The town had suddenly turned completely dark, so dark that one was unable to see their own hand laid out in front of them, and it was as if an extremely rare solar eclipse were taking place.

In addition to that, the cracks and pops ringing out from the deity statues outside of the town were becoming more and more frequent. Those sounds were particularly jarring in the silence of the night, and they only served to further fuel the speculation in the hearts of the town's residents. Thinking back to all of the ox-drawn carriages and horse-drawn carriages that had recently left the town, all of the residents were growing more and more uneasy by the day.

Within the manors of all of the affluent clans, whenever a servant tried to put up some lanterns in order to illuminate the darkness, they would immediately be loudly scolded, and some of the particularly short-tempered members of those clans would even rush out to pull the lanterns down before stamping them out with their feet. As they did so, they would glower furiously at the servants as if they were sworn enemies, even though those servants only had good intentions.

Over at the...