Roy woke up the next morning feeling refreshed after his meditation session. After replacing sleep with meditation, Roy only had to rest for five hours a day, and he’d wake up fully recharged. He couldn’t believe he could do that, for he used to be a weak insomniac in his past life. Even though his new body was younger and weaker, it wasn’t a bad one. In fact, it was better than his old one.

Letho woke up earlier than he did. He was having wine and pie on the first floor, still looking inscrutable. If Roy hadn’t known better, he wouldn’t have thought Letho had a night of fun. 

“Aren’t you sleeping in?”

“Relaxing is relaxing. A witcher must not deprive himself of discipline.”

As they chatted, Roy was just about to bring up the dwarf’s request when Seville showed up. Seville’s dark circles had worsened, and he looked exhausted. Even so, he kept himself awake and talked about his troubles to them.

Witchers didn’t mind more requests, so Letho listened to him.

“The nightmares started three months ago. They keep haunting me from midnight to dawn. They’re like demons who won’t let me rest. I can’t really sleep. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night, and after a while, my health gets affected. Can you imagine that? I used to be the squirrel of Mahakam, the dwarf who can go without sleep for three days straight. But now? Now, I doze off if I don’t concentrate. I don’t feel like a strong dwarf anymore. I’m more like the gnomes of Tir Tochair.

“I scoured through Aldersberg, asked every doctor, but none of them knew what was wrong with me. I searched my home, but nothing weird came up, but I have a feeling something evil is in my house. It’s cursing me, corrupting me, depriving me of peace. Nobody can help me, so please lend me a hand, Letho,” the dwarf requested sincerely, the discrimination against witchers absent from his eyes.

Letho stared down in contemplation after listening to the request. He tapped the table with his pudgy fingers while Roy was trying to link the matter to the monsters he knew.

Letho gave his price. “Two hundred crowns.” It was double the reward he got for killing the grave hag in Kaer. Obviously, the dwarf was loaded, and since different employers had different economic statuses, witchers were flexible with their pricings.

Even though it was expensive, Seville Hoger agreed to it without batting an eye.

“Now, take us to your home. We need to investigate.”

***

As the main wine dealer of Aldersberg, Seville was a wealthy dwarf. His residence was in the western area, where the affluent lived, and it was surrounded by four towerhouses. That area took up a major part of the city. The rich, famous, and powerful of Aldersberg lived there, like the baron of Tavik, weapon and ore merchants, and wine merchants. The number of patrols and green infrastructure outnumbered that of the civilian area.

Beyond the walls of the affluent area stood the gigantic Mahakam mountains. Some bards teased that the mountains had been made by ancient nobles of Aldersberg to keep their troops from running away. Within the residence and outside its walls stood many dwarves with braided beards equipped with giant axes and hammers. They were sentries of the residence who kept the place and its residents safe.

The guards bowed when they saw Seville, their eyes filled with respect. So this guy’s a respectable one in the dwarven society, huh?

Roy noticed that the outer walls were filled with patterns that resembled totems, but he couldn’t make out what they meant. There were also carvings of Lebioda on some spots of the wall.

Once they entered the house, Seville waved his men down, leaving them in peace. And he yawned. “Just tell the guards when you finish checking the yard. They’ll let you into the house for further investigation. I’m getting tired, so I’ll be taking a nap.” Seville suffered from sleep deprivation because of the nightmares, and he would take a nap whenever he had the time.

Letho and Roy started with their investigation once Seville had left. Letho observed the yard’s structure. There was a small fountain in the center, and neatly trimmed, decorative plants surrounded them in an organized fashion. A large number of plants that were taller than a human were linked together, forming paths that turned into a small maze. Something sparkled within Letho’s eyes, and he started searching in a direction. 

Roy knew that Letho had activated his witcher senses, making him a radar that radiated microwaves. He went up to say, “I’ve always been curious about the way witchers track down monsters.”

Letho was patient when it came to the witcher trade. He explained, “After witchers go through their mutations, their senses become different from a normal human’s. Precisely speaking, they can reconstruct everything they see, smell, and hear through their senses, turning them into a vague line of smell, ripples of sounds, or sets of footprints. Those can lead them to their prey.” He paused for a moment. “A witcher’s senses are sharp. They can see further, hear clearer, and smell things normal humans can’t, like the stench of blood that should have been long gone, the smell of monsters, and the scent of a strong perfume. And also the smell of wine in cellars,” he added.

“If we just track while using those traces, eventually we’ll reach the culprit,” Letho continued, then he put on a solemn look. “But before you start doing that with your bounty after locating a suspicious trace, it’d be best you judge what kind of enemy you’re going to face —  whether it’s something you can handle, or something you can only hide from. If you make the wrong judgment, you might get yourself killed from facing off against a terrible monster.” Melancholy welled up within his eyes, as if he’d remembered something sad. “Whether you get it right or not depends on your experience. For example, drowners emit the smell of seaweed and the stench of fish, while ghouls will appear where there’s the smell of rotten corpses. You’ll see a hole in the ground with green fluids at the entrance where a pale widow burrows. And as for griffins, well, they only appear on mountains.” Letho explained everything in detail patiently, while Roy listened, felt, and memorized it.

“Now that I’ve told you about the monsters, can you give me your judgment based on my teachings and the clues in the yard, boy?” Letho had given him a test all of a sudden.

Roy rubbed his chin and went through the details of the monsters Letho told him about. “If it’s just within this yard…” He hesitated. “We didn’t see any weird footprints, so we can eliminate vampires who can turn invisible and hypnotize their prey. Katakan’s not what we’re looking for.”

“You have a decent memory,” Letho said, praising him for the first time in a while. “Alright, since katakan’s not on the list, we’ll have to go inside to search for more clues.”