Lee Yeong stood inside the monastery courtyard while his guards searched every room, questioned every monk and arrested anyone who had taken part in Yeon Joo's disappearance, yet the anger that had carried him through the mountain road slowly disappeared when the locked room was opened and he found nothing except a thin cloth, an empty bowl of water and faint marks left behind on the wooden floor.
"She was here," Seon Yeo said after examining the room, "but it looks like she disappeared before anyone returned."
Lee Yeong did not answer because he already understood what had happened, and the unbearable emptiness inside his chest confirmed that Yeon Joo had used the necklace and returned to the world where he could not follow her.
