After letting the ghost woman go inside him, something that he found to be joyful considering he didn't want his ears to hear either constant crying or laughter, Farrel went back to his seat beside the tree trunk.
He had just done a lot of things ever since finding himself in a completely new, foreign body. In an unknown place and at an unknown time.
He had gathered ghosts, teaching those ghosts how to scare the shit out of people, teaching them how to possess a human, and he had also killed people together with said ghosts.
It was a busy agenda, and Farrel finally got time for himself where he didn't have to scavenge food to prevent himself from dying of starvation or go on a quest for revenge.
Now that he didn't have anything urgent to think about, Farrel began rearranging his thoughts.
He had given up figuring out what had caused him to suddenly appear in a stranger's body, one that was remarkably suitable for his soul. And he was also done trying to figure out why and how it happened.
However, he still didn't give up thinking about where in the world he was right now.
He might not have traveled far from the first place he found himself waking up in, but after meeting the ghosts, seeing Joy's story, and also terrorizing the bandits, Farrel learned a thing or two about the place he was currently in.
First of all, he knew damn well that he didn't know where he was currently. Not a single idea, nothing at all.
He had visited many parts of the world, traveling from one country to another, and he had basically gone to all 7 continents on Earth despite not exploring every part of them.
And recalling his memories of it, there's not a place in his mind where he found people from the lower-end economy wearing literal rags as clothes and the counterparts wore medieval-looking robes that looked like a hassle just to put on.
He knew a place where the people still carried swords on their waists and wore chainmail armor, he had seen them before.
But it was inside a movie set about some medieval games involving thrones.
He had to exorcise some ghosts that haunted the place so the film crew could go on with their schedule, and that was only once he took a job like that.
Other than that, Farrel had never seen a place like the one he was currently in.
And he would bet all his kidneys and other internal organs that wherever he was currently, it was no movie set.
In other parts of the earth where the people were still having tribal-like lifestyles, they did use rag-like clothes and still hunt on daily.
However, no matter their social standing, they all wore similar-looking clothes due to their centuries-old tradition.
But here, it was evident that the rags that the people wore were not because it was their tradition, it was because they were poor.
Evident from the few people who actually wore clothes that looked like it was straight out of a movie about king arthur and the Knights of the round table.
The jumbled information in his head began to seem more abstract as Farrel couldn't get even a wild guess about where he was currently.
And with their connection with each other, Joy noticed the change in Farrel's state of mind.
"What's wrong? What are you thinking about?"
Hearing the ghost boy's voice, an idea finally surfaced in Farrel's mind.
"Joy, do you know where we are right now?"
Without delaying a beat, Joy answered, "We're currently in The Forest of Death. Why? You didn't even know where you were going to go when you decided to go into this forest!?"
Joy then shook his head and crossed his arms before his chest.
"You're one crazy person, Farrel. It took all my resolve and motivation to live to gather enough courage to go into this forest. And even with all that resolve,"
"Look at what I've become!"
Joy showed his ethereal body to the fullest, even putting his hand in and out of a tree trunk to show that he no longer had a physical body.
"Me dead," Joy said as his head went limp and his tongue out.
Farrel tried to think of any place named The Forest of Death in his memory, and there were several places where he could think of any forest that was related to death.
But after matching the location of those places with the one he was currently in, and the fact that Joy, the local ghost spoke to him in a language that he understood fluently, Farrel crossed out those places immediately.
Where he came from, there weren't any kinds of forests that were related to death. And there were certainly not a group of eccentric people wearing rags for clothes when they could easily get cotton clothes for dirt cheap.
Then a thought crossed his mind.
"What year are we currently in?"
It took Joy several seconds, but he finally answered,
"Umm… as you probably know, I kinda lived on the street ever since I was very little… So…"
"The best I can give you is how many winters I've been through since I started gaining my consciousness as a kid."
Farrel raised his eyebrows.
"Don't you have a calendar or something? A watch, clock, or anything?"
Joy then tilted his head.
"What's a calendar? And if you want to see the clock, you have to go to the village and look at the clock tower there, how can I have something that big in my pocket!?"
"Wait, I don't have any pockets…"
Farrel shook his head and released another sigh. His questionnaire with Joy didn't give him much since the ghost was literally a kid, and he had seen for himself how the kid was living on the street of a village for god knows how long.
He wanted to ask the ghost woman inside him, but remembering that only giggles and sobs could come out of the woman's mouth, he instantly shelved the idea, faster than when he even thought of it.
'Is there someone else I could ask this about…'
Farrel adjusted his sitting position. And as if being reminded that he had someone else he could ask the question to, the handle of the bandit leader's sword poked his side.
Looking at the steel sword, Farrel's face quickly lit up as he pulled the sword out of its sheath.
"I almost forgot about you!"
Saying the chants with his mouth while holding the sword, Farrel then called out to the bandit leader's soul that he had trapped inside the steel sword.