Beside Pandora, Elsa was still in her spotless, gorgeous handmaiden’s dress, but her calm, unwavering eyes constantly scanned every shadow that might hide danger.

  Aurora, in contrast, was in full armor. Her knight’s longsword was at her hip, her thick leather armor gleaming with a somber luster in the sun. Her hand never left the hilt, her expression solemn.

  The three of them were no longer at the manor. They were now at the edge of the Dougs fiefdom, at the pce of ill repute, the notorious… Forbidden Forest.

  The previous night, Pandora had a long conversation with Aurora. She had told Aurora everything she’d heard from the herb girl, Lena—the strange fate of the small vilge, and her own theory about the disappearing zombies—holding nothing back.

  Then, she had given Aurora a task: to use the tracking skills she’d learned as a knight-squire to carefully investigate the area in and around the manor, to see if she could find any clues.

  Aurora did not disappoint her.

  This morning, while Pandora was still asleep, Aurora had made a startling discovery.

  In a corner of the manor stables, beside the horse corpses that hadn’t yet been cleared away, she had found a trail of tracks—chaotic, heavy, and without pattern.

  They were clearly not human tracks, but more like the drag marks of some heavy object pulled by an unseen force.

  The trail began at the bloodstains in the stables, stretched across the manor’s wn, and finally disappeared into the forest beyond.

  The three of them had followed the trail. They had nearly lost their way several times due to the complex terrain of the forest, but fortunately, Aurora’s experience was rich enough that she could always rediscover the unique tracks belonging to the zombies.

  Finally, they arrived here.

  And the reason they stopped, not advancing any further, was because of the completely different woods before them.

  The trees here were fundamentally different from the ordinary woods outside. They were taller, more ancient. Their trunks were a deep, near-bck brown, their bark as rough as dark scale armor.

  Their branches twisted, reaching for the sky in a bizarre, menacing posture, blocking out most of the sunlight. Only mottled specks of light were sparsely cast upon the forest floor, which was covered in a thick yer of fallen leaves.

  The light itself seemed warped here, the air as thick as a tangible substance, as if even breathing carried some ancient, ominous weight.

  “The Forbidden Forest…”

  Pandora whispered the name.

  The name was far too familiar to her. So familiar that, even though she had never been there, she felt an almost innate fear of it.

  When she was a babbling child, her wet nurse had described it in bedtime stories as a witch’s ir, a fairy’s trap.

  When she grew older and began to learn about the fiefdom, her father, Viscount Dougs, had warned her in the gravest of tones that this forest was a “scar” on the nd, a pce she must never enter.

  The worldly old steward and the head maid, who had never left the manor her entire life, had woven the legends of this pce into one horrifying anecdote after another, mentioned countless times over fourteen years.

  Hunters who entered and never returned.

  Herb gatherers who went to gather herbs and were never seen again.

  There were even rumors that on moonlit nights, you could hear inhuman cries echoing from within the forest…

  Over time, this forbidden pce became a concrete, miniature symbol of fear in Pandora’s heart.

  And now it seemed… this forest, rumored to be so perilous, likely held the secret of the zombies’ “disappearance” within its depths.

  Along with it, naturally, came immense and unpredictable danger.

  “I remember…”

  Aurora, who was beside Pandora, suddenly began to speak slowly. Her voice was a bit distant, her gaze drifting into the depths of the forest as if lost in a distant memory.

  “When I was little, I followed my hunter father and wandered into this pce by mistake.”

  Both Pandora’s and Elsa’s gazes fell upon her.

  “That time, my father was hunting a rare albino deer and chased it too deep. I was following behind when I tripped on a patch of thorny vines and tumbled down a small slope. By the time I climbed back up, I couldn’t find his trail.”

  A hint of lingering fear appeared in Aurora’s eyes. “I waited in that forest for a very, very long time, from day until night, but my father never came for me.”

  “The bugs… there were so many of them. And snakes.”

  She subconsciously rubbed her arm, as if she could still feel the sting of their bites. “A venomous snake bit my calf. Fortunately, I recognized the kind; my father had taught me how to treat it. But I still developed a high fever, and my consciousness began to fade. I thought I was going to die.”

  “In the end, I don’t know how long I walked. Relying on pure survival instinct, on the verge of death, I finally stumbled out of that forest. And then… I met your father, the Viscount, who was hunting just outside the woods at the time.”

  As she said this, a warm smile involuntarily appeared on Aurora’s lips.

  Pandora remembered that day, too.

  It hadn’t been hunting season, but her father had suddenly been in high spirits, taking a few guards with him to go “get some fresh air.”

  In the end, he hadn’t hunted any noteworthy game, but he had brought back from the edge of the forest a girl covered in mud, her hair as messy as a ball of fluff, who was only two years older than her.

  At the time, she was still precocious and withdrawn, struggling to adapt to the transmigration. Seeing the dirty little girl, she had even thought to herself: Did Father’s hunt fail, so he just picked up a wildling from the woods to make up the numbers?

  Looking back now, their meeting that day felt like an arrangement of fate.

  They exchanged a look, the shared memories dissipating some of the oppressive atmosphere of the Forbidden Forest.

  “However,” Pandora’s smile faded, her expression growing serious again. “From your experience, this forbidden nd doesn’t seem quite as… lethal as the legends suggest?”

  Aurora thought for a moment, then shook her head, her expression grave. “No, My Lady. I believe I was lucky on the one hand… I didn’t encounter anything more terrible. But on the other… there was a sense of guidance, something intangible leading me, so that at the brink of death, I actually found the right way. If… if I were to go in again, I’m not sure I could make it out alive.”

  Pandora fell silent.

  She looked at the twisted, gloomy woods before her, feeling the faint but undeniable sense of rejection and malice it exuded.

  Aurora was right.

  Luck and chance couldn't be treated as reliable assets.

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