The dwarf sorted through their belongings to see whether anything had been lost in the earlier confusion. As he worked, his gaze suddenly fixed on something to Jess's right.

Jess glanced that way and discovered a skeleton lying there, buried to the chest in weeds. Though its bones had fallen into a shapeless jumble, each part remained more or less intact. Jess was sitting on its right leg.

Jess closed his eyes helplessly. "I'm not going to get poisoned, am I? Damn it."

"At least you brought a change of clothes. I have to admit you showed remarkable foresight, brother," Gred said with a half-mocking laugh.

"I brought clothes, but I didn't bring another pair of trousers." Jess slowly rose and noticed that the corpse was missing one arm. Perhaps the arm from earlier had belonged to it.

"The rest of his body rotted down to bare bones, but the arm still had flesh on it. How does that happen?"

"My guess," Gred said, "is that a zombie scratched his arm and infected him. He chopped it off to keep himself from becoming a zombie."

Jess looked at the empty skull, which had accumulated a thick layer of dust. "So did it work or not?"

"Cutting off an arm hurts," Gred said. "If my guess is right, then I have to admit this human was extraordinarily brave and decisive. He probably couldn't endure the pain and fainted, or lost too much blood, after which some other small beast ate him. A large animal such as a bear wouldn't have left such a complete skeleton."

Jess asked suspiciously, "Isn't that description a little too detailed?"

"This sort of thing happens far too often. I saw an elf die the same way in the Hinterlands," Gred said. "Except it wasn't a zombie that bit him. It was a spider."

Jess remembered the spiders of the Hinterlands all too well.

He had once been somewhat afraid of spiders. When he reached the final step of the spider god quest in the Hinterlands and the enormous spider matriarch suddenly appeared as the boss, he had fought with goose bumps erupting all over his body.

That spider god had an exceptionally striking name, but Jess could not remember it. After thinking for a while, his curiosity turned into an obsession. Now he had to recall it.

"Sha... Shad..." He tried sounding it out.

"Shadra," the dwarf supplied. "The spider god worshiped by the Amani trolls. You really do know quite a lot."

"Right, that's the name." Jess immediately felt relieved. "There are troll ruins in Lordaeron too, around Hillsbrad. It isn't strange that I know about her."

Without the metal fence or low wall between them and the cemetery, the burial ground beneath the lingering morning mist felt even colder than before.

Jess now felt completely exposed to the cemetery. Nothing protected or separated him from it. If danger suddenly emerged, he would have nowhere to hide and no way to avoid it.

They kept close to the fence as they followed the cemetery's edge. Gred watched the interior for anything unusual, while Jess held the scroll and searched the surrounding ground for suspicious plants.

They searched for an hour or two. By the time the thin mist faded somewhat, they had found only three clusters of Silverleaf in different sizes. They could not even be certain that one of them was truly Silverleaf rather than a similar plant from the same family.

In short, the harvest was poor.

More importantly, they searched several gravestones near the cemetery's edge without finding any trace of Grave Moss.

This was not the game. Real herbs did not glow, and moving a mouse over them would not reveal that they were interactive. Of course, there was no mouse pointer here to move in the first place. They had to rely entirely on their own eyes and hands.

After staring with intense concentration for two hours, Jess's eyes ached with exhaustion. Their sack held only a thin layer of cheap Silverleaf at the bottom.

"We have to go deeper," he admitted. "There isn't anything valuable around the edge."

He pointed at a stone building guarded by animal statues nearby. "See those crypts? There may be piles of Grave Moss waiting inside, while we keep circling out here and missing our chance to get rich again and again."

"Lead the way," Gred said.

Jess looked at him, let out a long breath, and said, "Fine. I'll lead."

With that, he walked straight toward one of the crypts.

Gred licked his dry, coarse lips, apparently surprised by Jess's courage. But if a human had already taken the lead, there was no reason for a dwarf to fall behind.

Although the crypts were built of stone, most of their doors were wooden.

With no one maintaining or repairing it for so long, this crypt's door had split. It looked as though a single axe blow could break it open.

Jess tightened his grip on the axe. But the extreme silence around them kept him from simply swinging. The sound of the blow might carry through the entire cemetery.

"I'll handle it." Gred stepped forward and first peered through the crack to make sure no walking corpse waited behind it to ambush them. Then he gripped the edges of the split door with both hands.

"Hrrgh..."

The dwarf exerted himself until his face turned red, his veins bulged, and spit sprayed from his mouth. With a loud crack, he tore away an enormous piece of wood by brute force.

The chain swung uselessly back and forth. Gred casually snapped the remaining boards and strode inside.

Jess thought it was like bringing a battering ram with him.

The crypt was unexpectedly spacious, with a passage leading deeper underground. From the inscribed stone tablets around them, they could tell that the person buried here had been a Stormwind noble, though his family name was now forgotten.

The noble had died during the Gurubashi Empire's invasion several decades ago and had been a war hero.

For thousands of years, the Gurubashi trolls had occupied the lands stretching from Elwynn to Stranglethorn Vale in the south. But as the human Kingdom of Stormwind grew stronger, countless conflicts over the centuries steadily pushed the troll empire's effective border south, until the empire that once controlled half the continent was confined to Stranglethorn Vale.

Twenty years before the Dark Portal opened, another conflict erupted between Stormwind's farmers and the trolls of Stranglethorn Vale, beginning the Gurubashi War.

The Gurubashi leaders and their most powerful warlords mobilized in full force. They could no longer tolerate their already diminished territory shrinking again and intended to teach the humans a final lesson.

Once the might accumulated by an empire of ten thousand years erupted in fury, it proved unstoppable. The Kingdom of Stormwind retreated again and again. In less than a year, the troll army reached the walls of Stormwind City.

But this time, Medivh awaited them.

Though only in his twenties, Medivh used terrifying magic of unknown origin to annihilate the entire troll army beneath the city walls in a single strike. The Gurubashi leader and nearly all the empire's elite forces instantly turned to ash. Only a small number of survivors escaped to Stranglethorn Vale. They withdrew into their capital, Zul'Gurub, and several troll cities farther south, no longer daring to venture out lightly.

It was not only the trolls who feared Medivh's magic. The humans were badly frightened as well. The Wrynn royal family deliberately concealed the spell's power, claiming that favorable weather and the soldiers' courage in defending the walls had ultimately repelled the trolls.

Of course, though the humans had reversed their defeat and won the war, they had still paid an enormous price. Judging from the dates described in the inscription's eulogy, this noble had died during the trolls' first wave of invasion.

"I didn't expect the owner of this crypt to be a war hero," Jess said.

"Maybe he was a knight," Gred said. "Then his grave goods might include a fine sword and armor..."

"We're herb gatherers, not grave robbers," Jess said. "Besides, do you want to carry dozens of pounds of metal armor while ghouls chase you?"

Gred said smugly, "If I had a complete suit of armor belonging to a Stormwind knight, why would I run from ghouls?"

Jess said, "They'll spray corpse toxin all over your face. Unless you plug every gap around it with mud, you'll still be in trouble."

"Screw you." As he spoke, Gred tossed a chip of stone at him, which Jess easily dodged.

They removed a torch hanging from a rack near the crypt entrance, lit it, and descended underground together. Only then did they discover that although the crypt was fairly large, most of its coffins were empty and there were no grave goods to speak of.

As their surroundings grew darker and quieter, their footsteps became slower.

A faint, damp stench of unknown origin lingered in the air. That meant there had to be a corpse somewhere in the crypt.

And if there was a corpse, Grave Moss might be present. According to the books, Grave Moss grew by absorbing the necromantic aura from corpses.

Something that should have made them shudder had instead become a reason for hope.

Only their footsteps remained in the crypt, with Gred in front and Jess behind. Before long, Jess suddenly heard water splashing beside him.

"What was that?"

"I stepped into water." Gred lowered the torch and only then realized that he had stepped down from a stair. Everything below it was completely flooded.

He waved the torch and realized its light could not illuminate anything more than a few yards away. That was why they had failed to notice the water nearby.

Gred asked, "What's wrong with this place? How can it be so dark that it swallows firelight?"

Jess countered, "Isn't it the same outside?"

That was true, but only here, confronted firsthand by the darkness veiling Duskwood, could they grasp how terrifying the darkness in Medivh's heart had been.

It had seeped into every corner of the forest and gathered in every shadow hidden deep underground. Here, it accumulated without end, growing ever denser and darker, making life torment for the living and denying rest to the dead.

"Let's get in and out quickly," Jess said. "If this darkness is poisonous, we have no way to treat ourselves."

"You only remembered to warn me now?" Holding the torch high, Gred began wading through the water, his steps growing faster and faster.

The crypt seemed to have been compressed and partially collapsed by some geological shift. Its walls had cracked in many places.

The stone floor had also given way to earth. Strange cave algae grew here, but Jess could not identify any of it, and none belonged to a medicinal species he had seen in books.

After only a short distance, they reached the deepest part. One final, half-submerged stone coffin stood ahead.

Jess lowered the torch close to the water and searched below the surface. Apart from a few aquatic plants, he found nothing resembling Grave Moss.

Gred felt along the walls for a long while, then looked back at Jess and shook his head.

Only the tightly closed stone coffin remained unsearched in the entire crypt.

Jess's scalp prickled. Anyone would feel uncomfortable at the thought of opening a stone coffin, especially without knowing whether the corpse inside was dead or alive.

"Whatever the owner is wearing or holding, don't touch it," he emphasized.

"Even if you told me to take something off a dead body, I wouldn't," Gred muttered as he approached the coffin.

Clenching his teeth, he pushed the lid aside just enough to reveal a small opening. He immediately raised his sword and aimed at it for a moment. Only after confirming that no corpse reached out to claw him did he continue pushing.

Jess brought the torch closer and shone it inside. Suddenly, the darkness within began churning violently.

"What the hell is that?" Gred nearly launched himself backward in fright and landed in the water. Jess also retreated several steps until his back struck the wall.

A mass of black matter surged like boiling mud from the partially opened coffin. In a crypt this dark, they could not see it clearly at all.

"If we don't earn a gold coin from this trip, I'll tie you up and sell your arse in Old Town!" Gred cursed as he approached again.

"You... would still need to find someone willing to pay for it." Jess moved closer with the torch, and only then did they see what the black things were.

Beetles—countless beetles packed together!

The beetles poured from the coffin like a tide and crawled into the water. At the sight, Gred could barely keep hold of his sword.

But the beetles did not seem intent on attacking them. They were only fleeing the firelight in a frenzy and dispersing through the water.

As though he had realized something, Gred said, "These beetles are no longer ordinary living insects. They're mutated creatures nourished by necromantic energy. Many torches used in crypts are made by the Church of the Holy Light, especially those in noble family crypts. They possess a faint power to repel evil. That's why the insects are running."

"What if one of these things bites us...?" Jess asked hesitantly.

Gred said, "You might become sick, vomit, or grow dizzy, but one or two bites don't carry enough poison to turn you into a zombie. Hurry and see whether there's any Grave Moss inside."

Jess approached again with the torch. Most of the beetles had already fled. A rotting corpse lay flat in the mud inside. Strange dark-green plants clung to its exposed bones, clustered like spores across the leg bones and blackened clothing.

"That's Grave Moss," Jess said, fighting the urge to vomit.

Gred sighed. "I really fucking wish you'd said it wasn't."

Jess pressed his arm tightly over his nose, although he knew it did little good.

The corpse before him was as thoroughly decayed as he could imagine, yet the stench in the air was surprisingly faint.

"Why doesn't it smell worse?"

Pinching his nose, Gred said, "Corpses affected by necromancy don't produce the same foul odor as natural decay. It's more of a strange, rank smell, like this one. Being submerged in water may have weakened it further... Let's stop discussing this and get to work! The sooner we get out, the better!"