"Sigh..." Hanya let out a somewhat helpless sigh and swept her gaze across Stelle and March. "As for these two..."
"That's right, I am the Galactic Baseballer!" Before Hanya could continue, Stelle already spoke up on her own.
Right now, she showed absolutely no awareness that she had been caught trespassing in a restricted area. Hands on her hips and grinning shamelessly, she looked both proud and punchable.
Even March, who had been nervous about getting caught, couldn't help rubbing her forehead.
She had thought she should already be used to Stelle's occasional weird bouts of nonsense, but the embarrassment and helplessness still strongly diluted her nervousness.
Stelle's behavior clearly made the three judges across from them pause slightly.
Then Xueyi said, "Stelle, March 7th. Crew members of the Astral Express, Nero's friends, guests of the Seat of Divine Foresight."
"They helped the Cloud Knights suppress the Ambrosial Arbor disaster and are friends of the Alliance."
Huohuo nodded from the side. Although she had not participated in the final battle, she had followed Nero and the others through all the earlier missions.
If anyone among the three members of the Ten-Lords Commission present understood the operation to suppress the Ambrosial Arbor disaster the best, it was undoubtedly her.
Hanya took a deep breath and looked toward Guinaifen. "Speak, Guinaifen. You left and then returned. What was your purpose?"
Under Hanya's gaze, Guinaifen awkwardly twitched the corner of her mouth.
Among the four members, there was no need to mention Nero, the Xianzhou idol. March and Stelle were also friends of the Xianzhou Alliance.
If someone really had to be suspected of doing something bad, then the suspicion would obviously land squarely on her head.
After a brief moment of awkwardness, Guinaifen still told the truth, "Uh, it's nothing much. I haven't updated in a long time, so I wanted to film some ghost and spirit stuff as video material... hehe."
Stelle nodded from the side. "As the saying goes, people die for wealth, birds die for food. Guinaifen risked it all to chase this trending topic. As for us... actually, I came along with Nero."
The moment Stelle finished speaking, March and Guinaifen both turned their heads and stared at her in shock.
'Wow. This person is seriously shameless.'
Hanya did not care about Stelle's nonsense. She only shook her head helplessly.
Meanwhile, Xueyi said to Guinaifen, "I already told you. There are no ghosts on the Xianzhou. Such things are absurd superstition. As a Xianzhou resident, you should neither believe nor spread rumors."
"I know already. Nero and the others already explained it to me. The things Sushang and I saw that day, the ones squeaking sparks and laughing weirdly, are a kind of creature called Heliobi, but..."
Before Guinaifen could finish, Tail interrupted her.
"What do you mean 'a kind of creature called Heliobi'? Why not just say Heliobi directly? Do you even have manners?"
"Huh?" Guinaifen blinked in confusion.
"Um... Miss Guinaifen, Tail can be a little impulsive when speaking, so please don't mind him," Huohuo said.
"What do you mean I'm impulsive? The way she said it really was rude. Besides, you little coward, why are you siding with outsiders?"
Huohuo, "Wuu..."
Hanya and Xueyi: "..."
Well, this was also part of the daily routine when going out with Huohuo.
"What were you trying to say with 'but'?" Xueyi asked.
Guinaifen did not hide anything. After all, they had personally experienced it on the way here. "There might really be ghosts in this world. Nero saw them on the way here!"
Xueyi and Hanya: "?"
Huohuo, "!!!"
The moment Guinaifen said this, Xueyi and Hanya immediately frowned and looked toward Nero with questioning gazes.
Huohuo, meanwhile, went even paler. Her entire body tensed up, both hands tightly gripping the command flag in her hands. Her ears and tail both stood straight up at that moment, and even puffed up slightly.
Though with Tail's burning spirit-fire appearance, it was hard to tell whether he puffed up or not.
Noticing Xueyi and Hanya's gazes, Nero nodded. "Yeah, there really are a lot of them."
After saying that, Nero even looked around the surroundings while quietly mumbling numbers under his breath, one, two, three, four... as if counting ghosts.
Nero counted all the way to sixty-three before stopping, then looked up at Xueyi and Hanya and said, "It's pretty lively here right now. There are sixty-three ghosts in total."
Nero's extremely genuine behavior made Hanya and Xueyi's expressions turn more serious.
But before the two could say anything, Huohuo suddenly screamed and immediately crouched down on the spot while clutching her head.
"Hahahahahaha!" Tail burst into loud laughter.
"You little coward, what are you scared of? That brat is messing with you on purpose! Hahahaha!"
"Huh?"
Hearing Tail say that, Huohuo froze while crouching there, then raised her head with teary eyes and looked at Nero. "Nero..."
Nero shook his head, then grabbed Huohuo's hand and pulled her up. He patted the little fox girl's head to comfort her before saying, "Tail, I'm not lying."
"Although souls are even harder to notice than the Garden of Recollection's Memokeepers, ordinary people can't see them, and their influence on the physical world is so tiny it's almost nonexistent... they can still deliberately cause some effects."
"Eh..." The moment Nero finished speaking, Huohuo's extremely active ghost imagination made her tremble slightly.
At the same time, the instant Nero's voice fell, she really seemed to feel something, as if someone was standing behind her and breathing...
That made Huohuo unable to stop thinking about it. She had a fate of attracting evil spirits. To put it simply, she was unlucky and attracted ghosts.
The current situation made her unable to stop wondering if something really was there, because that feeling was completely different from a Heliobus.
After all, she constantly dealt with Heliobi, and Tail was always by her side, so Huohuo was very confident in her judgment in this area. But at this moment, that confidence became the source of her fear.
Nero held Huohuo's hand while comforting her. At the same time, he raised his head and looked above Huohuo, as if someone was really standing behind her, and said, "Auntie, could you help grab Tail's butt? Mm, thank you!"
Everyone else silently watched Nero's actions, and in the next second, they saw Tail suddenly tremble as a few sparks scattered from his body.
Immediately afterward, a burst of spirit fire exploded out, and Tail directly broke through the seal and appeared beside Huohuo. Then Tail looked left and right as if someone had touched his butt, shouting,
"Who!? Which one of you touched my butt!?"
But Tail failed to find the culprit.
Meanwhile, Nero said, "That's basically it. Ghosts may really exist, but they're not as scary as the stories say. In most situations, they're completely harmless, and their influence on reality is minimal.
"If living beings are divided into three levels, then there are existences like Heliobi standing between us and ghosts. So for them, Heliobi can sense them more clearly than we can.
"Of course, from a more scientific angle, we could perhaps view ghosts as a kind of new species that reads the memories of dying people and recognizes those memories as its own."