Chapter 37: Witch Temple and Werewolf Investigations

The night was pitch black, and Jace walked in utter darkness, his feet wet as if it had just rained, and muddy as if he were in a swamp.

He doesn’t know where he is, the sewers of Stormwind? Or was it ……

He didn’t know how long he had been walking, but he vaguely felt as if someone was following behind him, but when he turned back, it was once again complete darkness, and he couldn’t see anything clearly.

Even if someone is following, they simply can’t see it.

Jace felt trapped inside an inexplicable maze, and there was only one way to get out of it, and that was to stick to one side of the wall.

With that thought, he used his hand to hold up the wall, but his palm felt like it pressed against the top of something cold and soft.

Fixing my eyes, this turned out to be a face!

The entire wall was piled high with heads, countless faces huddled together in agonized stares, and Jace felt a chill run down the back of his head in terror and snapped his eyes open.

Before his eyes, the sun had shone through the small window, and a fine dust hung in the air.

Hanging the sweat-soaked bedding out the window, right in front of the canal that glimmers with morning waves, is a beautiful sight.

It’s broken. It’s late.

Jess grabbed his shirt and pants and ran all the way down the stairs, threw them over the edge of the river and jumped straight into the canal, not yet washing his hair, only to see a piece of young men bathing around him seem like frightened ducks clattering and a piece of them jumping up onto the edge of the river and fleeing in a panic.

It’s the guards coming to rush.

Jace skillfully swooped down to the edge of the river, grabbed his clothes and ran for the wooden canal bridge, dressing as he ran, watching the guards on the other side of the river behind him chase people around like they were chicks.

Stormwind doesn’t actually allow bathing in the newly repaired canals, the king or one of the lords thinks it detracts from the cityscape of the new city.

From Jace’s own point of view, a bunch of naked men writhing and twisting around on the city’s main street every morning did seem slightly indecent, and he really didn’t much want the canal that flowed through the front of his rented house to end up looking like the Ganges.

But washing in this river is also really much more painful than fetching water from a basin or something, so it’s absolutely impossible for him to give up this right.

And the guards of Storm City seem to have long been relieved, even if they catch someone just give him a kick, never seen anyone really taken away, and from the beginning of the two or three days to rush once, now a week or two are not seen once.

Arriving at Marin’s quarters, where the mage had not yet arrived, Jace quickly cleaned the room, then took Marin’s quill and a scroll of paper, ready to write down last night’s spell.

When he got home last night his mind was muddled and he was also too tired to forget the work he was supposed to be doing. Luckily, he had slept and had a nightmare and still remembered what Gagin had said last night.

Foaiket.

Jace was going to use the English alphabet to roughly write down the pronunciation of the spell he heard to help him memorize it, after all, how the Chinese characters looked like some sort of unknown magical rune was more likely to raise suspicion if someone else saw it.

He mumbled twice as he memorized it.

The spell was something Gagin had heard from somewhere unknown, and with Jace’s guesses, it must not have been accurate enough.

Because these warlocks have no avenue to learn dark spells, which are metamorphoses based on void languages such as demonic, the sounds emitted must not be able to utilize the full power of the spell.

Thinking back to last night, Gagin’s spell on him had limited utility, probably related to the Shadow Protection Potion, and he managed to counter Gagin with that spell.

Just how did he accomplish the spell casting without doing any spell casting actions or having any mana as a drain?

I wonder when I can reproduce this magic.

As he was thinking, Marin had come up behind him.

Startled, Jess turned around and asked, “Master when did you get here I didn’t even hear the door slam.”

“Because you didn’t even close the door.” Marin pointed to the note under Jace’s hand and asked, “What kind of writing is that?”

“It’s ……” Jace looked at what he had written, stammered for a moment, and said, “So what, Latin.”

“Latin?”

“A childhood playmate invented the code word, his name was Latin.”

“Interesting.” Marin asked again, “And what does the word mean?”

“That’s the problem, I don’t know.” Jace said, “I had a dream last night about my friends shouting that word, and I couldn’t recall exactly what it was when I thought about it. I was just resting here for a while and it popped back into my head, thinking it might help to write it down, and then you came in.”

“How do you pronounce it?” Marin asked, touching the teapot.

“Fark.” Jace spoke with a straight face.

Marin nodded and said, “Love it, Mr. Sesso, but I think this Mr. Latin has the potential to be a mage.”

“He died.” Jace sighed softly and said, “He disappeared in the Silver Pine Forest afterward, probably killed by orcs or taken captive by werewolves, and I still have a hard time thinking about it.”

“Too bad.” Marin said, “It also means we’ll never know what ‘fark’ means.”

Jace stifled a laugh and held his forehead and coughed twice as cover.

Speaking of werewolves, though, the ones that Morgan Raddimore had feared with a bunch of the residents of Raven Ridge had been completely absent from both his and Grid’s adventures those two days.

It can’t be the giant silver wolf, can it?

Impossible, how could the townspeople who had experienced the orc crossing in Raven Ridge not know what a werewolf looked like.

If you go out at night, you might have a chance to see it too.

Intense curiosity tickled Jace, but he wasn’t stupid enough to go to his death just to settle his curiosity, and besides, Grid would never approve.

“By the way, Master Marin, did you know that there are werewolves in the Twilight Forest?”

Marin took a piece of sugar and threw it into his teacup and said, “You’re talking about the South Irving area, aren’t you? I’ve heard a lot of people calling it the Twilight Forest now, and I wonder what the natives think of that nickname. You’re referring to the werewolf legends of Raven Ridge, aren’t you?”

Surprised, Jess asked, “You know about this too?”

“Of course.” Marin said, “The Sorcerer’s Sanctuary may be independent of Dalaran and Kenrito, but we still carry on the spirit of the old Tirisfal Council in spirit, which is to protect humanity from otherworldly magical creatures, to study any signs of influence from foreign invaders on Azeroth, and so on. We’ve come into contact with many, many immigrants who have come here from both towns over the years, and they’ve brought up the werewolf legends about Raven’s Ridge, and there’s been a strong request from many of them for the Sorcerer’s Sanctuary to send someone to take a look.”

“What’s the result?”

“No results.” Marin said, “We’ve sent out three teams of mages and trainee mages, including a few of the best of our students, whose talent is no less than that of the new generation of young men who have sprung up since the war in Dalaran. Even so, in the end, nothing was found but a few resurrected dead. We suspected that someone was using those dark energies to learn necromancy and secretly stirring up the cemeteries of Raven Ridge and Nighttown, about which, in the end, nothing was found either.”

“Did you look for it at night?” Jess asked.

Marin nodded and said, “Yes, Master Andromas even emphasized the nighttime appearances that the refugees mentioned, but again, even at night there were no so-called werewolves present.”

Jace thought this whole thing was starting to get a little confusing, “If there were no werewolves, why did the townspeople who had never seen a werewolf before associate the wounds on the victim with a werewolf, and why not an orc? If there are remnants of Shadow energy …… then an orc warlock should be able to do this as well?”

The old mage threw a few copper coins into Jace’s hand, and Jace picked up one of them.

“What does this mean, could it be that someone has been hired to spread panic and rumors between Raven Ridge and Grantown, trying to get the people in both areas to flee sooner then in order to accomplish their ulterior secrets?”

Marlin said, “No, you go to the Blue Hermit and get me a small crab cake and I’ll tell you a couple of our guesses.”

Jess had no choice but to hold up all the coins and stuff them in his pocket and head out the door.

The Blue Hermitage was still quite busy in the morning, with a large group of apprentices and mages gathered here like college students running to the cafeteria between classes to eat and drink while talking.

Jace ordered a black coffee for two coppers, cheap and sobering, and two gulps of it cleared away the mental distress of last night’s nightmare.

In Stormwind, tea was many times more expensive than coffee, and tea like Eden Marin’s Tea Goldthorn Herb, an herb in itself, was expensive.

Although coffee beans can boost the spirit, there is little medicinal value in terms of magic, and for many workers drinking coffee is not as exciting as just drinking alcohol. So the consumers of coffee are mostly students, clerical workers and other ordinary people who don’t have much money.

Dalaran is the largest coffee consuming region in the whole continent, the poor mages and alchemists there developed countless strange “magic fertilizers” to increase the production of coffee in order to drink coffee, and in the end, the price of coffee was ridiculously low.

However, most of the herbs were species that had been subjected to the natural magical energy of Azeroth for tens of thousands of years, and could not be catalyzed by relying on simple magic, so it had not been possible to make a breakthrough in this area, and teas with no special utility were not considered to be true teas, so the prices were high.

I didn’t realize that a drink that I didn’t really care to buy in my past life had instead become so poor that I was forced to drink it in a more backward place.

Setting down his small glass, Jace glanced over to the corner of the tavern out of habit and was surprised to see Grid, he even thought he was seeing things.

“Grady?”

“Hmm?” Grid looked up just in time to see Jace.

Jace walked over and sat down next to Grid and said, “What brings you to the Mage Quarter?”

“To wait for you of course, why are you out so early?”

“I’m not off work yet na, come here and rest for a while.”

Grid glanced at his surroundings and said, “It’s just nice to be a mage, and the place where you work is pretty enough, with fresh air, like a garden, not to mention, the students are good looking too.”

Jace let out a chuckle and asked, “Surely there’s something you came to see me about?”

Grid took a sip of milk from the large glass in front of him and said, “The Warrior’s Guild remembers, doesn’t it?”

“Remember that.” Jace narrowed his eyes, looked into his glass, and said, “Why are you drinking milk?”

“No drinking on the job.” Grid said seriously, “The Warrior’s Guild has offered me a job, quite an important one, and the pay is good, so I don’t want to keep it all to myself, and I’m not thinking of you, am I?”

Jace asked skeptically, “Afraid you can’t handle it on your own?”

The dwarf let out a laugh, “What difference does it make if I bring you along on a job I can’t handle alone?”

“Cow, griffin rider.” Jace took the milk from the dwarf’s cup and poured a little into his own coffee and said, “I’m going back to my boss’s first ah, and he asked me to bring him a snack.”

“Hey, wait ……” said the dwarf, stopping Jace, “Frankly speaking, this time it is to deal with wolves, probably more than one, without a backup or something really difficult. Besides in the Twilight Forest, without you I can die several times, I just was joking, you do not take it seriously …… I do not have any other helpers that can be trusted.”

“Where’s the wolf?” Jace asked.

“A farm southeast of Shining Gold Town is rumored to have wolves making a den, and traps have been set to catch them several times to no avail.” The dwarf took out a piece of paper that was about to be rubbed out and laid it flat on the table, saying, “It’s a bounty issued by the Stormwind City Guard, probably because the farm owner over there asked them for help, and they’re short of men.”

Jace took a look at it, it only said the address, the person asking for help, but not the bounty.

“Where is the bounty written?”

“Five silver coins.” The dwarf says, “Not bad at all.”

Jace repeated, “I mean where’s the bounty on this, if the city put out a bounty, shouldn’t it be clearly written?”

That said, he already felt something was wrong with the paper.

Grid finally admitted, “It was written by the Warrior’s Guild, who took the quest and released it to us, the members.”

Jess asked, “So what you’re saying is, they’re taking the difference in the middle?”

Grid said, “I can raise my class by completing quests and then acquire harder quests, the guild assigns quests of varying difficulty based on each member’s class assertion of their level. For example, if my current class is Recruit, then I won’t be able to go and help the guards of the Red Ridge Mountains against the threat of the Jackal Clan. Once I complete a few missions and raise my class, then I’ll be able to.”

Jace nodded slowly, then asked, “So why don’t you just go to Red Ridge, I’m sure they’d like to put you right into the Guard.”

Grid’s eyes blinked, “Then I wouldn’t get class.”

Jace says, “This class is a warrior guild class, not a kingdom rank, right? It doesn’t seem to be very useful.”

“You have a point.” Grid rubbed his beard and said, “However, I’m too lazy to deal with those humans, so I’ll just let the Warrior Guild go to them and discuss it. As for that money the Warrior Guild took, just think of it as me paying them to contact people for me.”

Jess asked, “So when do you want to go?”

“Afternoon.”

“Too much of a rush, huh?”

“Jace, what if that family is harassed by wolves again a day late?”