CH 322

322: Liana and the Others Appear

“We’ll disappear forever if we die here!” It was painful news.

Even the normally calm Ming Xi had to take a deep steadying breath. The Ancient Silver Moon kingdom had ways to reunite a destroyed consciousness to a body, but the soul. . . there was no away to reform a soul, no one in any of the four major kingdoms knew how.

Even a true god couldn’t reform a soul once it was destroyed, never mind mere mortals.

While Feng Wu and her group were having her discussion, seven other people were also meeting for their own discussion.

The group was made up of Liana and Hart’s people.

Hart had been lucky and was doing well. His commander and deputy commander were well too. Oli[notes] was still alive as well.

Liana only had Mia.[notes] The other two guards, who had reached the castle before them, were nowhere to be found. They had most likely met with misfortune.

The last member had no affiliation with either Hart or Liana. He was an old magician and could have been considered a master in his own right. If his magic wasn’t suppressed, he wouldn’t have bothered joining forces with a bunch of young people.

“Miss Liana, what did you find?” Hart was now a gardener who specialized in trimming flowers.

“Nothing.” Liana replied bitterly.

The seven of them had gradually found each other. They were trying to find the murderer, but the culprit was hidden too well for them to discover. It was difficult to investigate with their abilities sealed.

Liana was now a pretty school girl who was one of Yanaimo’s cronies. She felt like her morals were compromised from what she had to do to play the role well.

“We must find Miss Feng Wu and her group soon. There are many people in their group. Maybe they found some useful clues.” Oli was optimistic.

The others agreed. There were only seven of them in the group currently. The others were either dead or couldn’t be found. They had to find other people to see if they could gather more clues.

“Miss, what if Miss Feng Wu is already dead?” Mia asked hesitantly.

The others sighed. So many people had died recently. There was no way to know if any of the dead were one of their own.

“We keep looking. I hope Feng Wu is OK.” Liana’s eyes dimmed. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to Feng Wu.

“We should keep looking for clues while we are a looking for Miss Feng Wu and her group,” said the mercenary’s deputy commander.

“Yes, people wouldn’t murder without reason. There must be a motive. It must have something to do with Yanaimo’s family,” hypothesized the old magician.

The most important thing was the motive. It wasn’t easy to kill so many people. Whether it was a single culprit or a group, they had to investigate every lead.

Both Liana’s group and Ming Xi’s group finished their meeting at the same time. They came to the same conclusion: find the motive, then the culprit.

There were lots of motives: killing out of anger or feeling slighted, killing out of revenge, even killing to promote self-interest.

Feng Wu’s group decided to try and find out of Yanaimo’s family had any enemies.

There were plenty of classmates who could talk about how wealthy and powerful her family was, but none who knew about her family’s enemies.

They couldn’t ask her directly, so they had to find a way to get her to reveal it herself.

The survivors arranged night patrol. There were so few of them that even the girls were recruited to patrol. Feng Wu’s team was one of the two on patrol that night.

The castle was too big, and with so many already dead, the building felt incredibly empty. The teachers got permission from Yanaimo to move everyone, including the servants, to the first floor. Scattering everyone around the castle was too dangerous.

Decreasing their living space meant less to patrol, so patrolling was easier. They also locked up large parts of the castle in order to prevent the murderer from entering any of the empty rooms.

There were two teams of five on patrol. One team was responsible for patrolling inside the castle, while the other was responsible for patrolling the outside grounds.

Ink was among the people patrolling. Through some finessing, he was able to assign Feng Wu to his group. Aside from them, there was also Annai, another boy and girl. They were all classmates.

Though night patrol was boring it was also scary. There was a constant fear that the murderer would appear and try to kill them.

They inevitably started chatting. The other boy, Chamai, was talkative so having him around made things less boring and scary.

“The murderer is really amongst us?” Cassie, the other girl in the group, asked.

“It shouldn’t be the case. We’re all classmates. If the person had the intention to kill, shouldn’t they have done it a long time ago? Why wait so long?” Annai asked.

“Maybe they didn’t have the opportunity. Think about it. If it weren’t for this isolated island and the fact that we’ve all lost our abilities, do you think the person would dare? Who knows what method they used to seal our powers? I don’t believe it isn’t one of us,” said Chamai, the talkative boy.

“That’s true, but who is trying to kill us? It’s hard to believe one of our classmates is trying to kill us. We’ve been together for over a year. We’ve had our quarrels, but for the most part we get along well enough. How can someone just think of killing us and then act on it?”

Annai's heart felt heavy as she thought about the classmates who had died. They had all been on the boat playing together.