gait became even bolder.

The ruins emitted a musty smell of dead trees, mold, and moss mixed together. Another pungent odor wafted through the air, the kind of smell that might come from rotting soil.

Eustar grabbed a handful of soil from under the lone remaining foundation stone and let it fall back down. There was no sign of life in the crumbling pile of soil. Nothing would grow here. At least not for a few years.

“This way.”

Laila said. She went around to the back, following along what was left of the corner of the ruins.

There were more debris there. Dead trees and furniture pieces smashed to pieces and randomly buried in the soil resembled a chaotic battlefield.

Eustar asked.

“Was it here? The ‘seeker’?”

Laila nodded.

“It was here, definitely. But I can’t feel it now. There’s nothing. Except for the unpleasant smell.”

“Can you see why this place ended up like this?”

Laila looked around the ruins for a moment, but what she saw was all there was.

Was it even possible to see through the ‘memories’ of something without life in the first place? Eustar spoke as if it was obviously possible, but Laila shook her head.

“I can’t see anything.”

Eustar let out a quiet sound between his lips that could have been either a sigh or a groan. Then he took a couple of steps towards what must have once been the backyard.

The moment she saw his back, Laila startled again at the feeling of her heart being transferred to her palm. The hair from the nape of her neck to her waist stood on end.

There was something behind.

Laila swallowed a scream and whirled around. She almost tripped over a log buried in the soil, but that was a trivial matter.

“Eustar.”

Her breathing became rough. Either because her voice was too low, or because Eustar was engrossed in examining the surroundings, there was no response.

“Eustar, look over there.”

When Laila raised her voice a little more, Eustar finally turned his head. The next moment, what he felt was exactly what Laila had felt. It was fear.

In the forest where there had been no one, among the dead trees, people were standing. They were all smiling with pained expressions, shrugging their shoulders and shaking their bodies as if they wanted to run away somewhere.

But none of them could move. Their feet were stuck to the ground as if glued.

Laila recognized the face of one of them. It was a woman whose headscarf had slipped askew, covering half her face.

The sensation of the withered apple that had rolled out of the basket she was holding suddenly came alive. It was so convincing that for a moment, she thought she was holding the apple in her hand.

“That person…”

Laila, trying to steady her trembling voice, pointed at the woman’s apron. The mud handprint, small as a palm, was still clearly visible. It hadn’t been blurred or erased at all.

“It’s the person who bumped into the children earlier.”

Eustar looked again at the person Laila was pointing at. She was smiling a nightmarish smile and wiggling her fingertips. It looked like a broken wind-up doll twitching.

“Can you see it, Laila? All these people… they have handprints on them.”

Laila’s gaze moved from left to right, then from right to left again.

He was right. All the people standing in a line had those mud handprints on them. The locations were all different, but they were clear enough to be recognized from afar. And it was also apparent that the shape of all the handprints was the same.

“I think that’s the ‘seeker’s’ mark.”

Eustar nodded, agreeing with her words. Originally, a person caught by the ‘seeker’ becomes the next seeker, but these people were clearly just being chased continuously. Like that man they saw at the branch. Then…

“The seeker has come.”

Someone whispered. The moment Laila and Eustar turned to him, the same sound was heard from the opposite side.

“The seeker has come.”

“The seeker has arrived.”

“The seeker has found us.”

The whispers grew louder. They gathered into a buzzing noise. Eustar drew his sword from its scabbard, and Laila gripped the box in her pocket tightly.

The dead trees made a rustling sound. The people were now smiling with even more grotesque expressions. Their lips were turned inside out, revealing their teeth, and their gaping throats were visible.

“You’re the seeker.”

Suddenly, a small, old wardrobe appeared in front of Eustar and Laila. It stood there as nonchalantly as if it had been there from the beginning.

By the time the two grasped the situation, the wardrobe door had already opened. A child with hair short on one side and long on the other was hanging inside the wardrobe, propping themselves up with their arms and legs on the floor. They giggled.

“Find me.”

The child’s body fell with a thud and sank down, disappearing. At the same time, Laila realized that something hard and invisible had wrapped around her body forcefully.

“Eustar!”

The moment Laila screamed, Eustar tried to grab her hand. But Laila’s hand slipped away before he could grasp it, as if it had been oiled.

“Laila!”

With Eustar’s scream, the wardrobe door slammed shut.

Then the people standing in a line in the forest started to disappear one by one. They vanished quickly with only a crumbling sound, like sand sculptures collapsing.

“Laila! Damn it, Laila!”

Eustar pulled and kicked at the wardrobe door, but it didn’t budge. Just as he raised his sword to forcibly break the doorknob, the wardrobe vanished from his sight in the blink of an eye.

The gleaming tip of the sword fell onto the soil with a thud. Curses flowed from Eustar’s mouth as he looked around the empty ruins with a dumbfounded expression.