"Why don’t you ask Lightchaser?"
She didn’t say it outright, but the aning was obvious. It was about Lynx Duke’s burial location.
Of course Rita had already asked. She wasn’t that rigid.
"For the record, I did," Rita replied. "But Lightchaser was dropped there directly. She doesn’t know the exact ti. She only rembers appearing beside a fireplace the mont she entered the ga."
Technically, that entry ti could be used as a rough reference for when Lynx Duke appears.
But Rita had the pocket watch map now. Nothing was more precise than that.
More importantly, she had already seen Lynx Duke’s appearance at Dustfire’s old dinner table.
The real issue now was the owner of Cat’s Ideal. King.
As she walked out of the castle, Rita pulled the ship’s wheel closer and examined it again and again, searching for clues.
She had noticed how By referred to King.
In Vineborne language, it was "it."
Was it a cat? Or sothing else?
She asked directly, "Are you King’s relic?"
The six cats on the wheel blinked at the sa ti.
By now, Rita understood. That ant yes.
But when it ca to anything more specific, like whether King was actually a cat or whether the burial ti matched what By said, the six little "vice captains" imdiately played dumb again.
Rita didn’t mind.
She already had the key answer.
Once the pocket watch heated up for the first ti, she would get Lynx Duke’s burial ti. Then she could swap in King’s na and verify By’s information.
She opened the battlefield chat and skimd through it.
Not many people were talking anymore.
Compared to when she first entered the ga, it felt almost deserted.
Sotis only one or two ssages appeared in a minute. Most of them were requests to buy invasion sequences or world fragnts.
Compared to that, the lively cooperation back in Quiet Mountain felt like a dream.
She had only been in the ga for a day, yet she finished scrolling through the entire day’s chat quickly.
She was mainly looking for ssages from players who had entered the Graveyard of Bones.
But both Nivalis and B80 could see the tension in her expression.
Every now and then, she would pause, staring at the chat window without typing anything.
At so point, a coin appeared in her hand again.
She had gotten used to spinning it whenever she was thinking. Most of the ti, it was to access the mories inside it.
But not this ti.
The coin spun between her fingers.
Skill: Brief Departure.
As long as the coin spins for more than two seconds, she becos undetectable, unseen, unheard, and untraceable until it stops.
Against players who had already begun to break free from divine grace, item effects were weakened significantly.
Still better than nothing.
Nivalis couldn’t hold back.
"What are you thinking about?"
B80 spoke first, offering its analysis.
"You’re hesitating about whether to tell everyone that the fourth bell will co imdiately after the ga ends, right?"
Nivalis added, "Are you worried that revealing that will cause even more frequent and intense wars?"
Rita snapped out of her thoughts. She put the coin away and kept walking.
"No. That information won’t stay secret anyway. If it’s real and unavoidable, anyone who enters a burial ti will eventually get hints from Starsea gods."
She had done all this, but she never saw other worlds as her responsibility.
No matter how brutal the wars got, she wouldn’t feel guilty.
She wouldn’t step forward to judge or pity anyone either.
If nothing can be changed, then keep quiet.
One of the few principles she actually followed.
"I’m thinking about the timing of the fourth pendulum strike..."
Each bell had only ever co with a vague tifra.
Only when the pendulum entered Starsea did players get a real warning.
Was it because Starsea or the gods didn’t want to give an exact ti?
She dismissed that imdiately.
This wasn’t about personality or morality. Their interests were aligned.
If Starsea could provide an exact ti, it would.
In fact, judging from how eager it seed to rge worlds before, it would probably welco the chaos.
More likely, it didn’t know either.
Maybe the pendulum itself didn’t follow any fixed pattern.
The first three strikes had co at similar points, just a few days before the next Divine Ga.
Quiet Mountain, Divine Instruction, and Graveyard of Bones all had similar durations.
Anyone who had survived three strikes, no matter how cautious, wouldn’t expect the fourth to co so soon.
She stopped walking.
Through the castle gates, she could hear distant explosions of skills echoing through the fog.
Fragnts of thought surfaced in her mind.
They were standing on the hands of a clock.
The soul flas buried here had beco part of Order.
The pendulum existed to destroy the soul flas lit by Starsea.
Soul flas... again. Always circling back to that.
This ga only allowed players who had begun breaking free from divine grace.
And even if they died here, they would respawn at the entrance.
A thought slowly took shape.
Could the players here, standing on the hands of ti, actually be influencing the speed of the fourth strike?
Maybe the first three strikes were also affected, just too slightly to notice.
Or maybe before the pendulum started moving, even Starsea couldn’t predict anything.
None of it had solid proof.
If... if what happened inside Graveyard of Bones really could affect the pendulum...
Then it would have been better if the fourth strike happened in Quiet Mountain.
The thought flashed by.
And just as quickly, it unsettled her.
Starsea was already in ruins.
Every player here had blood on their hands.
Quiet Mountain didn’t.
But then again...
Wasn’t Starsea’s suffering caused by Quiet Mountain in the first place?
Other worlds weren’t her responsibility.
Quiet Mountain even less so.
She walked into the cold fog.
Moisture clung to her hair, her lashes, her eyes.
Rita said nothing.
She simply moved forward, focused, her expression almost gentle.
But Nivalis and B80 both knew.
She had run into another problem.
Flower Crown Murder drifted behind her again, scattering loosely in the air, unwilling to wrap around her.
Even the surrounding fog seed to avoid her.
As she walked along the path, the street lamps lit up one by one.
Each fla flickered violently inside its glass casing.
And as she passed...
They went dark again.
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