Chapter 195: Wish

Chapter 195: Wish

The moment the questions left, Old Bai stopped in his tracks for a second before walking again.

The sudden spiritual presence from the wardrobe erupted once again, carried by the soft wind.

Finally, after a long pause, Old Bai spoke. "It’s not as simple as it seems, Mr. Sherlock." His voice turned grieving as he pressed his hand against the railing of the stairway. "I know that Midnight Wings is not a great organization either... it’s not completely righteous or fundamentally wrong. The only thing that makes this organization work is a mere card provided by the government. Just a piece of cardboard."

Mo Fei listened attentively as they descended to the basement. Old Bai finally stopped near the end of the stairs and slowly sat down. "I know that they cannot protect me... nor do I wish to be a burden. I’m already at the verge of death as I’m already old. Who knows how long this weak body could go? Knowing that, I can’t take it seriously. In the end, I’m another specialist here."

Exhaling a sigh, he glanced at the young man who stared at him silently while his expression carried something that Old Bai couldn’t read yet. However, he continued. "You are right, but I’m not hiding it because they’d fail to protect me, but it’s because if something goes wrong, then I cannot be selfish to bring others to chaos. The truth of the wish..."

He closed his eyes and intertwined his fingers together. His wrinkled face softened up with a strange look that seemed as if he was recalling a memory that he had tried hard to forget. "My wife died nine years ago... It’s not my wish."

"Your wife?" Mo Fei asked, initially believing that he wanted to fulfill her small wish that he couldn’t in his younger times. "What did she ask for that you are willing to take a risk on, Old Bai?"

A slight smile played across his old face as he opened his eyes and looked toward Mo Fei. "No, Mr. Sherlock. She didn’t ask for anything, but there was a one single wish she desperately sought... my daughter died when she was only ten years old. There was no medicine for the plague back then."

He sighed once again and swallowed once as if attempting to hide the fact of how miserably he failed. "It was winter, somewhere around 1865." Old Bai whispered, his voice trembling slightly as the damp chill of the basement seemed to pull the memory right out of him. "A black cough, high fevers, and swellings that had turned dark in her fragile skin. The doctors came with their leeches and their lances. They burned tar in the streets to clear the ’bad air.’ But it was all useless theater. They were just men poking in the dark, bleeding a dying child to fix her ’humors’ while the infection ate her from the inside out."

He looked down at his own wrinkled, calloused hands, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his fingers tighter.

"I had to watch her suffocate in her own blood. Ten years old. She didn’t even understand why it was happening to her. She just cried out for her mother and me, begging us to make the pain stop. And we could do absolutely nothing but watch the light leave her eyes."

Mo Fei stood a few steps above him on the wooden stairs, the dim basement light casting long shadows across his face. He kept his silence, but his hand instinctively tightened around the revolver.

"My wife... she never recovered from it." Old Bai continued with a self-deprecating laugh escaping his chest. "Twenty years she spent staring at an empty rocking chair, whispering to a ghost that wasn’t there. When she died twenty years ago, her mind was entirely gone. But right before she breathed her last, she gripped my front coat and screamed at me. She didn’t ask for peace, Mr. Sherlock. She cursed the world. She wished for our little girl to be standing by her bedside, alive and breathing, regardless of what it took. We never had another child after that loss."

Old Bai slowly raised his head. In the dimness of the basement, his eyes didn’t look like those of a frail, dying old man anymore. They shone with a manic, unsettling lucidity — the unmistakable mark of an Ascended who had peered too deeply into the abyss.

"The government card, the Midnight Wings, the protocols... they are for the living, Mr. Sherlock. They care about maintaining the order of a world that lets my family rot." Old Bai said, his voice dropping to a harsh, gravelly whisper as the spiritual pressure from the wardrobe upstairs seemed to echo down the stairwell.

"I am a specialist. I have spent decades studying the bizarre, the forbidden, the things that drop from the cosmos when the veil grows thin. I know the rules. I know what the Orthodox churches call a sin." He leaned forward, the shadows swallowing the lines on his face. "It wasn’t my wife’s wish that brought me to this path. It was her curse... and now that my own body is failing, I finally found the ritual. I’m not concerned about the chaos it brings as long as the cost is just me. I am going to bring my daughter back."

Mo Fei’s heart hammered against his ribs as he understood the heavy weight of those words... Old Bai was no longer that sane eccentric old man today. He recalled the words of the Death Angel Serphiron. The words echoed clearly in his mind. "Death is not something to play with; some deaths are necessary; if you mock it, eventually it’ll mock you back."

Old Bai also had fallen into the category of playing with the laws of death...

"Old Bai! It’s not necessary anymore..."

"It is more than necessary... not just my wife’s wish. I also wanted to see my daughter grow up... if not her, then I still wish that no child ever faces that same sickness. I want to wish not one, Mr. Sherlock."

"But Old Bai." Mo Fei pressed his hand on the old man’s shoulder and muttered. "You know that the cost of one wish could be your sanity, your humanity... if you ask one more wish... I can’t imagine the outcomes, but it’ll certainly won’t be good."

Old Bai inhaled a long breath. "I know. I have read through everything, and I already have her soul. Luckily she wasn’t reincarnated yet, her consciousness was still present in this world. I’m already old, I won’t lose much, and I already have the way I wanted to live. I enjoyed every bit of it, but I couldn’t hide from the guilt."

Mo Fei gently helped Old Bai stand again and asked one last time. "In these few weeks of knowing you, Old Bai. It was a great moment, but ultimately, what are you planning is not necessary to work... We will talk about it after this mission."

Old Bai dropped his gaze to the floor, lifted his cane, and walked alongside him. "I’ll ask for the favor: do not tell this to anyone."

"I’m really good at hiding secrets."

Old Bai’s expression gradually returned to his prior look. He gave him a faint look at the grandfatherly smile and spoke. "That’s ambiguous. What kind of secrets did you hide in the past that you became good at keeping secret?"

"Hm. Hm. Hm. Very embarrassing ones and horrible ones."

Mo Fei returned the smile as they returned to Lionel, who was still searching and asking the remaining members.

Lionel looked back and found them. He waved his hand and winked at them. "Heroic entry. What were you doing all along? It was urgent."

"Mr. Sherlock told me about it. Let’s gather at Yureshia first."

Lionel shrugged and walked out first in his grand manner.

Outside, the sun was beginning to appear on the horizon, letting the rays of the light peek through the smoggy streets of Ciradyl, where more of the carriages were starting to roam around.

After the bakery, different shopkeepers opened their shops. Morning people walked outside, buying their daily expenses and gradually creating the chorus of sounds.

Lionel stopped a carriage where the man lifted his hat and asked for the location.

Entering back into the carriage, Mo Fei adjusted his top hat and looked at Lionel, who seemed to hide a slight hint of uneasiness from the residential spiritual infection caused by the artifacts. They were miles away, yet the results of awakening had started to build up, which could be felt by local Ascenders who had sensitivity over spirituality.

Mo Fei himself also felt the prickling sensation in both of his arms; he still needed time to recover, but he couldn’t get any day for the phantom thread to leave him.

His descent was also coming closer, leaving only a day for his advancement to Ordinal Nine, and his adventure to get the next Ordinal page.