Chapter 186: The Trade Deal Between Stonemen and the Witch World

Magna was taken aback. He hadn’t expected to meet a Stoneman who could speak his language.

It was not even some crude dialect. Its voice still sounded strange, like stones grinding against each other, but the words were clear and properly formed.

Magna quickly collected himself and hid his surprise. He slightly lowered his head in greeting, following the etiquette he had learned.

"Hello. I’m Magna."

He also walked inside. Seeing no reason to be afraid, he started inspecting the room more closely.

There wasn’t much to see. The place was filled with stone spears, neatly lined up on stone shelves. Other than that, there wasn’t even any basic furniture or anything else that could normally be found inside a home.

While Magna curiously looked around, the Stoneman lowered its head again. It slowly continued rubbing the stone against the spear in its hands.

"Magna... You humans have strong names." It sounded somewhat impressed, though it didn’t seem to care much while it kept polishing the shaft of the spear.

Every time the stone rubbed against the spear, it produced an almost melodic sound, each stroke following the next in a strangely perfect rhythm.

The sound caught Magna’s attention. He turned his gaze away from the shelves and walls and back toward the spear.

Before, he probably would have dismissed it as nothing more than the sound of stone rubbing against stone. But after learning so much about spellcasting, Magna had become much more sensitive to sounds. He tried to understand the rhythm and melody.

’It’s almost like a spell pattern.’

He even wanted to try reproducing the sounds to see what kind of pattern they would create inside his mana channels.

Unfortunately, the work was finished before he could understand the full pattern. The Stoneman put down the stone and slowly started getting to its feet with the spear in its hands.

It walked toward one of the shelves along the wall and placed the finished spear on it. "My name is Rhadak. I’m the chief of this small town."

Every step he took made the huge stone house tremble slightly, since he was at least 3 or 4 times heavier than any of the Stonemen outside.

"Nice to meet you." Magna wasn’t intimidated by this and simply answered casually.

After seeing that they could speak human language, he had already started seeing the Stonemen as a civilized society. That alone was usually enough to make anyone feel relatively safe.

That was enough for Magna to remain calm. He asked out of curiosity, "Are there any human settlements around here?"

He thought there might be humans living somewhere in this realm, since the chief clearly wasn’t meeting a human for the first time.

At the very least, if he could find them, he might be able to find some food to fill his empty stomach.

The chief turned toward him again, lowering his stone head slightly. "Humans don’t live here. They don’t usually come here while they’re alive."

That was an interesting answer. "What do you mean?"

Magna still had almost no knowledge about the realm he was in. Even its name, the Underworld, was only a guess. So this was a good opportunity to finally learn where he actually was.

The chief didn’t answer him directly. Instead, he walked out of the stone house and raised his head toward the crimson sky.

"I assume you humans call this place the Underworld. While this is our home, our world, it is also an afterlife for you, a place where you go after you die."

After those words, he lowered his head again and looked at Magna. "But sometimes, there are exceptions, like you, coming here through the entrance while still in the flesh."

Magna was left quite dumbfounded by what he heard.

He hadn’t expected the Underworld to actually be what people called the afterlife, the place where the dead went after death.

At least he hadn’t expected it to be anything like the concept of Heaven and Hell that people on Earth believed in.

Suddenly, he remembered the dream he had while inside the boiling water, when he had seen Green and the other ghosts.

’Don’t tell me... They were real?’

He fell into deep thought, trying to understand what he had just experienced, until Rhadak’s grinding voice scattered his thoughts.

"You seem like a human child. Why would they send a human child here?"

Although there was no expression on his stone face, his voice sounded quite conflicted.

This confused Magna as well. "They?"

"The humans call themselves Witches and Shadows."

Magna finally understood what kind of humans Rhadak had been talking about.

’So the expedition teams from the Witch World have visited this place before.’

Apparently, some of the Witches and Shadows from previous expedition teams had explored this region before, meeting with Rhadak during their journeys. That was likely how Rhadak learned the human language.

As if proving Magna’s thought right, Rhadak spoke again. "They come here every 10 eclipses..." He paused and thought for a moment before saying, "100 human years, to trade with us. It has been 30 years since they last came."

’So they have some kind of business relationship with each other.’ Magna finally understood how things worked.

As it turned out, the Underworld was no longer an unknown realm for the Witches. They had moved far beyond simple exploration, forging deals and establishing trade with the local races.

"What do you trade?"

The cave entrance that stretched into one of the mountains came to his mind right away, along with the golden light coming from inside.

If the Witches were interested in something, it would probably be the mana-rich resource in that cave.

"We make Grak Steel for them." Rhadak answered, then fell into silence.

For some reason, Magna felt that Rhadak did not want to say what the Witches offered them in return.

Still, Magna wanted to hear the answer. "And? What do you get in return?"

His curiosity grew with each second of silence, since the answer seemed likely to be worth hearing.