Chapter 653 Burial and the Bracelet's Changes

The death of the banshee Allirella plunged Ice Tree Village into a somber, sorrowful silence.

Even the children who usually roughhoused on the muddy roads sensed the heavy, mournful mood in the air, obediently staying inside their homes instead of going out to play.

With her warm, kind heart, this beautiful Elf from the distant northern snowfields had long since touched the villagers' closed-off hearts, earning their acceptance as a recognized part of their large family.

She had sacrificed herself through a mysterious ritual from an elven tribe, drawing the terrifying plague that should have reduced the village to ruins entirely into her own body. She paid the ultimate price, denied even the eternal peace of death as she was forced to reincarnate as a banshee.

Because of this, Allirella had become the benefactor of the entire Ice Tree Village.

"I am willing to accept my punishment, Lord Xia Nan."

Inside the guest house at the very center of Ice Tree Village, the elderly, exhausted village chief spoke with deep sincerity to the black-haired adventurer sitting across from him, who was currently grooming his Winter Wolf companion.

Half a month ago, the Adventurer Squad passing through had inflicted irreversible damage upon Ice Tree Village.

At the time, the villagers had not resisted.

However, upon learning that Allirella had completely wiped out that group of adventurers, the villagers worried that someone might come to investigate. Long before Xia Nan's group arrived, they had collectively synchronized their stories, hoping to cover up Allirella's existence and gloss over the incident.

Truthfully, if the banshee had still been rational at the time and hadn't taken the initiative to attack them in the Goblin Lair, the villagers might have actually gotten away with it.

After all, their time was limited. If their mission stalled and they never found any traces of the banshee, Xia Nan and his group couldn't have stayed in the village wasting their energy forever.

Now that things had developed to this point, there was naturally no longer any need or possibility of hiding the truth.

As the leader of Ice Tree Village, the chief had come to Xia Nan to plead guilty. Whether it required compensation or his own old life, he had no complaints.

In truth, Xia Nan did not particularly care.

If the people Allirella killed had been a squad of kingdom soldiers on a mission, and he had been an official loyal to the kingdom...

Then he might have hesitated over how to deal with her.

But right now, he was merely an adventurer.

And compared to the relationship between soldiers and the kingdom, the connection between an adventurer and the Adventurers' Association could only be described as loose.

Most of the time, adventurers simply viewed the Association as a platform to take on quests and earn bounties. There was no real subordinate relationship.

As for the relationship between adventurers themselves, they were rarely colleagues and far more often competitors.

Bumping into each other in the wilderness and turning into enemies only took a single thought.

Under these circumstances, Xia Nan naturally didn't care whether the villagers were accomplices to the murderer who had wiped out the previous Adventurer Squad.

Moreover, the banshee who actively attacked them was now dead; he had no reason to take his anger out on the villagers.

In contrast, he was actually more interested in how Allirella had interacted with the villagers after becoming a banshee. "So the banshee-transformed Allirella didn't attack you?"

Xia Nan asked the village chief, continuing to groom Winter Wolf Fanny beside him.

Given a banshee's Challenge Rating, she wouldn't even need to use [Withering Wail] to kill these ordinary people in Ice Tree Village. A regular shriek would be enough to shatter their eardrums, and a slight touch would allow negative energy to completely erode their lives.

And judging by the villagers' current attitude toward Allirella, she didn't seem to have caused the village much harm after transforming into a monster.

The truth was exactly as Xia Nan had guessed.

"Not only that, Mr. Xia Nan,"

the village chief sitting opposite him replied. "At that time, Allirella's mind was far clearer than it was recently."

"Although she couldn't live in the village due to the energy she emanated and had to stay in the Rime Forest, she never harmed a single villager."

"Sometimes, when children from the village got lost in the forest, she was the one who helped bring them back."

According to the village chief, for a very long time after her banshee transformation, Allirella maintained a clear consciousness and could freely control her body.

Old Sonny and their daughter Sarah were also able to meet with her briefly every few days—prolonged, frequent contact could allow the negative energy on the banshee to affect their health.

At that time, Ice Tree Village was like a settlement that had acquired a guardian deity who required no sacrifices.

The banshee's high Challenge Rating of Level 4 was enough to drive away the vast majority of beasts and monsters that could threaten the village.

Even when facing a few dangerous entities with a similar or higher Challenge Rating, the intense danger of [Withering Wail] sensed through their monstrous instincts was enough to make them steer clear of this small village in the forest.

But...

"Right around the beginning of the year, Sonny suddenly came to me and said that Allirella's condition had taken a turn for the worse, and she was experiencing sudden bouts of losing control,"

the village chief recalled. He had clearly ventured into the outside world during his youth and was no stranger to adventurer terminology.

"At first, I just thought the negative energy of a banshee was eroding her mind and causing her to lose lucidity. I even used the animal pelts our village had accumulated over the years to commission a passing merchant to exchange them for relevant alchemical potions over at Bloodcast Keep."

"However, those expensive potions seemed completely useless."

"And the duration of Allirella's loss of control multiplied at an extremely fast rate. In the end, at her own request, even the children in the village were forbidden from going near the woods where she roamed for fear of accidental injury."

"And after that came the events you already know about—"

The adventurers who committed atrocities in Ice Tree Village were intercepted and killed by the banshee, who was in a half-mad, half-lucid state. Even her husband, Sonny, was accidentally injured in the crossfire.

The dwarven adventurer who luckily survived fled back to Bloodcast Keep, making the officials aware of the banshee's existence and leading to the bounty quest.

Suddenly catching a specific keyword in the village chief's story, Xia Nan furrowed his brow involuntarily.

"The beginning of the year?"

"Yes, Lord Xia Nan. Allirella's first loss of control happened right around the beginning of the year." The village chief looked puzzled. "Excuse me... is there a problem?"

If Xia Nan remembered correctly, the frequent monster riots near the border of Bloodcast Keep had initially started right at the beginning of this year.

And what was certain was that although the banshee had been transformed from Allirella, she indisputably belonged to the "monster" category as defined by adventurers.

Could her loss of control... have some connection to the riots of the surrounding monsters?

After thinking for a moment, Xia Nan asked the village chief, "From the beginning of this year until now, compared to previous years, has anything strange happened in or near your village?"

"Anything at all."

Hearing Xia Nan ask this, the village chief began to ponder seriously.

After a long while, he opened his mouth with a hesitant expression. But then, remembering the adventurer had said "anything at all," he spoke up. "Strange things..."

"If I had to name something, perhaps... there were far more goblins in the woods this year than in previous years?"

The Rime Forest had a unique environment. The air was filled with turbulent magical particles, and the temperature stayed below freezing year-round.

Goblins, possessing a vitality tougher than cockroaches, could naturally inhabit and survive there, but the relatively scarce natural resources and the icy, snowy environment would ultimately impact their survival.

Temporary mini-tribes numbering between five and ten might be common, but a stable, large tribe exceeding fifty or even reaching triple digits was very difficult to form.

Yet since the beginning of this year, signs of goblins roaming the woods around Ice Tree Village had become increasingly frequent.

Around February and March, the green-skinned Goblins had even organized in considerable numbers to attack Ice Tree Village.

Fortunately, when they launched their attack, Allirella had been in a lucid state. A single [Withering Wail] completely wiped out the goblins.

While cleaning up the battlefield, the villagers discovered a total of thirty-six Goblin corpses.

Such numbers might be very common in the south, but in the Rime Hills—looking back across all the village chief's years of experience—it was rare.

"Other than that, there's nothing else, Mr. Xia Nan,"

the village chief said cautiously, carefully observing the young adventurer's expression.

'Goblins...'

Xia Nan was deep in thought.

He recalled the unusually large Goblin troop he had encountered on his way here, when he met the Barbarian Forgan.

Now hearing the village chief say this, he couldn't help but draw a connection.

While subconsciously raising his guard, he figured that after returning to Bloodcast Keep, he could ask the officials or other adventurers operating in the area about the situation. He might discover something.

"Alright, let's leave it at that."

"I don't have anything else I need to know."

Nodding to the village chief sitting across from him, Xia Nan stood up and left the cabin with Fanny.

Since the banshee—their mission target—was already dead, there was naturally no point for them as adventurers to linger in Ice Tree Village any longer.

They had already finished packing their luggage the night before. However, because the morning fog in the forest was too thick, they decided to wait a few hours. They would set off on their return journey to Bloodcast Keep around noon when the fog lifted.

Perhaps because the banshee was already dead, the atmosphere between the two members of the Sulfur Dragon Breath squad had eased slightly compared to when they had first returned to the village from the Goblin Lair.

But with his acute Perception, Xia Nan could still sense the grudge the half-elf Treebrook held toward the bard Uriah in both word and deed.

It was understandable. If it were him, he would probably find it very hard to accept teaming up with a comrade like Uriah again.

He figured that this Sulfur Dragon Breath squad, which had once held some renown in the Calm Peaks Province, was likely on the verge of disbanding.

Nodding from a distance in greeting to Uriah, who was maintaining his Vertical Flute on the other side, Xia Nan turned and walked toward the cemetery.

It was still deserted, but there were far more footprints on the ground than there had been earlier.

In front of the gravestone engraved with "Allirella," numerous offerings had been laid out, and the soil clearly showed signs of having been recently overturned.

Just this morning, right when the sun rose.

With the collective help of the villagers, Allirella's true corpse had been buried in front of the gravestone.

Normally, after a battle with a monster like a banshee, adventurer customs would never allow the entity to be buried with its body intact. At the very least, they would thoroughly scavenge it, cutting open the chest, abdomen, and cranial cavity to carefully search for material loot.

Although Xia Nan possessed a resilient will, he ultimately came from a modern society in his past life. Even at the beginning of his transmigration, he had already formed mature and stable moral values.

Despite his severe, coldly detached exterior that seemingly lacked any human touch, he was ultimately much more decent than other adventurers when actually encountering a situation like this.

One second, Old Sonny and Sarah were hugging Allirella's corpse and weeping bitterly;

the next, he would be dissecting the banshee's corpse right in front of her husband and daughter.

It was truly a bit too unseemly.

Furthermore, because of the negative energy inherent to an undead creature, a banshee's loot materials were extremely difficult to preserve and required considerable means to process. The buyers were basically all Spellcasters of the necromancy school, or alchemists in the related potion industry.

They could only fetch a good price in major adventuring hubs like Rivervale Town or Barracuda Bay.

In a temporary adventurer gathering place like Bloodcast Keep, there was absolutely no market for them, and they wouldn't sell for much.

After consolidating the opinions of his teammates in the squad, Allirella's corpse was ultimately allowed to be buried intact.

At present, the funeral was already over.

Most of the villagers had also left the cemetery and returned to their respective lives.

Only two figures remained standing motionless in front of the gravestone.

Naturally, it was Allirella's husband, Old Sonny, and her daughter, Sarah.

Now that her mixed-blood identity as a half-elf had been exposed, she naturally no longer wore her ear-covering felt hat, revealing a pair of sharp, slender ears amidst her hair.

Seeing Xia Nan approach, Sarah forced a smile onto her pain-filled face and greeted him, "Mr. Xia Nan, you're here."

With the passing of a loved one, she naturally lacked the warmth and vitality she had displayed during their first meeting.

At the same time, however, there was no resentment whatsoever.

Even the hunter Sonny beside her, who had just lost his wife, bore no ill will when he looked at Xia Nan, despite the pained expression and red-rimmed eyes on his face.

The sorrow of losing a loved one had begun many years ago, on the very night Allirella was transformed into a banshee.

And their deeper emotions had long since morphed into pure heartache for her—as Allirella endured the continuous erosion of negative energy, her expression feigning strength while suffering unbearable pain; as she looked at her husband with relief after regaining lucidity time and time again following a loss of control; and as she anxiously asked about their daughter's well-being.

As things were now... it was a release for Sonny and Sarah, and for Allirella herself.

Speaking more realistically, if Xia Nan and the others had not come to Ice Tree Village, or if they had arrived a few months later...

Given Allirella's rapidly deteriorating mental state as of late, it was hard to say how much longer Ice Tree Village could have survived.

Sweeping his gaze over the offerings in front of the gravestone, Xia Nan thought for a moment, then took off the Ice Crystal Flower Bracelet that Sarah had given him from his wrist.

Before he could make a move, his Perception triggered, faintly detecting a certain subtle sensation.

His attention concentrated subconsciously as he once again summoned the bracelet's Attribute Panel.

He discovered that the text on the Attribute Panel had already undergone a massive change compared to when he had first received it from the young girl's hands.