Chapter 740
They dropped from the rooftop together, landing in the narrow gap between two stone buildings with barely more sound than cloth brushing masonry.
After that, Hroth stopped acting like a man stalking prey and started moving like someone who belonged in the city. He walked. Normally. No roof-hopping. No dramatic sneaking.
Just a steady pace through the capital’s quieter arteries, cloak settled properly, posture relaxed enough that a distant observer would think he was simply returning from late work. Ludger matched him.
Still, “normally” didn’t mean “carelessly.”
Hroth clearly didn’t enjoy attention any more than Ludger did. He chose side streets and dim lanes where the lantern light didn’t reach as well, routes between warehouses, closed courtyards, and servant alleys where only stray cats and bad memories lingered at this hour.
No crowds. No curious eyes. Ludger watched him while they moved. He wondered, briefly, whether trusting this man even this much was a mistake.
Hroth was useful. Sharp. Connected. And more importantly, he was a spy from another country pretending to be something else half the time. That kind of person didn’t become harmless just because he sounded casual on a rooftop.
Still… Ludger had a feeling Hroth wouldn’t do anything stupid tonight. Not because he was kind. Because he was practical. And practical men usually preferred mutually beneficial arrangements over pointless betrayal.
They turned into a darker residential lane bordered by high walls and trimmed hedges hidden behind ironwork. After a stretch of silence, Hroth spoke.
“I’m working as a bodyguard for the family that owns that tree.”
Ludger glanced at him.
“A bodyguard.”
Hroth shrugged.
“It pays.”
That was believable enough.
Ludger let the answer sit for a second, then asked, “What about your work as a guild member?”
Hroth snorted.
“The Ashbound Compact?” he said. “It lost too much influence.”
There was no affection in his tone. Just a dry assessment.
“Too many losses. Too many failed plays. Too many people realizing the name didn’t protect them anymore.”
He shoved his hands deeper into his cloak pockets as they walked.
“So most of the members started leaving.”
Ludger narrowed his eyes slightly. That tracked. A guild built too much on leverage and reputation usually started rotting the moment both got questioned.
“You left too,” Ludger said.
Hroth’s mouth twitched.
“I was already halfway out.”
Then he added, “I got this job offer not long after our duel.”
Ludger looked at him again.
“Convenient.”
Hroth barked a soft laugh.
“Yeah,” he said. “Almost like surviving a fight against a terrifying child makes people reconsider their career options.”
Ludger ignored the jab. But his thoughts moved quietly in the background. Bodyguard position. Noble family. Access to a rare tree. And a man who used to work inside one network of secrets now standing inside another. Useful. Potentially very useful.
They kept walking through the sleeping capital, two dangerous men pretending the night belonged to them. Maybe, for now, it did. Hroth eventually slowed near the end of a narrow lane and lifted a hand.
“There,” he said.
Ludger followed the line of his finger. The estate sat behind a tall wrought-iron gate worked into elegant curves and family crests. The manor beyond was large without being gaudy, all pale stone walls and dark windows, the sort of place built to suggest old money instead of loud power.
But Ludger’s eyes moved past the house almost immediately. Past the trimmed hedges. Past the carved fountain. To the tree.
It stood in the inner garden beyond the gate, slightly apart from the others, like the grounds themselves had given it room.
Even from this distance, Ludger could tell.
Same trunk shape. Same heavy, bent limbs. Same strange tension in the roots, as if the whole thing had grown while clutching the soil too tightly. He narrowed his eyes.
“It’s the same one.”
Hroth nodded once. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Ludger studied the estate, the walls, the ward lines, the placement of the tree in relation to the house. And then he frowned. He had found it.
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But he still didn’t know what to do next. There was no obvious clue hanging from a branch. No glowing rune. No sign that an illusionist had thoughtfully left a note saying good job, now continue to the next stage. Just a tree in a noble family’s garden. Eventually, Ludger asked the first useful question that came to mind.
“Are those trees common in Argarthia?”
Hroth turned to look at him fully. His expression lost the last traces of casual amusement. For the first time that night, he looked genuinely serious.
He studied Ludger for a few seconds in silence before asking, “Do you know the rumors about those trees?”
Ludger kept his eyes on the garden.
“My mother mentioned one.”
He paused.
“That they grow in places where people die full of hatred. Regret. Bad feelings.”
Hroth was quiet for another second. Then he nodded slowly.
“That is mostly true,” he said.
Ludger’s eyes shifted to him. Hroth continued, voice lower now, stripped of humor.
“However, what they truly have in common is more specific.”
He glanced back at the tree.
“They only grow in places where people with a certain kind of disease were buried.”
Ludger’s brow furrowed.
“What kind of disease?”
Hroth folded his arms, gaze distant as if he were reciting something old and unpleasant.
“It used to be more common in the past,” he said. “Especially for people who spent too much time in labyrinths.”
Ludger went still. Hroth continued.
“No one knew exactly how they got sick. There were theories. Mana poisoning. Curses. Rot from old labyrinth cores. But nothing was ever proven.”
His voice stayed even, but there was weight in it now.
“The symptoms were always similar. The person would weaken little by little. First, fatigue. Then loss of appetite. Then their body would start failing in strange ways, slower reflexes, trembling hands, fevers that came and went.”
Ludger listened without interrupting. Hroth’s eyes stayed on the tree.
“They would become more exhausted every day,” he said. “Until eventually they would fall unconscious.”
A short pause.
“And then they would never wake up.”
The night around them seemed quieter after that. Ludger looked back at the tree. Its branches twisted under the moonlight, silent and still. Not just a rare plant. A marker. A grave sign. A thing that fed on a pattern of death. His eyes narrowed.
“And this family has one growing in their garden.”
Hroth’s mouth twisted faintly.
“Yes.”
That answer felt wrong in half a dozen ways. Ludger stared at the tree again, mind already moving. People who died from a labyrinth-linked wasting disease. Buried here. Tree grown over them.
And an illusionist using the image of that tree as a clue. This wasn’t pointing toward a rich family’s garden. It was pointing toward what had been buried beneath it. Ludger went silent.
The tree stood beyond the gate, dark and unmoving, but his mind had already gone somewhere else. To Lucius’s father. A similar sickness had ruined him slowly too, hadn’t it?
Lucius had always assumed it was poison. That was the simplest answer. The cleanest one. A wealthy family man weakening day by day until even good food, expensive medicine, healers, and clerics failed to stop it.
And they had money. Enough money that if it were a normal illness, someone should have found something. A treatment. A delay. A way to buy more time. But they hadn’t. Nothing had worked. Ludger narrowed his eyes at the tree.
Maybe it wasn’t poison.
Maybe Lucius’s father had been right about the symptoms and wrong about the cause. Maybe it was closer to a curse.
Not the obvious kind with black smoke and dramatic chanting. Something worse. Something that affected the spirit or mana pathways first, and the body only showed the damage after the important parts had already begun to rot.
That would explain why normal healing failed. If the soul, the core, or the mana structure was being eaten away… Then patching the flesh would be like painting over a wall while the foundation collapsed underneath. Ludger exhaled slowly.
Then he asked, “Do you know about the people in the Empire who fell ill over the years? The ones apparently tied to Verk and the Rodericks?”
Hroth’s expression tightened slightly. So he knew the names.
“I do,” Hroth said.
Ludger glanced at him.
“But I’m not sure both situations are connected,” Hroth continued.
Ludger waited. Hroth kept his eyes on the tree as he explained.
“The old labyrinth sickness was linked to delvers. Explorers. People who spent too much time in certain labyrinth environments.” His tone was thoughtful now, more analyst than bodyguard. “The pattern was ugly, but at least it had one thing in common, exposure.”
He tilted his head faintly.
“The people tied to Verk and the Rodericks…” he said, “many of them hadn’t been in labyrinths at all.”
Ludger’s brow furrowed. Hroth nodded once.
“That’s why I’m cautious about forcing the connection.”
He folded his arms tighter.
“Something like this, if it really is tied to old labyrinth contamination, curses, or whatever it was, would be difficult to control. You don’t casually point it at selected targets without causing collateral damage.”
Ludger understood the argument. A random wasting disease from old labyrinth exposure didn’t sound like the kind of tool a conspiracy could deploy neatly against chosen enemies.
Unless… Unless they’d found a way to refine it. To isolate whatever caused it. To turn an old curse into a weapon. Ludger’s eyes narrowed again, the possibility sitting in his mind like a shard of ice.
Hard to control. But not impossible. Not for people willing to experiment. Not for people already tied to hidden routes, sealed labyrinths, and things that should have stayed buried. He looked back at the tree.
A grave marker growing over the dead. A clue left by an illusionist. And now, maybe, a thread connected to something older than the Empire’s current games. Ludger spoke quietly.
“Even if they’re not the same thing…”
Hroth glanced at him.
“They’re close enough that I can’t ignore it,” Ludger finished.
Hroth didn’t argue. Because standing there beneath the shadow of that tree, with the capital sleeping around them and too many secrets buried under rich soil… Ignoring it would have been the stupidest thing either of them could do. Ludger fell quiet again, but this time the silence wasn’t empty. It was sharp. Busy.
He stared at the tree beyond the gate while his mind began fitting the pieces together, not because they wanted to fit, but because too many of them sat too close to each other to be coincidence anymore.
The illusionist had sent a drawing. Not words. Not a place name. Not instructions. Just a tree.
A rare tree tied to old burials. To a labyrinth-born sickness. To places where people died carrying something ugly in them—or where something ugly had already been done to them.
That meant the drawing was never just “find this plant.”
It was find what this plant means.
A marker. A memory. A grave sign. Maybe even a warning.