Once you’re able to access the Howling Aces region, look for a small graveyard area on the overworld map that contains nine tombstones. Standing near those tombstones is a ghostly detective who strongly suggests the graveyard harbors some kind of mystery. It turns out that it does, but you won’t be able to solve it quite yet.
Instead, you’ll want to head to the nearby shop and purchase the newly-available Broken Relic item. Once you have it, walk towards Glumstone the Giant’s region, and keep an eye out for three climbers standing on a ranked podium. Speak to each of them, and they’ll tell you the story of their adventure.
This is where things get tricky. The stories they tell contain hints that indicate which tombstones you need to interact with in that graveyard and the order to trigger them in. The problem is that those hints (and the “tombstone order” they reveal) are random for each player. So, if you see another player suggest that there is a definitive order you need to trigger the tombstones in, don’t listen to them. You may get lucky and get the same order they did, but it’s more likely that your solution will be slightly different.
Instead, the best thing to do is to keep an eye out for the positional “keywords” the climbers use when telling their stories. So, if the first place climber says their opponents were “left down at the bottom,” they’re likely telling you that you’ll first need to interact with the tombstone in the bottom left of the graveyard. If the second-place climber mentions getting “up right at the crack of dawn,” that could mean that the second tombstone you need to interact with is the uppermost one to the far right. The third might mention that it “ain’t right they came in third,” which means that the third tombstone is one of the ones to the very right.
Again, this part of the puzzle can be difficult simply because there is no set solution and the clues are so oddly phrased. Ultimately, though, you need to know that each climber’s position on the podium corresponds to the order you need to interact with the tombstones in, and that the only words that really matter in their dialog are the ones that indicate a specific direction (no matter what the context is).
For what it’s worth, it also seems like the climber’s hints are all relative to the middle tombstone. In other words, always start and reset at the middle tombstone. If the first climber mentions the directions “up and right,” go up and to the right from the middle tombstone and interact with that tombstone first. If the second just mentions the word “left,” interact with the tombstone immediately to the left of the center one. I haven’t had the chance to extensively test this theory with every available clue, but every clue I’ve seen so far seems to suggest that the best thing to do is to reset your position at the center tombstone before following the next set of directions.
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