Shadow Slave

In the ensuing silence, the smile slowly disappeared from Cassie’s face, replaced by confusion. Feeling the sudden tension, she asked:

“Uh… what’s wrong?”

Sunny sighed.

“No, nothing is wrong. It’s just that that direction is the one we wanted to avoid.”

After some thought, he added:

“That’s where I came from yesterday. There’s a lot of scavengers down there.”

The blind girl’s face fell.

“Oh.”

Nephis, who was quietly listening to them, gave him an indecipherable look and finally spoke:

“Tell us more about the castle.”

A shadow of the previous excitement returned to Cassie’s eyes. With a serious nod, she began describing her vision.

“I dreamt of a vast, ruined city built of weathered stone. It was surrounded by tall, impregnable walls. Various monsters were wandering its narrow streets. In the center of the city, the was a hill, and on that hill stood a magnificent castle.”

She smiled.

“But there were no monsters in the castle! Instead, it was full of people. I think… no, I’m sure that they were Awakened. Some were guarding the walls, some were going about their lives without a care in the world. There was food, safety, and laughter!”

‘Well, that sounds great.’

really existed, then all of their problems would be solved.

see anything

to remember. Then,

saw Sunny leading me through the gates of the castle!

her doll-like face, beaming with so much joy that Sunny couldn’t help but curl

was that, when talking about reaching the castle, the blind girl only mentioned the two of them.

and secretly glanced at Nephis, trying to discern if she had picked up on that

Without showing much emotion, she thought for

we will go

***

planning for the journey and preparing to abandon the temporary

came to a sudden realization, which almost made his head explode from bafflement. That mind-blowing

formed a certain impression of the confident, distant girl. Later, her behavior and the different revelations about Changing Star’s past only served to

and strange speech patterns made people interacting with her feel unnerved and rattled, often revealing more than they had been planning to. The less she talked, the more she seemed to know. That silent,

that impression turned out to be

to her a bit more and observing their interactions with Cassie, Sunny almost fainted when he realized that Nephis was simply

of the sentence and fall silent. Her tone never matched what she was trying to

to that was the fact that, like many introverted people, Nephis was not in a habit of openly showing her emotions. It’s not that she didn’t have feelings: it’s just that she was really bad at emoting them!

most of the time, she simply chose to talk as little as possible or not to talk at

general weirdness, was

in fact, she was just shy and

all his might but still failed to stop himself from

not in line with

person to be the main character of any event. At the center stage, there were always confident, strong

expressing herself and lacked social skills did not mean that she was not strong. In fact, it might have meant the opposite. She still achieved everything that she had achieved,