Chapter 71
As soon as he opened the door and stepped out, the man took a deep breath.
“Phew.”
He thought he was going to die from holding his breath because of the cigarette smoke.
How does she gather information? What happens if she doesn’t get what he wants in two weeks? That was why he had fled the shop without asking any detailed questions.
As expected, the Back Alleys were no easy place. Especially for someone like him who had lived in the eastern district his whole life.
The man came from a fallen noble family, but noble nonetheless, and he had never ventured beyond the area around the temple. Well, if he had left home just a little later, he might have ended up living in those very back alleys.
‘That’s all in the past now.’
The man walked briskly out of the alley. Once he passed through the lower-class residential area and onto the bridge leading back to the plaza, he took off the robe he had been wearing and draped it over his arm.
The child who used to sleep curled up in a single room had grown up to become a Holy Knight. Johan smoothed down the brown hair that had been flattened by the hood and thought of the woman whose hair was as white as his uniform.
‘Eden.’
The moment he stepped off the train, Johan had turned away from his colleagues heading to their quarters and headed to the temple alone.
There, he inquired about a man named Bezel through the Holy Knights and high priests, but all he heard was that no one had ever seen or heard of anyone with that appearance and divine power.
He had even gone to the personnel office and asked about Bezel’s name, but the only answer he got was, “Oh, a famous Hunter asked about the same person not too long ago. He’s not on the roster.”
In the end, Johan turned to an informant in the Back Alleys. Answers that cannot be found in the light are often hidden in the dark. When Holy Knights had cases they couldn’t solve, they would turn to information brokers for help.
Of course, the process had to be discreet, if only to avoid the looks of people saying, “Those Holy Knights can’t even solve this one thing, so they have to go to the Back Alleys?” It was standard practice never to go in person, but to send a temple errand runner to secretly buy information.
But this time, Johan had to look into it himself. It wasn’t an official mission, and he had to conduct a background check on a victim, not a perpetrator.
If this came to light, he would be subjected to the very finger-pointing he so desperately avoided. Knowing that and still doing something this reckless was….
‘I can’t let Eden continue living with a suspicious man.’
He wasn’t quite sure what this feeling was. It felt like concern for the safety of a woman who had once been his lover, yet it also felt like a sense of deprivation stemming from the thought that someone had taken his place.
Either way, his thought that he did not want that man to stay long in Eden’s house remained unchanged.
Johan quickened his already brisk pace, as if he wanted to get as far from the west as quickly as possible.
* * *
Early April was a period when Eden paid particular attention to her commissions. It was because her work efficiency dropped from suffering through nightmares and insomnia.
She was dealing not with humans but with demons, no less. Since one moment of carelessness could cost her her life, Eden made sure to fill her schedule with only easy commissions around this time.
Thanks to that, the past few days had passed without any major incidents. As the anniversary of her parents’ death drew near, she lost her appetite, had nightmares so frequently it was sickening, and her mood would often sour even from stepping on a blade of grass while walking. But this too would be over soon.
Just three days. If she could endure this period, Eden would go back to her usual self: eating well, sleeping well, and fighting well.
Meanwhile, Eden wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been eating properly. Bezel, too, was being forced to go hungry because of her sleeplessness.
He had snuck into Eden’s bedroom at night, but couldn’t enjoy her as comfortably as before. At even the slightest stimulation, Eden would furrow her brow as if about to wake at any moment. It was the same whether it was a night she fell asleep drunk, or a night she collapsed after overworking her body through exercise.
Lapping at her lips a few times and barely scratching the surface of her curse wasn’t enough to satisfy him. This kind of intake was worse than not feeding at all. Bezel reduced the time he spent in her room and increased the frequency of his night walks. He swallowed not only living creatures but even inanimate objects like trees and rocks to soothe his burning hunger.
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