Ch. 14
Chapter 14
Luo En wasn’t the first person to set foot in the center of Winterless Town.
Long before him, Lady Mercury had dispatched others to find out what lay here.
None of them ever came back alive.
“I... am the mayor of this town... Welcome... to Winterless Town.”
The mummy-like man spoke with the weary cadence of someone on the edge of death.
Listening to him made Luo En itch with frustration; he wished the mayor would pick up the pace.
Only Luo En seemed bothered, though. The white squirrel curled in the mayor’s arms bobbed its head in time with the slow words, clearly enjoying the rhythm.
Luo En studied him with narrowed eyes. “You’re really the mayor?”
“Yes... Even if you doubt it... the fact remains...” The mayor stroked the squirrel’s snowy fur with fingers that looked ready to snap at any moment.
“Then do you know what happened to this place?” Luo En asked, swallowing his many misgivings.
“Of course I know... But didn’t you already realize it yourself?” The mayor lifted his eyelids with visible effort. “Anyone who reaches this spot... sees the truth for themselves...”
Luo En fell silent. “So it wasn’t an illusion?”
The mayor shook his head; no further answer was needed.
Each sentence they’d heard had been no hallucination, but a faithful echo of the past.
“What happened to you?” Luo En surveyed the mayor again; nothing about the man looked remotely normal.
“When you’re trapped inside a Time Prison... you end up like this...” The mayor answered Luo En’s barrage of questions with surprising patience.
“You must have sensed it already...” He held Luo En’s gaze.
Luo En knew exactly what he meant. When he’d first grabbed the squirrel, he’d heard words he wouldn’t utter until minutes later—words that had felt like déjà vu at the time, and which he’d dismissed as tricks of the mind.
“The owner of this territory... if memory serves... should be Lady Mercury,” the mayor said slowly. “But so much time has passed... I can’t be sure...”
“Many have come seeking the truth... I always tell them... yet none can leave... just like me... no, perhaps worse off than me...”
The mayor never hid the truth.
Tragically, every time he spoke it, no one survived to carry it beyond the town’s borders.
To those outside, Winterless Town had merely been frozen for a short spell.
To the mayor, the days had blurred into an endless night.
At first he’d tried counting them, but eventually he gave up.
It wasn’t only the town that had been sealed; time itself had been locked in ice.
The irony stung: the place once called Winterless Town had never known winter—until now.
Before the catastrophe, spring reigned eternal, and the river bordering the town nourished everything in sight.
Then the cult of the Evil God arrived, and the rot began.
Luo En, a complete newcomer to the Bicolor Realm, frowned. “By the way—what exactly is an Evil God? Sounds ominous.”
Normally, such a question would earn an eye-roll.
But the mayor, ground down by years outside of time, answered with endless patience.
“The Evil God... is like the deep-blue moon in the sky, the Mother Tree visible from every corner, the volcano that never stops erupting.
A power that grants our wishes... lends us strength...
But unlike Them... the Evil God is no single entity.
It joins with those who worship it, gifting them fire... brute strength...”
“Lift the clothes of the frozen, and you’ll see the Evil God etched into their chests.”
The first to embrace the Evil God were the Giants.
Each Giant carried one within its breast from birth; no exceptions.
Humans were different. To claim that power, they had to invite the Evil God in.
Thus, among humans, the cult remained fringe—rare, almost exotic.
The mayor’s gaze grew hollow. “But it was wrong... We should never have accepted the Evil God... We misunderstood everything...”
Luo En had already dragged over a small stool and sat, ready to milk the mummy-like elder for every scrap of story.
The mayor’s manner of speech grated on the ears, yet the man radiated plot-critical importance.
Instinct told Luo En the mayor was a walking cache of clues.
Yet the mayor stopped short, dangling the tale just out of reach.
Luo En hated few things more than cliff-hangers.
“Finally... someone saw the error... and borrowed a spell from the Mage Tower...”
The Tower housed worshippers of the Moon; they were only too happy to supply something against the despised Evil God.
Obtaining the magic proved easy—almost insultingly so.
The mayor raised a trembling finger, pointing into the distance, eyes unfocused.
“He cast the spell right there... freezing everyone who bore the Evil God...”
“It unfolded exactly as you saw...”
Every newcomer, like Luo En, was plunged into a replay of the past.
Every line of dialogue matched the ghosts that still walked these streets.
“But he never considered... what disaster the spell would unleash...”
Luo En was suddenly wide awake. “So the one who borrowed the magic is the real culprit?”
Lady Mercury had sent him to identify the mastermind; looked like the job was easier than expected.
He wouldn’t even need an arrest—just report back and a whole territory would be his.
Crazy! Is this what another world is like? Everything just falls into your lap.
Even if he never became a major lord, he could still carve out a comfy fiefdom as a minor one. He could already picture the cushy life ahead.
The more backward the society looked, the richer the perks of being a lord.
He’d made up his mind: he was going to be the greediest streetlamp hanged ghost this side of the river!
What? Where had Luo En’s sense of shame gone? He’d tossed it out somewhere during his days as a street bum.
“You’re right... and the person who borrowed that magic is—” The Mayor paused, then answered in his gravest voice, “me.”
“Good evening, Mayor. I need you to come with me.”
In an instant, Luo En’s easy grin vanished, replaced by a face carved from ice.