Chapter 84: Sorry, Officer… I Didn’t Recognize You Just Now
“The bear tribe will never be slaves!”
The Ice Bear King let out a loud roar and was about to seal the cave entrance completely with falling crystals. Even one extra second of delay mattered.
Today was the day the prophecy said the Witch would be born.
Nothing could go wrong.
“Babul… stand down…”
A calm female voice, with a slight cough, interrupted him.
More precisely, it stopped everything just as the cave was about to collapse, forcefully changing the situation.
The Ice Bear King, Babul, turned his head in shock. His eyes trembled.
That voice… was it the Witch?
No… something wasn’t right. She didn’t have the Witch’s aura.
Babul stepped forward cautiously. At first, he wanted to jump up immediately.
But only the Witch knew his name.
So he held back, suppressing his shock, and quietly stared at Peiya above.
The name “Babul” was given to him by the Witch herself.
Almost no one else should know it.
Even though he never understood what the Witch meant when she talked about “reincarnation,” “living as a human,” or her final words, ‘If possible… please forget me.’
Still, Babul knew one thing.
It was the Witch who suppressed the spreading corruption in the Calamity Forest, sealing the toxic minerals deep underground.
Back when Babul was still a small cub, he had already begun following the Witch.
He remembered how she would sit high on a crescent-shaped platform, playing a simple flute made by the “Half-Moon Rabbit.”
Sometimes, crickets would jump onto her shoulder and nibble at the grass ring on her head. She never chased them away.
She would just sit under the moonlight, practicing her music, though she wasn’t very skilled.
Babul remembered that she often hummed “do re mi fa sol,” and she seemed especially focused on the note “mi.”
It was said that once, the Witch saw a little girl in the forest.
The girl ran toward an older woman and opened her arms, calling out “Mom.”
The Witch didn’t understand what “Mom” meant.
But she noticed how happy the little girl looked when the woman picked her up.
From a distance, the Witch opened her arms too, trying to hug herself. But she hugged nothing.
She stood there, staring at the empty ground.
It seemed that hugging was something a person couldn’t do alone.
She looked up and saw the woman walking away.
Then she sat down and played with her fingers, just like the little girl had done before being noticed.
She wondered…
If she did the same, would someone come and notice her too?
But after playing like that for an entire afternoon, nothing happened.
Except her clothes, made from animal skins, became damp.
No one came.
That night, when the flute made a sound like “mi,” she listened quietly.
Thinking of the little girl again, she looked at her own hands, so similar to the girl’s.
Then she asked the Ice Bear King a question.
“Do you know… what ‘Mom’ means?”
“Bear… bear doesn’t know…”
At that time, Babul was still just a young bear. Protected by the Witch, he didn’t understand much about such things.
He remembered that the Witch looked sad for quite a while after that.
It seemed very important to her. So the creatures of the forest found a human book for her.
After that, the Witch spent her days studying strange books. She even made clothes like those adventurers wore.
From a distance, she looked almost no different from a human.
After that, the Witch gave each monster friend a name, and the Ice Bear King also received his own.
Babul.
He had remembered that name until now. After five hundred years, hearing that familiar way of calling him again made Babul completely lose his calm.
“Did you just call me Babul?”
“Yes.” Seeing that the Ice Bear King had calmed down, Peiya guessed he had regained his reason. “An old friend of mine gave you that name. I respect her a lot too. Can we talk?”
Peiya made a gesture to stop Elise from following. She wanted to talk to this big guy alone and learn more.
“You mean…”
The Ice Bear King was about to mention the Witch, but suddenly realized there were still adventurers here. He couldn’t reveal too much.
He lowered his voice, jumped onto a high platform, and stood there like an old general on a stage.
“Human, I will trust you for now. If you can explain clearly, I will release everyone here and also clean the pollution in this place.”
“Alright.”
Peiya understood what he meant, both sides were taking a step back.
They moved to an open area. Peiya directly summoned the bleeding tree from before.
“I have a few questions. You can answer only what you want. If you don’t want to say something, just ignore it.”
She didn’t expect to learn the whole truth just by asking, but she still wanted to try.
“Roar… Human, no matter how you learned my name, I can feel that you mean no harm.”
The Ice Bear King walked forward. His attitude was much softer now.
“Of course. I came here only to deal with a regional threat. If you don’t cause trouble, I have no reason to kill you.”
After thinking for a moment, Peiya asked her first question.
“You are actually absorbing the poison on purpose, right? Or in other words, you don’t want to hurt humans at all. If you really wanted to kill us, you wouldn’t just stand there talking earlier.”
She had noticed this when the Ice Bear King first appeared. He was different from normal monsters, he didn’t want to harm them.
He was more like trying to drive them away. Even when he fused with the Bear Guard, he only knocked the other adventurers unconscious instead of killing them.
That clearly wasn’t how monsters usually acted.
Babul paused for a moment.
“Yes. Because the Witch once said that not all humans are bad. It’s just that some people want monsters to become the enemy of humans.”
“You dare to tell me something like that?”
Peiya was surprised. She didn’t expect him to say something so important without even being asked.
There were very few records about witches in human history. Most people only knew simple things like: witches are evil, and the Church drove them away.
As for deeper knowledge, ordinary people couldn’t access it, and didn’t really care to.
Most people were more concerned about daily life. What to eat, how to spend their money. No one spent time studying old legends in detail.
The Ice Bear King stood up from the stone platform, smashed part of the wall, and took out an old yellowed book.
“If you were recognized by the Moon Tree, then your relationship with the Witch must be close. There are many things I don’t know. I was only a small bear by her side. I didn’t know how to help her. But I do know that she cared deeply about everyone. I couldn’t interfere with what she wanted to become, and I shouldn’t stop her…”
“...I only want to protect the place where she once lived. She told me that ‘home’ is very important… so important that she never truly had one. So I want to protect this place and wait for the day she returns. If you ever meet her… can you give this book to her?”
Peiya took the book. It was a language book, filled with many interesting stories and notes.
But because it had been kept for so long, the edges of the pages were badly worn.
Even so, she could tell that its previous owner had taken great care of it.
It was probably something very important to her.