Chapter 19: The Green Ghost

“Ugh… not again.”

Serayne let out a weary breath, her lynx ears drooping as she stared at the iron pedestal. Wisps of black smoke curled lazily from its surface. Gathering mana in her palm, she carefully brushed away the scorched residue of the ruined array, wiping the metal clean for another attempt.

It was her thirteenth failure. 

Judging by the dark smudges dusting her cheeks, a little soot from each attempt had decided to stick around as a souvenir. Yet despite the grinding fatigue and a rising urge to fling the manual against the wall, she couldn't deny she was making progress.

Her very first attempt had only collapsed on the final stroke, but subsequent trials quickly proved that reaching the finish line once didn't mean she had mastered the basics. Sometimes an uneven surge of mana was all it took to blow the whole thing apart before she even finished two glyphs.

Now she could at least spot her own mistakes, maintain a steadier mana flow, and reach the final stages more consistently before the iron slab could mock her with its snarky appraisal for apprentice alchemists.

If it takes longer and longer for it to blow up, that must mean I'll eventually stop blowing it up at all.

She deemed that comforting enough logic to press on, though before the next attempt, she had to pause, flex her stiff fingers, and wait for her mana to refill. Pure stubbornness, as it turned out, wasn't a valid fuel for drawing matrices.

Afternoon bled into evening, darkness fell outside, and Serayne continued cross-referencing lines with the reference diagram, adjusting her hand position, and wiping the slate clean again and again. Until finally, as she completed the last symbol, no explosion came.

Instead, a soft golden light ignited within the engraved grooves. It rippled smoothly through the entire array, illuminating the outer circle, the inscribed triangle, and each glyph etched between them.

Serayne drew her finger back, hardly daring to breathe for several seconds, as though a sudden movement might offend the matrix and tempt it to join the graveyard of its predecessors.

The light held steady.

“Golden legendary!” burst from her lips. She pressed both hands to her cheeks, inadvertently smearing more soot across her face, but her grin stretched so wide she forgot her exhaustion entirely, her animal ears giving a happy little quiver.

The finished diagram looked brazenly simple compared to the grueling labor she’d poured into it. But before she could hold that against it, three thick, curved struts extended outward from the corners of the inscribed triangle.

Serayne inspected them, then glanced over at the nearby cauldron, whose rounded base had previously required propping up between loose stones.

“So that’s why you don’t have legs… Someone actually thought ahead for once.”

After carefully inspecting the completed pedestal, she checked the alarm clock and found it was already past eleven at night - which readily explained both the pitch-black window and the vocal protests from her stomach.

Food first, then a quick crate run before it gets any later. I've had more than enough explosions in my own house for one day.

***

The night breeze brushed Serayne’s face as she drifted through the canopy. After spending endless hours hunched over the iron pedestal, the cool air and the need to spot handholds felt like a surprisingly pleasant change of pace.

Coasting on a short glide, she relaxed her shoulders and let her momentum carry her along its arc before snagging a hanging creeper to pivot and change direction, savoring the thrill of a freedom that had seemed impossible only days ago.

She could have called it freedom, the joy of living, or something equally poetic, but right now her attention was far more effectively hooked by a pale green luminescence glowing through the foliage.

Supply crates possessed the undeniable virtue of not requiring a poetic mood to brighten her day.

She already had nine crates tucked inside her spatial pouch. A tenth was secured against her ribs by a makeshift loop of vine, cradled by her forearm so she wouldn't have to cram another rigid box among her delicate herbs.

Her white dress strained against the pressed edge of the box, and she shifted the cargo periodically to keep it from digging into her chest or hindering her reach, rapidly concluding she ought to head back.

Right then, she caught another glimmer.

“Just one more… Alright, but this is seriously the last one,” she murmured, making a promise whose credibility hinged entirely on whether she spotted anything else on the way home.

She lowered herself along the trunk, using a dangling creeper to control her descent, scooped up the crate, and pulled herself back up, minding her paralyzed legs so they wouldn't snag on an exposed root.

She spent no more than a few seconds near the ground. The fluid grace of the maneuver wasn't born of some sudden upgrade to her Talent, but from an instinctual grasp of how far a shove would carry her and exactly when to extend a hand for the next branch.

Over the past few days, she had practiced at every opportunity. Distances were easier to judge, jarring midair corrections were fewer, and she could even pluck certain plants without having to settle down in the dirt each time.

Her legs still required conscious vigilance, especially on low descents, but otherwise moving with Featherstep was becoming a skill she could genuinely rely on.

Hauling two crates outside the pouch left her with no desire to push her luck, so she adjusted her bindings and beelined straight for The Crimson Spire, deciding eleven crates were more than enough reason to call it a night.

Back inside, she unpacked them one by one, sorting the contents into piles until the floor resembled an unholy union between a convenience store and a home goods aisle.

For food, she unboxed four portions of bread, three packs of instant noodles, three canned meals, two self-heating ration kits, three large meat buns, two steamed buns, a sausage, and a pack of twelve frozen pork and chive dumplings.

The beverage haul was equally generous: three bottles of mineral water, a tea, a lemon-lime soda, a cola, three cans of beer, a small bottle of hard liquor, and an energy drink - the sight of which made Serayne wonder if she shouldn't have found it before wrestling with the alchemical matrix.

The sundries, however, brought her the greatest joy. Rations were a survival necessity, but a pack of sanitary pads, two sets of cotton sports underwear, and a box of tissues were gentle reminders that daily life could still hold small, human dignities.

Beside them, she laid out a two-hundred-milliliter enamel mug, a loud floral quilted coat, a red apron, a memory foam pillow, a little pouch featuring a yellow duck, a bottle of facial cleanser, and a set of ten steel hangers.

Under normal circumstances, she would have called the haul utterly chaotic, but here she could instantly find a use for almost everything - even if looking at the garish floral coat forced her to admit that comfort and aesthetics didn't always see eye to eye.

She held up the apron with undisguised pleasure, holding it against her sundress and looking down as the red fabric draped over her chest and flared over her lap.

Protecting her dress from stains and stray splashes was a blessing, especially after her recent misadventures with charcoal and soot. She hung the apron by the workshop entrance and set about stowing the rest of her haul.

Only once everything was put away did she settle before the console to review the pending trades from Serava, keeping to their agreement on daily settlement.

Another twenty-odd boxes of test tubes awaited her. She accepted them as gleefully as if the merchant had sent raw materials instead of empty vials, confirmed the trade, and set about bottling the rest of her initial brew.

That finally emptied the cauldron, freeing it up for thorough cleaning ahead of the next brew. She listed the filled vials on her stall, well aware that demand hadn't waned in the slightest.

Other arrivals were growing more accustomed to their Talents as well. While that didn't magically increase the resource yield from Gathering, smoother skill execution made hunting and daily chores considerably easier.

More monster cores were surfacing on the market, with some sellers demanding mana potions exclusively - echoing Serayne's established exchange rate of ten vials per E-rank core.

Urging requests flooded her inbox, but she refused to let them dictate her schedule. The clearer her past mistakes became, the less sense it made to rush out another batch brewed the exact same flawed way.

Only after confirming her listings did she open the Regional Channel, and the very first post took the wind right out of her sails.

[It appeared! The ghost showed up again!]

[Do you seriously want someone to come beat your ass?]

[I have proof this time! It flew right past my window, the console had a clear angle and I snapped a picture. Look!]

[Attachment: image]

Serayne opened the photo and leaned in. Against a backdrop of pitch-black night hung a blurry, pale green smudge of an uncomfortably humanoid shape.

A chill ran down her spine.

So something really was out there? But I was just roaming the canopy for over an hour.

Only moments ago, she had been thrilled with her eleven-crate haul. Now she wondered how close she might have drifted past that thing, oblivious in the leaves as she tunnel-visioned on loot.

[Holy shit, so it wasn't a joke.]

[I saw it too! A white dress, kinda dirty, long hair, no face.]

[Green light was shining over its whole body. Looked like a woman.]

[It moved so freakin' weirdly.]

[Like a number seven. Seriously, the whole body was bent like a seven.]

[Green? Didn't Zara say blue earlier?]

[Blue-green, it was in the chat.]

[You have a photo right in front of you and you're still arguing?]

[Since when does the console take photos?]

[Check the small panel, there are more features than you think.]

[Thanks, checking now.]

Serayne read the description a second time, then slowly lowered her eyes to her own dress - which, despite her best efforts, still bore grime from work and slipping through branches in the dark.

Her long hair fell across her face as she looked down. She brushed it back on instinct, then froze, hand arrested against her cheek.

Meanwhile, the channel had already moved on.

[Forget ghosts for a second, Serayne listed potions again, over two hundred this time.]

[BRB.]

[Buy first, chat later.]

[Damn, you guys are fast.]

[Serayne Veyra, got any more? Post 'em before they're gone!]

Purchase notifications chimed in rapid succession, but Serayne had stopped paying attention altogether, staring at the photo with a sinking, horribly familiar realization.

A white dress, smudges of grime, hair obscuring the face, and unnaturally angled legs that didn't always follow the torso the way an able-bodied person’s would.

Add to that a greenish glow radiating from the front - right where she had been clutching a supply crate against her ribs.

No…

She zoomed in on the snapshot, studied the posture of the arms, and could suddenly make out the faint, boxy outline of the crate cradled against the chest. The puzzle snapped together with an answer so painfully obvious she couldn't even manage to be properly angry.

“The ghost… is me?”

She looked at the empty crates stacked nearby, back to the photo, and down at her dress again, watching her earlier dread melt into a vast, creeping wave of pure humiliation.

The Green Ghost of Hollowbriar Forest… Are you fucking kidding me.

The longer she stared at the picture, the less doubt remained. That was precisely how she must look from afar - hunched over a crate, drifting through the canopy, hair veiling her face, with limp legs trailing behind at an awkward, broken angle.

“Brilliant. Just brilliant,” she muttered, burying her forehead in her palm. “I've spent days terrified of running into myself.”

All that straining her ears, scanning the branches, and putting off foraging runs so she wouldn't cross paths with a ghost that people only ever spotted right when she was hauling loot home.