Angor frowned while reading the broken piece. It seemed this should be one of the pages in Lucas’ logbook. For some reason, it was torn off.
[Year 1353, Age of Gold, Month of Looming Frost, day 8
[I’m welcoming my death at the bottom of this well. But my treasures... the treasures I collected lay in wait for my child. Those shall be the final glory I granted you.]
It was short. But the date on it was pretty important. It told Angor that Lucas wrote this entry on the second day after he “suicided”, and this page was the last page of the logbook.
“Lucas said he waited for death under the well... so who took his bones here?”
By saying “hidden treasures”, Lucas probably meant to let his child go through the strange portal by using their blood.
Were there treasures hidden on this ship?
Until now, Angor had not figured out whether Lucas was “loyal” or a downright liar. With nothing else to go by, he put away the journal page and was going to search whether there were treasures to be found.
He turned around and stopped to look at the headless skeleton.
There were the remains of broken fabric clung to the skeleton. A quick check didn’t show anything of interest.
“This must be Lucas... but where’s his head?”
Angor shook his head in confusion and stepped out of the captain’s room.
First, he headed to the lower cabins, which were slightly drenched by water.
Half of the Feather Fan was submerged underwater, which suggested why many rooms had watermarks in them during his initial search even though the ship was floating above the water level at that time.
After checking more carefully, he was sure that this ship had always been here but somehow showed up in the mist for a brief moment, after which it once again returned here.
What is this place then?
He stepped out of the cabin area and flew to the figurehead of the ship. Using the weak light of his lamp, he managed to notice that there was a solid cliff behind the ship, apart from the dark water and more darkness ahead of his position.
By moving around further, he realized that The Feather Fan was left abandoned at the edge of a small island, and the cliff prevented anyone from venturing further into the island by normal means.
“Did Lucas hide his treasure on this island?”
Instead of flying over the cliff, he used his spirit feelers to check the seawater first. He had been wondering why the water around here looked so stagnant as if it weren’t the sea at all.
As he expected, everything he sensed using his spirit feelers was “dead”. The water was almost completely still. No plants, no wildlife.
He dared not leave the island too far since he was bad at finding directions on the sea, if not to worry about potential danger waiting for him out there.
He landed back on the ship and picked up Toby, who had been sleeping in his pocket, and told the bird to turn into a griffin.
“I’m going to look around in my soul form. Watch my body in the meantime.”
Toby looked around with his sleepy eyes and wondered why they showed up on the sea again overnight.
After listening to Angor’s explanation, especially the “treasure” part, Toby immediately perked up and gave Angor a “leave it to me” look.
Angor chuckled and left his body, while Toby used gravity power to seal his body inside.
First, he floated around The Feather Fan to look for the magic array, which should be his way back.
Searching around the beach area yielded no result, so he dived into the water, and still found nothing other than several skeletons covered by dirt. There weren’t anything on the skeletons that could be used to tell their identities. But telling from their locations, Angor was sure that these were sailors working on The Feather Fan.
The only place he had yet to check around the ship was the cliff. He didn’t believe the exit of the magic array was too far from its entrance, if whoever designed the magic array decided to split them apart.
When he failed to find anything along the cliff and wondered if his theory was wrong, he suddenly heard Toby calling out to him.
Following the voice, he saw Toby had carried his body to a dead tree at the cliff wall. It seemed Toby found a cave entrance hidden behind the tree.
Curious, Angor entered the cave, which didn’t take him very long to reach the end.
Toby looked pretty disappointed when looking at the emptiness. But unlike him, Angor finally felt relieved when looking at the glowing magic array drawn on the cave wall.
Since he knew how to go back to the well, he returned to his body and prepared to explore the island.
Together with Toby, who also looked thirsty for adventure, he headed back to the entrance of the cave.
But upon arriving, a faint shadow swept past his view.
He quickly dashed outside and looked around, but without finding anything other than the dead tree, which appeared like a twisted soul in the darkness.
“Am I seeing things?” He shook his head and expanded his spirit power, but he still didn’t notice anything wrong.
Next, he flew to the top of the cliff and saw the other side of it as a gentle slope with more dead trees of strange shapes growing on it.
Using his lamp, he traveled down the slope and felt a bit scared by the crooked shadows that looked like monsters quietly watching him.
He reached the bottom of the slope and kept gliding for a few kilometers, but without finding anything alive. In the end, he and Toby stopped at the edge of a large lake.
Because he saw human traces here.
Not far from his position, there was a patch of burned dirt, beside which a simple cooking pot was placed on top of an improvised stone stove.
The dust and rust marks on the pot suggested that it was left here several decades ago.
This meant there were people who lived here, but since both the water and the island itself were so “dead” right now, Angor believed that whoever left these traces wasn’t a native, but a poor soul who was trapped here.
He then walked around the lake, hoping to find other clues.
As far as he could see, the island was pretty worthless and uninteresting. The only thing that kept him here was the treasure mentioned by Lucas, which was probably why Song of the Deep and Summerdew Ridge were all going after Lucas.
He wasn’t planning on spending too much time treasure hunting. Since two truth-finders, “God of Seas” and the “Basket Witch” already came, they would arrive here sooner or later.
Whether he could find the treasure or not, Angor decided to consider safety as his top priority—he had to leave before the truth-finders came and saw him.
“Tweeeeet!”
Toby’s call interrupted his thoughts. He looked that way and saw Toby hovering above the lake water while holding another Luminous Stone lamp in his beak.
Angor immediately saw what Toby wanted to show him. At the center of the lake, there was a tiny stick submerged in the water. While only a very short part of it was above water level, the shadow under the surface proved that it must be a pretty long stick.
He took out a Luminous Stone and tossed it into the water, which slowly sank and revealed a gigantic shadow at the bottom of the lake.