Brennan's death meant that no one dared say another word about what Ronin and Vanessa did next.
Ronin's method was simple: he used Earth Release: Subterranean Voyage to turn the earth and stone blocking their path into a fluid, then used the Golem Technique to excavate.
And once Ronin and Vanessa followed the stone giant created by the Golem Technique into the newly dug tunnel, the earth and stone that had lost the chakra maintaining their altered state reverted back to their original form.
The people inside the ruins stared at the newly sealed opening, looking at one another in silence.
Whether they should keep digging or wait for the other side to finish exploring and come back—that question soon received a very clear answer.
Some of them resumed digging a passage, preparing to go deeper into the ruins, while another group gathered together to discuss something.
These two groups had one obvious feature: the ones doing the digging were the people who had previously been blocked from going forward, while the ones gathered together to talk were all Nen users from Brennan's team.
But before long, the gathered group also split into two factions.
One side recognized that Ronin was not someone to mess with, especially since the Rock Mercenary Corps was very likely backing him. So even if they followed his words and were only "picking up leftovers," they still joined the digging team and continued moving forward.
The other side consisted of people who had been on relatively good terms with Brennan.
After discussing it, they all agreed that there was no need to go in themselves. They only had to wait—wait until Ronin came back out of the ruins with the best items, then launch an attack.
Letting him go deep into the ruins first was just making him do free labor for them.
Ronin had no idea what the people in the divided group were thinking. Even if he did know, he wouldn't have cared.
After all, the moment he attacked Brennan, he had already prepared himself to face an assault from multiple Nen users at once.
It was just that Brennan's team didn't seem especially impressive. After Brennan died, not a single person dared step forward.
A team like that might try some petty tricks at the end, but so what?
With the stone giant's help, Ronin advanced very quickly. Even so, opening up the current passage still took him a great deal of time.
The passage was simply too long.
During the excavation, it was clear that the buried area had once been the same kind of residential room as before.
And yet within these buildings, there were no human corpses or anything similar to be seen.
It was as if all the humans who had lived here had moved away overnight.
However, during the digging process, Ronin did discover another piece of traditional Kurta clothing. Although it had long since been crushed and torn by the sand and stones, its style could still be recognized once it was pulled out.
One piece might have been an accident.
But two pieces unearthed from different locations? That was hard to dismiss as coincidence.
As they moved forward, Ronin and Vanessa also found bottles, jars, and other containers. The traces of everyday life grew increasingly dense.
And at that moment, beyond the sand and stone that had been softened into fluid, what finally appeared was no longer the same monotonous wall—
but a pitch-black space.
At once, an illumination stone flew through the newly opened hole.
Its light was not especially bright, but it was enough for Ronin to see most of what he wanted through that faint glow.
After all, his En detected no living beings nearby. The only thing he needed to watch for was what might be farther away.
The illumination stone fell to the ground with a crisp sound. The sound traveled far and echoed back.
The stone giant stopped digging, while Ronin and Vanessa came to the edge of the entrance and listened carefully.
After a long while, when they still heard nothing suspicious, the two of them slowly stepped out through the opening melted by Earth Release.
The stone giant collapsed into rubble, disappearing inside the tunnel it had excavated.
More illumination stones flew out of Vanessa's hand, scattering in every direction. Once they landed, each one could only light up a small area, but that was enough to create an environment where Vanessa could slip into the shadows at any moment.
It also allowed Ronin to take in the nearby situation.
The place they were now in was more like a hall.
Ronin looked up and fired an aura bullet into the air.
Under the weak light of the aura bullet, he could see that the ceiling of the hall was very high, roughly eight meters above them. Overall, it had a strange spiral shape twisting upward. Some things that looked like lighting fixtures hung from above, and they too were faintly twisted into whirlpool-like forms.
But when Ronin saw the shape of those spirals, a familiar feeling rose in him.
For a moment, though, he couldn't remember where that familiarity came from.
The hall connected to three other passages. Judging by their direction, all three were toward the right-hand side.
And that direction happened to lead away from the central passage of the ruins.
They randomly chose one of the passages and walked in. Soon, they noticed that the passage also bore traces of rotation. Following the spiral staircase downward for less than a hundred meters, the view in front of them suddenly opened up.
The ground began to show plants with curled leaves, glowing with faint blue light.
That blue glow illuminated the entire space, revealing round tents hidden among the plants, each marked with spiral patterns.
And the instant he saw those tents, Ronin finally understood where that familiar feeling came from.
Because those spiral patterns, and the style of those tents, all existed in his memory.
Almost everything here matched things from the Kurta Clan's secluded settlement.
The curled plants with spiral-like features were common in the Kurta Clan's hidden settlement. Even the tents were exactly the same.
Yet as Ronin looked at everything in front of him, he didn't feel any sense of familiarity or warmth for some reason.
Only a chilling sensation that made the hairs on his body stand on end.
He did not stop moving forward. He pushed open the door of one of the tents and looked inside.
This time, Ronin finally saw clear evidence of human presence inside these ruins.
Only, the person existed in the form of a skeleton.
The bones were lying on a bed. The clothes on the body had already fused with the plants inside the room, but from the style, it could still be identified as traditional Kurta clothing.
What caught Ronin's attention was that the shape of the skeleton was somewhat abnormal.
It seemed slightly twisted, faintly spiraling.
As if it were trying to merge into this world filled with whirlpools.
That made Ronin think of a horror manga he had once read: Junji Ito's Uzumaki.
The story was set in Kurozu-cho, where high school student Kirie Goshima and her boyfriend Shuichi Saito witnessed the town's residents gradually transform under the curse of spirals.
In the end, the entire town was swallowed into a massive spiral ruin.
Because he had read the manga a long time ago, Ronin could no longer remember exactly what it had been trying to symbolize.
But the terrifying images of the townspeople mutating one after another had left a deep impression on him.
Could the Kurta Clan have suffered a spiral curse too, just like Kurozu-cho in the manga?