The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick up Trash - Volume 9 - Chapter 429

Chapter 429:

Granddaughter? Wife?

“HERE, SIR, have some tea.”

“Thanks… I thought I was going to drown for a minute there.” With a laugh, the guild master poked Sora on his lap.

“Pu! Pu, puuu.”

“Does it still hurt?” my father asked.

The guild master shook his head. “The pain vanished as soon as Sora swallowed my head. You’re a real wonder, Sora!” He squeezed the slime tight in his arms, and it looked a bit pleased with itself. I didn’t really get what was happening, but I decided all’s well that ends well.

“Thanks to Sora, I remember now. It was three years ago—that’s when I met Marsha’s granddaughter.”

Marsha’s granddaughter? What’s he talking about?

“The woman I called my wife was Marsha’s granddaughter.”

“Really?”

“Yeah… She wasn’t doing too well as a tamer, so she came to me for advice—I remember that clearly now.”

So the woman posing as the guild master’s wife turned out to be the tamer’s granddaughter… Did that mean the granddaughter was directly involved with the conspiracy?

“Do you remember everything now?” my father asked.

“No, only fragments. I remember Marsha’s granddaughter asking for my advice, and I’m sure something happened after that, but my memory cuts out there…and then I was in some other room, standing face-to-face with her.”

Even fragments of memory would serve us well in solving the case. We’d had no leads whatsoever before this.

“It’s just like you said, Ivy, I remember being inside a summoning circle many times. I know it was a summoning circle, but as for the glyphs themselves, well, my memory’s a bit fuzzy there.”

If he’d been inside a summoning circle many times, there must have been a reason for it.

“Why would anyone need to be put inside a summoning circle more than once?” I asked.

The guild master shook his head. “I don’t know why. I just know I remember seeing that window somewhere before.”

“A window?”

“Yeah… It was in the room where the summoning circle was… I remember the room had a window. I think I saw it from where I was standing in the circle.”

“Oh…”

“Do you remember any other details about the room with the summoning circle, sir?”

“Other details, eh… Well, I feel like there was a lot of multicolored light…and a window… Sorry, I can’t remember anything else. All I do know is that it wasn’t in the adventurer guild or the merchant guild.”

Okay… So neither guild was involved. It was a failure on our part to assume they were and plunge into the investigation. But multicolored light? The light coming in from a window is all the same color. If only we could figure out that piece of the puzzle, we could narrow down where that room was.

“I also remember giving something to an adventurer. Marsha’s granddaughter was with me then. I was probably commanded to give out directions to the summoning circle and lure people there that way,” the guild master explained, a wretched look on his face.

“Do you know where Marsha’s granddaughter is right now?” my father asked.

“Well, she’s a tamer, so she’s probably at work. I don’t have any recent memories of Marsha.”

“Ah, then she probably already skipped town,” my father said.

Huh? Wait a minute…

“There almost certainly isn’t a summoning circle at the merchant guild or the adventurer guild, right, sir?” I asked.

“We’ll look into that tomorrow, but I don’t think it would be there. Why do you ask?” A deep crease formed between the guild master’s brows.

“Dad, where did you and I get put under the spell?”

We had assumed it was the adventurer guild, so I hadn’t put much thought into other possibilities…

“Yeah, that is a bit odd. The first time we met the guild master was when we freed him from the spell.”

Where else might we have met him? The plaza?

“We did check the plaza, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, we scouted around secretly because we knew there might be people watching, but we didn’t find anything that looked like a summoning circle.”

I thought back to the summoning circle in the cave. I’d only been able to see a part of it, but it was a rather large circle. The one that affected Snakey was also large. A summoning circle of that size should be easy to spot, so since we hadn’t found it, maybe it was a small one. Was it at the gatekeeper’s station? It could be there… No, there were walls all around it. Part of the wall had a bunch of notes with messages scribbled on them, but the wall was bare otherwise. You couldn’t hide a summoning circle there. But what if this circle was much smaller than we were imagining it?

“How small could a person make a summoning circle?” I asked.

“Hm? Why do you ask?” my father said.

“It’s the size. All the summoning circles we found together were huge, but I was just wondering if smaller ones also existed.”

“I’ve never heard of smaller ones. But then again, summoning circle research is restricted now, so there’s not much we do know,” the guild master said.

I smiled and shook my head. That was a big wall that blocked us from cracking this case. Since summoning circle research was prohibited, there wasn’t much information on them. That meant we were just blindly flinging ourselves on what little we did know, and we weren’t reaching the correct answer.

“We’ll just have to ask the captain more about summoning circles. I have no idea how much he knows, but it’s probably a fair amount,” my father said.

The guild master nodded. “We should turn in soon. We’ve got an early start tomorrow morning.”

“Good idea.” My father gave my head a pat and did the same to Sora on the guild master’s lap. Sora closed its eyes and happily jiggled.

“All the danger we’re in scares me, but being around your monsters always calms me down, Ivy. It clears my head, too.” Pleased by the guild master’s praise, Sora jiggled even harder. “It really is like therapy.”

“It sure is,” said my father.

Both of them murmured, looking fondly at Sora. They must have been incredibly exhausted.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, everyone.”

When we left the guild master’s house the next morning, we found Nalgath and his men already waiting for us at the gate.

“Ready to head out?” Juggy took the lead, which surprised me a little. Yesterday, Nalgath had gone in front. I looked for him and found him behind me.

“What’s wrong?” Nalgath looked confused by my staring.

“Oh, I was just wondering why Mr. Juggy was taking the lead today.”

“Ah, well, we change up our order now and then.”

Oh, okay. Rattloore and his party always walked in the same order. I guess every party is different.

“Fill me in while we walk there. I want to compare notes.”

My father brought the members of Cobalt up to speed on everything we’d found out yesterday. Come to think of it, Nalgath and his men met the guild master’s wife, but their memories from two years ago were missing, so they didn’t remember she was Marsha’s granddaughter, right? Maybe they remembered her as the wife but not as the granddaughter? What a strange way to have a memory erased.

“So that woman…was Marsha’s granddaughter?” Piarre’s voice quaked once my father finished filling them in.

“You didn’t notice, Piarre?” Arly asked.

“Did they have some kind of connection?” My father looked at Piarre.

“Well, um…it was a little while ago, but we dated. But the guild master’s wife…I remember what she looked like, and I don’t think she was Matorry… Was Matorry really the guild master’s wife?”

Matorry? That’s right, I never got the name of Marsha’s granddaughter… Why didn’t I? That’s the sort of thing you’d usually ask.

“Matorry?”

When I voiced the name, Nalgath stopped in his tracks. He stayed there a while, thinking…then he gasped and said, “Agggh, that’s right, it’s Matorry! Piarre, I can’t be wrong! Why did we forget it? That’s who he introduced us to at first—it was Matorry!”

His memory suddenly came back? Is that a thing? It looked like Nalgath wasn’t the only one: Juggy and Arly also remembered.

“Was her name the trigger?” my father asked. Nalgath and his men answered that it probably was.

“But what about me? I still can’t wrap my head around Matorry being his wife.” Piarre looked at everyone in bewilderment. That was a good question. Why was he the only one who couldn’t remember?

“Maybe because you two were involved with each other? If you innocently said her name, your comrades’ memories would return, so they must have put a different spell on you, Piarre.”

That makes sense.

We resumed our trek back to the sharmy cave. Piarre’s gaze was a bit downcast; he was obviously in shock.

“Um, about what happened a year and a half ago…” I began. “You said you felt the guild master was acting strange, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right. When we asked the captain for advice, he got poisoned. We should have been more discreet,” Arly growled bitterly. Juggy nodded.

“How did you notice he was behaving oddly? Did something tip you off?”

“Nothing tipped me off, per se… It’s just that he was acting strange when I came back from my business trip to the capital and I went to give him my report. Come to think of it, Matorry was with him then.”

Oh, so he was away from the village! That’s why he wasn’t under the spell. That makes sense.

“Yup, she was there.” Arly looked awfully pleased with himself, while Juggy smiled sheepishly.

“In what way was he acting strange?”