Vic held his necklace out, albeit hesitantly. As the Man in White leaned in over the pot to look, Zel could see him stick his hand in the boiling liquid without so much as a twitch, resting it against the bottom of the pot, his sleeve mere centimeters from being soaked. He drew in a shallow breath and an eerie glow overcame his eyes as he stared into the gemstone; then, a moment later, it was gone and he returned to his seat, only holding out his completely unscalded hand in the rain to wash it off. He then rubbed his chin with this same hand in contemplation.

“Hrmmm… Yes, as I thought, I do not carry even a fraction of this beauty’s value in liquid currency…” he murmured, blinking away the eerie glow before he looked up at Victor. “This is an heirloom, is it not? Was one of your ancestors a wizard, perhaps?”

“Er- I think so, yes. Why?” Vic answered, pulling the gem back. He would’ve stuffed it under his shirt but it was already beneath his jacket, its string too long to be covered by what little there was on the front of the garment. As such, he pulled back the string and tied a knot on it far enough up its length that the gem was out of view, doing so almost in a defensive manner. This was much to the Man in White’s amusement, who reiterated: “There is no need for such caution, I already said I have neither the intention nor the means to buy that Antediluvian… That gem from you.

Vic tilted his head: “...Ante-di-lu-vian?”

“Ah, a slip of the tongue,” the elf shook his head, slurping up a piece of Dozer meat straight out of the claw. “Nevermind that. Ask someone more familiar with such things, I’m just a peddler that has overheard a few too many conversations not meant for my ears.”

It couldn’t have been more obvious that the old man had intentionally said that phrase and put in the bare minimum effort to make it seem like a slip-up, as if he was trying to create plausible deniability for handing over information he wasn’t supposed to. All four of his guests squinted at him with eyes full of suspicion, but the elf’s ageless countenance was as innocent as that of an infant as he cracked open the head of a River Dozer and plucked out the creature’s orange-coloured roe with inhuman precision.

He continued speaking, sharing what followed much more freely: “You’ll probably meet someone of the sort if you’re truly going to Agartha; I hear the Smoke Witch is fond of curious travelers. Though, to be fair, last I went through there, Ikesia was still a mess of Feudal holds…”

“The Smoke Witch is said to guide respectful travelers through the Boundaryless Forest… But she is as likely to find you as the forest’s bioarboribous monstrosities are, and if you offend her, she will burn you to a crisp. No corpse, no bones; erased, just smoke,” Jorfr said, chewing and eating as he spoke, yet retaining perfect clarity of speech.

“Hence the name.”

“You didn’t think to bring that up earlier?” Zel turned to the norseman, raising an eyebrow. More than anything, she saw it as a promising surprise, but it felt a little out of character for Jorfr to forego such information regarding their journey.

His answer to her questioning elucidated his reasoning: “I had no reason. There is a mountain pass which circumvents the forest.”

“Then, I suppose, you have a choice to make, don’t you? A chance for knowledge, or safe passage?” the Man in White smiled.

The more the elf spoke, the more it felt like he knew a great deal more than he was letting on, that he was perhaps trying to guide the course of their journey, or worse, just toying with them. Frustrated by the very idea of being manipulated in such a manner, Zel snapped at the man: “I better not find out that you and the other merchant are part of some sort of secret cultivator family trying to puppet the course of history back and forth.”

That crushing, furious pressure returned for a moment as the merchant’s smile became a ghastly grimace, and he hissed through gritted teeth: “Worry not; even if that were the case, I would never conspire with that senile old dreg.”

Then, his calm demeanor returned, and while everyone was in stunned silence, he added: “You ah… You made a good choice going against his advice of taking the naval route, but that is all I can say.”

For some time afterwards, they continued to partake of the merchant’s hospitality, and though the conversation turned towards more mystical topics from time to time, the Man in White staunchly avoided any concrete answers while also not claiming ignorance, but rather defaulting to the excuse: “I cannot say.”

The old man offered up tea to wash down the crustaceans, and by the end of it all, once all four of the travelers were fed, the rain had conspicuously enough cleared up, and the torrential flood blocking the road cleared up along with it. Though the Man in White staunchly denied the tacit accusations of the four travelers’ stares, the timing felt like far too much of a coincidence. Nevertheless, they departed in good spirits and continued on their north-eastward journey.

After the encounter, the Man in White drove his cart directly south over the Gaullam, the disguised hovercraft floating just over the water’s surface. He made his way to an illusion-concealed clearing with a circle of marble arches in its center, arranged around a blackstone obelisk. Awakening one of these ancient Fog Gates, he stepped through, returning to his true home - a mansion hidden atop one of the tallest peaks of the Ikes mountains. Before allowing the Gate to close, he sent a flesh-puppet through to take his place, this being a golem made of living flesh that could impersonate a human and operate semi-autonomously for months at a time. It would carry out the rest of the journey as the White-robed Merchant, sell its goods and buy others, then return to the mansion for maintenance with no-one the wiser. This was the closest he himself had ever gotten to creating true artificial life, a true homunculus - a glorious automaton of meat that could impersonate a human, but lacked everything that made a person a person. No free will, no inventiveness, no soul. Just a sprawling decision-tree etched in the form of a logic automaton tens of times the puppet’s size, which remotely controlled its actions from here, beneath the mansion, sending transmissions instantly over the leylines to local obelisks which he had modified to act as transmitter towers. The puppets’ reaction times dropped through the ground if they ever ventured too far from an obelisk, so his network of not-human sentries had gaping holes in it.