Guards, investigators and officers of all ranks ran up and down the corridors questioning everyone. I just kept shrugging, showing them my empty hands and pointing at the collar around my neck. In any case, didn't they see the hound was all of 120 levels out of my league? The interrogators scratched their heads and moved on. The hound's corpse and blood had disappeared a few minutes after it had died. I had swung the chain as far along the corridor as I could. The two smaller Soul Stones lay abandoned on the floor for another hour. No one but me could pick them up, apart from an NPC like the hound herself. But in her absence, all dropped items had a limited life. Game developers didn't want their world to be cluttered with trash. Besides, you never knew whose hands the item may end up in. So technically, the guards had nothing to confront me with, apart from the fact that my level had soared overnight. But I was prepared to feed them a story about some particularly complex meditational quest.
