Walking along the cobblestone path,
"What is it, Your Eminence?"
Anya, who had been pondering Barbara's many peculiar behaviors, felt her heart lurch — she nearly thought her thoughts had been seen through.
"Do you know… who those children are?"
Barbara's dark, luminous eyes carried the rich aesthetic of the indigenous people, yet they seemed out of place not at all — instead, they emanated a gentle power that made Anya want to draw closer.
"They should be refugees and escaped slaves from the northern territories, correct? This kind of situation has been quite common these past few decades. Your Eminence Barbara, taking them in is a most benevolent act!"
Anya naturally knew the origins of those children.
Ever since the wars in the north began, refugees like these had been everywhere, along with slaves who had fled the brutality of the Beastman Empire.
Sadly, even after making it this far, they received no guaranteed treatment — freezing to death or starving was practically an everyday occurrence. Along nearly every road, amid the wild overgrown grass, there were bleached white bones lying about.
If things were this dire for adults, then the children's situation was even worse.
It could be said that without Barbara's rescue, those little ones would likely have perished from cold and hunger in the near future.
So when Anya called Barbara's actions a benevolent deed, she was not wrong in the slightest.
"Mmm! A benevolent deed!" A trace of mocking amusement curled at the corner of Barbara's lips.
"Anya, did you know? As far back as a hundred years ago, when the northern territories had only just begun to fall into chaos, my Lord took in a group of refugee children and trained them into a large number of priests and scholars… Yet even now, when the descendants of those priests returned, they discovered that their original homeland was still mired in war… it had in fact only grown worse…"
"In the past, the great families, trade guilds, and churches would still take in a certain number of children, but now… the market is already saturated… People like Ronce and the others have nowhere to go — they can only be left to starve to death…"
Although it was a simple recounting, Anya felt an unfathomable light kindling in the Saintess's eyes.
"Anya!"
Barbara suddenly called out.
"Present!" Anya stepped forward uneasily.
"Are you willing to work alongside me to change everything in the North?"
"Ending the war, helping the common people recover from their suffering?" Anya was stunned — she hadn't expected the other party to harbor such a wish.
"Wait... given her status as a Holy Maiden, this kind of request could very well have come directly from the True God!"
Anya was seized by a chill of terror in an instant.
"Could it be... a divine war far more horrifying than any mortal conflict is about to descend upon this land?"
In a single heartbeat, fear at its absolute peak crashed through Anya's heart.
But on the surface, she merely nodded with a wooden expression.
"Excellent! I believe in the loyalty of both you and the Bane family, as well as your faith in my Lord!" Barbara nodded, apparently quite satisfied.
"Then... may I ask, Holy Maiden, how does the Church intend to end this war?"
Anya asked cautiously.
"First, there is the blood ritual transaction your family has been conducting with the Black Blood Tribe... the matter of that shipment of blood essence..."
Barbara glanced sideways at Anya.
"The Church already knows about all of it?" There was a note of unease in Anya's voice — after all, not every Church would tolerate something like this.
"Massacring civilians, purchasing slaves for slaughter, and currying favor with the false gods of foreign tribes..."
Barbara counted off on her fingers one by one, and beads of cold sweat cascaded down Anya's face.
"Any single one of these charges would be enough to condemn your family to eternal damnation!... Fortunately, the current Bane family still proves useful to my Lord..."
The tone of reprimand in Barbara's words was unmistakable.
"Yes! Our family will treat every task the Church assigns as its highest priority!" Anya understood the situation and immediately offered her guarantee.
"Good... First, the trade with the Black Blood Tribe must continue as before... only our personnel will be taking it over from here..."
Barbara said with a smile, but Anya had no power whatsoever to resist.
"Everything will be as the Lady commands... it's just..."
Anya's voice carried a rare note of hesitation.
"Go on, is there a problem?" The smile on Barbara's face didn't fade, but Anya felt the air around her grow suddenly cold.
"The thing is... our family is only responsible for collecting and processing blood essence from the interior. The lion's share of this trade is still controlled by another major trading house. They even handle our contact with the Black Blood Tribe and take a cut as middlemen..."
According to Anya, smuggling operations with the Beastman Empire had already formed a vast grey-market supply chain across the Northern Territory.
What was almost laughable was that the elites who controlled this industry often had intricate ties to the Silver Moon Alliance. Rumor even had it that the sage
"All transactions with the Dark Forest are controlled under the Black Moon Trading Company. Our Nien Trading Company can only act as a mid-level merchant..."
A bitter smile tugged at the corner of Anya's lips.
"The Black Moon Trading Company? That doesn't seem to be well-known in the Northern Territory?" A flicker of confusion crossed Barbara's eyes.
"It's a large trading house that operates in the shadows — a subsidiary and front for the major houses that operate in plain sight. It controls over sixty percent of all black-market transactions in the North..."
There was unmistakable mockery in Anya's gaze.
"Quite the nerve... And that Silver Moon Queen is truly pitiful..."
Barbara shook her head. Having grown up on Bankes Island, she had never witnessed such sordid dealings, but her long years of experience had taught her more than enough.
"Then... who exactly is the one standing in our way?"
Barbara asked.
"The mastermind behind the Black Moon Trading Company — Shadow Badger Glover!" Anya took a deep breath and spoke the name.
"Shadow Badger? An interesting nickname..." Barbara chuckled.
"The name means he always hides in the shadows, like a starving badger that won't pass up any piece of meat, even if it's rotting... In the underworld, Glover's greed and cruelty are enough to make even barbarians tremble..."
Anya's shoulders shuddered slightly, as though the name conjured some terrifying memory.
"Interesting. Set up a meeting with him for me..."
Barbara's smile grew ever more pronounced…
For underground networks like Nien and Black Moon — shadowy merchant guilds that operated in the dark — even when they had been officially blacklisted and hunted, the flow of information behind the scenes remained remarkably smooth.
Before long, Anya received Glover's reply agreeing to the meeting.
The location the two sides settled on was the basement of a tavern. Its owner was clearly a shrewd individual, having chosen a place where holy knights were unlikely to appear.
The acrid stench of cheap alcohol, mingled with tobacco leaf and the harsh bite of low-quality perfume, made Anya's face scrunch up involuntarily.
But when Glover's true appearance finally came into view, even Barbara's eyes flickered with a trace of shock, and Anya outright gasped.
It was simply because the man's features were far too distinctive — the bones jutting forward around his mouth, the sharp fangs, the black speckled nose, the beast-like eyes glowing with a red light, and skin that folded upon itself in thick, wrinkled layers like a shar-pei, revealing the dense fat and muscle beneath.
"A half-breed? And an exceedingly rare crossbreed at that…"
Anya thought to herself.
Infants of such mixed lineage were typically disposed of the moment they were born. Those who survived were vanishingly few, and for one like Glover to have clawed his way to a position of power was an anomaly among anomalies — not one in tens of thousands.
"Mm… two lovely ladies, please!"
A guttural, muddled sound rumbled from his throat, as though he were deliberately speaking with his tongue half-tied. Anya had to struggle for quite some time before she could make out what he was actually saying.
"Much obliged!"
Anya rose and gave a graceful curtsey before sitting down, but almost immediately felt a repulsive gaze crawling over her body.
That greedy, famished look sent goosebumps rippling across her skin.
"Shadow-sprayed hound, King of Scavengers… those nicknames really aren't off the mark…"
"What's the matter, two lovely ladies? Not enjoying my hospitality?"
Glover swallowed the quail on his plate in a single bite — roasted golden-brown and stuffed with tiny mushrooms and spices — and then licked his scarlet lips with lingering satisfaction. The sight nearly made Anya retch.
"Regarding the matter of contacting the Dark Forest…"
Anya forced down her discomfort and got straight to business.
"As for that..."
Glover was still shoveling food into his mouth with savage abandon while a servant flipped through an enormous dark-black notebook in front of him.
"We don't have that particular need at the moment, so your guild will have to wait..."
"Is there no other way? We could still make further concessions regarding the profit split," Anya ventured tentatively.
"This isn't about profit!"
Glover's tone was utterly final. By now he had demolished every last morsel before him, and several fox-folk maidens standing nearby were already dabbing at his mouth with spotless white napkins.
"...If Miss Anya insists, we could always discuss it further in private... Ha ha ha..."
The red glow in Glover's eyes blazed to sudden intensity...
"Damn it... this stupid badger mutt, this swine..."
After the meeting ended on a sour note, Anya and Barbara left the bar and, once they hit the street, Anya immediately started grumbling.
"I actually think he was rather clever about it..."
Barbara threw back her black cowl, revealing her bewitchingly beautiful features.
"Holy Maiden, surely you don't mean for me to..."
The taste of bitterness flooded Anya's mouth. After a difficult moment, she forced herself to nod. "If it's for the Church... I'm willing..."