Sebarius sits back up and starts talking again.

Back in that village, where I worked for a little while to get some traveling money, I did not know, that it was the spirit orb I had seen in the final vision.

I did not even know it to exist in this day and age.

In fact, after a while, I even started to believe that it was just my fantasy playing tricks on me.

A desperate attempt of my mind to make sense of all the madness I had gone through.

But it was not.

About two weeks into my stay in the village, I heard the rumor, that a wealthy merchant living in a nearby town had recently died of old age, without leaving children behind to inherit his fortune.

While that might not have been very interesting by itself, the rumor mill also said, that he had spent much of his money on collecting archeological artifacts as some sort of hobby.

The sharp-tongued tattletale stated, that he was too busy ripping off people and collecting shiny things of a time long since gone by to engage in any sort of romance.

Since 'ancient artifacts' just happened to be a passion of mine itself, I asked, what was going to happen to the things in his mansion, if there were childeren to inherit them.

The tattletale merely shrugged and went on to drone on how terrible that man really was, but I stopped listening.

Clearly she was more interested in the person instead of the artifacts and their fate.

The very thought that some buffoon could just toss these invaluable artifacts out like they were trash made my blood boil, so the very next day I packed up my things and headed over to the town where the man had died, inquiring with the local authorities what was to happen with the inheritance of the man.

As I talked to the policeman, the incident with the other policeman and his loose pants rose from the back of my mind and just for a second I felt the urge to run, but fortunately neither my picture nor my descriptions seemed to have reached this far to the north.

And, to be honest, chances that they didn't propagate that incident all over the country were pretty high to begin with.

After all, it's not like I murdered anyone.

So I relaxed, while the very helpful policeman told me, that the local government told me, that the artifacts were currently being examined by someone from the scholar society and, after that, put up for auction in a nearby city.

I still went there and asked, whether I could take a look at the artifacts, even flashing my old id of the scholars society, but the local scholar would hear nothing of it and I got turned away with the words, 'I am sorry, but you can't be careful enough these days.'

Of course that was an implication that my id was fake and that I might as well have been a thief trying to pilfer some of the more valuable items in order to sell them for my own profit on the black market.

Not that I can blame them for thinking that, I did not exactly look the 'perfectly innocent scholar' at the time.

So I decided to visit the public auction to see what was on sale and where it was going.

I knew from my time at the society, that the scholar on site would have the task to pick out 'historically relevant' items, which the society would then try to purchase, so they could be studied and, in turn, be transferred to one of the national museums of history, once the study was concluded.

About two weeks later, the auction was announced publicly and even on the paper to attract as many potential buyers as possible and on the evening, the hall was packed with history buffs, scholars, other collectors and I'm pretty sure that there were some more shady elements looking for prey in the audience as well.

As it turned out, most of the items were of little historical value, mostly just pieces of the people's everyday lives, like dishes and the likes, which were sold quickly enough to fellow collectors.

The evening dragged on from one item to the next and by midnight, the proclaimed highlight of the auction, the so-called 'Spirit Orb', an item, as the auctioneer proclaimed, dated back to the age prior to the grand reset, was brought on the stage.

You can imagine my surprise, when I recognized the orbs I had only seen in my dreams prior to that and I was so dumbfounded, that I was completely unable to follow the auction and by the time the hammer went down, I even failed to realize just who bought the darn thing.

I only knew that I had to get my hands on it, no matter what it took.