"Joan!?" Asa wanted to exclaim in surprise as she saw a familiar face of her comrade in this sigil ritual, but what came out of her mouth was something else instead.
"Heya!?" A panicked voice came through instead.
Standing before her door was Joan—or Heya, based on what she heard the Royal Sorcerer calling him—bathed in blood.
The vividness of the scene and the urgency in Heya's grunting voice sent a shiver down Asa's spine.
"What happened?" she managed to ask as she reached out to help Heya in.
Heya, looking visibly distressed, quickly stepped into the room with The Royal Sorcerer's help. "Mia… can you get me a glass of water first?"
The body quickly obeyed, heading to a nearby table and fetching a glass of water. Asa couldn't help but feel a sense of detachment from the situation. It was as if she was merely a spectator, witnessing events unfold without direct control over her actions.
The Royal Sorcerer handed the glass to Heya, who took it with a shaky hand. He drank the water in gulps, seemingly trying to regain his composure.
As Asa watched, she just realized that only now she knew her own name. So, it's Mia.
"What went wrong?" Mia asked, her concern deepening. Without being idle for too long, Mia made her way to get a bowl of water and a cloth.
She carefully cleaned the bloodstains on Heya's face as her vision fixed on it, waiting for the guy to say something.
Asa felt a chill running down her non-existent body.
What kind of interaction was this? What relationship did Mia and Heya have? Why were they so close like this? More importantly, why did this Heya guy look and sound exactly like Joan Eve?
If her guess was right, Asa assumed Joan Eve was having the same fate as she did—being a silent spectator inside the body of Heya and now probably cringing over the interaction that Heya and Mia were having.
Heya took a deep breath as Mia cleaned the bloodstains from his face, the cloth cool against his skin. The events of the vision still lingered in his mind. "They wouldn't let me pass the border or Antara."
Mia paused in her gentle cleaning, her eyes locking onto Heya's. "Who wouldn't let you pass? What happened?"
Heya hesitated for a moment, the weight of the experience evident in his eyes. "It was the border guards. They were aggressive, and I couldn't hold my anger as well. It was my fault."
Mia sighed. "You shouldn't have fought back. Didn't you tell them the condition we are in?"
Heya nodded. "And they said I am slandering you." He paused for a moment. "That's what gets me mad."
Mia sighed, finishing cleaning the bloodstains and placing the cloth aside. "I told you I should be the one entering the city and explain everything to father."
Heya stared at Mia with deep affection. Mia might be used to such a warm gaze, but Asa, on the other hand, felt like gagging, seeing a clone of Joan Eve looking at her with eyes full of love.
"It'd be dangerous for a beauty to travel alone," he said with a playful grin.
A hint of blush appeared on Mia's face. "Stop with your sweet talk," she demanded. "Now, whose blood is this? Did you kill all of those border guards?"
Suddenly, Joan's face turned serious again. "I don't want to kill innocent people; after all, they are just doing their job," he reasoned. "So, naturally, I got defeated by them, and they tried to put me back into the forest but got lost on their way. We ended up in the eastern forest."
Mia gasped, "Eastern forest? The war military camp area?"
During the war, Mia's father formed a secret troop and trained them in a hidden location, which happened to be the Eastern Forest. The training was said to be intense and harsh, pushing humans to the brink and turning them into killing machines.
Mia herself had never seen the camp or directly heard about it. Being a young woman in the Royal Garden Tower, Mia spent her days safely but lonely, without any worry about the war.
The war had long died down, and it had been five years since peace was restored to the land.
After the war, the secret was revealed. Everyone knew about the existence of the secret troop and the location of the hidden military camp.
This aroused the curiosity of the masses. Not long after peace was restored to Antara, many civilians, mainly teenagers, ventured into the Eastern Forest to see the secret military camp with their own eyes.
The old military soldiers who used to live in the camp located in the eastern forest had long returned home to their families, leaving the camp empty with nothing but their old belongings.
There was a rumor going around in the central region that back in wartime, the soldiers loved to torture the enemies in the camp to extract information from them. Many souls had suffered and died.
Not only that, during the training, many troops died from torture, experiencing a harsh death that prevented their souls from resting in peace.
After the place became empty, those souls returned and haunted the camp.
Although these were just conspiracy theories made up by visitors to the empty military camp, many people believed them.
At that time, Mia had been exiled from Antara because she went insane with her predictions of the future.
Before being exiled, trapped inside the Royal Garden Tower all alone, Mia found an interest in sitting in a quiet place, controlling her breath with her eyes closed.
At first, she only did this because she felt at peace and without worries when doing it. But as she did it more often, she started to see visions instead of darkness when she closed her eyes.
These visions varied.
She saw Antara's war dying down and the territory of the land becoming smaller.
She saw a trusted right-hand man of her father being killed by the enemy.
She saw betrayal and quickly told her father about it, saving him from impending havoc.
She saw a sword and told her father about it, giving him the idea to create the Night's Edge to bring peace to the land.
All that she had seen so far always came true, and she quickly gained a reputation as a sorcerer, a fortune-teller.
Everyone regarded her well until she started to make prophecies about a future catastrophe that she claimed to be worse than the war.
Not wanting to believe what she said, the people deemed her to be insane.
At the same time, her father was having worries about the guardians of the Night's Edge, which at that time had already been sealed underground.
Mia believed that her father loved her and trusted her so much that her father tasked her to go live in the underground camp he had built to guard the sword.
At first, Mia could go to the border once a week to get food supply.
Once a week turned into once a month, and suddenly the system changed, and Mia was not allowed to enter Antara. Food supply would be given by guards every now and then.
She thought something bad must have happened in Antara for her father to not want her to cross the border.
Never once was she tempted to use her sorcery ability to see what was hidden before her eyes.
She chose to blindly trust her family.
The people underground then grew and created a clan called Blood drops.
The food supply that the government sent was no longer sufficient for their growing population.
Then, Mia, being a genius, found ways to help the people stay alive.
She asked the guards to send her any unused books in Antara.
Among those books, she found a particular interest in ancient magic books.
She then started to learn all kinds of sigils and magics.
Accidentally putting a preserving spell on herself, she made herself stay young for more than the normal human does.
Then, she found a lighting system so that the people wouldn't have to live in the dark anymore.
She put a door at the entrance to the underground to give the people more privacy and found another airing system for them to live normally like other humans in the upper ground do.
She learned magic and sigils day and night, finally finding a way to make a small field and garden without direct sunlight.
She taught the people how to stay alive and how to maintain their lives.
Time flew by, the young ones turned old, and the babies became teenagers. Only she stayed the same.
Everyone respected her as their leader, acknowledging her as someone magical who came from heaven to help their lives, and she accepted their respect wholeheartedly.
Mia shook her head, trying to erase the memory from the past that just crossed her mind, setting her attention back to Heya. "What happened in the Eastern Forest?" she repeated her question.
Heya stared blankly at the air, the weight of the past events evident in his eyes. "The place was haunted, Mia. I saw things... heard things."