“What are you looking for?” Big Brother Fox asked, surprised.
In the furthest depths of Peregrine Lodge was a storage room for the things taken from humans. It was a room rarely visited by intruders and phantoms alike, yet here was the odd sight of Little Sister Fox rifling through it.
Growth doesn’t come without stimulus from the outside. The spectral foxes of Peregrine Lodge were highly intelligent, but they lived in an unstimulating environment that received next to no visitors. Therefore, most of the phantoms were unchanged from when they first came into being.
Little Sister Fox, on the other hand, was different. Fooled by a human, she had learned the taste of fried tofu. She had received further stimuli by going into the outside world, and appeared to have grown considerably from it. For someone granted near invincibility by vast quantities of mana material, defeat wasn’t easy to come by. Her growth was commendable, especially to Big Brother Fox, who could recall when she had no emotions and more intelligence than she could handle.
Shaking her tail as she stuck her head into a woven box, she calmly answered without bothering to turn around. “Something cursed.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Need a cursed item RN. Mr. Caution isn’t good with curses.”
Big Brother Fox’s eyes opened wide. So they were still in contact? A human conversing with a phantom over a Smartphone was unheard of. If they just exchanged a few messages, that would be one thing, but he thought she was getting too fixated on this human if they were still talking, even if that man was the first she had ever encountered.
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Besides, Big Brother Fox didn’t approve of her challenging someone a second time after she had already lost one battle of wits. If they lost once against someone, foxes generally didn’t win again. However, with the long lifespans of spectral foxes, maybe having someone to bash intellects with wasn’t such a bad thing.
“I see,” Big Brother Fox said. “RN, huh? Just be careful. We have many different cursed items, and some of them are dangerous.”
Unlike normal treasure vaults, the vaults of Peregrine Lodge mostly contained items taken from people. Sometimes they had taken precious items; other times, they had taken everything a person had on them. Not even Big Brother Fox knew the contents in their entirety, but he did know that there were fearsome items that could eat away at even a spectral fox. The emotions of humans could be terrifying, beautiful, foolish, and endearing.
“Ah, don’t open that,” he warned when he saw the ornate, palm-sized box in Little Sister Fox’s hand. “Of the curses I know, that’s the most beautiful and the most tragic. Though it doesn’t target phantoms, mother once expressed regret over taking it. That belongs in the outside world. It will invite a calamity, you see.”
“I’ll make him admit defeat,” Little Sister Fox said before snapping a photo of the box.
It seemed she was not at all happy about the way that young man had treated her. Given the man’s lack of engagement despite her attempts to trick him, Big Brother Fox could hardly blame her for being irritated.
“Still, I’d suggest you make this your last attempt, or this will never be over. And as progeny of a god, you shouldn’t be so quick to involve yourself with humans.”
With that warning from her elder, Little Sister Fox nodded. Then she vanished from Peregrine Lodge.