Chapter 940: Condensed Authority

"What did you find?" Ludwig asked.

Kaiser smiled through the communication crystal. "Come down to the laboratory, and I’ll show you. It will be easier to explain when you can see it."

The connection ended before Ludwig could object. He stared at the darkened crystal, then returned it to his inventory.

Joanna remained beside him at the stone railing. "That sounded ominous. Does he always refuse to explain himself?"

"Usually when he wants an audience. He likes the drama of it..." Ludwig glanced toward the Academy buildings. "Unfortunately, when Kaiser calls something interesting, it’s worth finding out what he means."

She laughed and pushed away from the railing. Ludwig bid her farewell, then crossed the training grounds while the remaining students continued watching him.

The Academy had changed since his years there, but he still knew his way through it. He passed familiar halls, classrooms he remembered with varying degrees of resentment, and several students who stopped talking when they recognized him.

The stairwell in the older section stood exactly where he remembered it.

He descended several flights, leaving the noise of the Academy behind. The air cooled, and the clean halls above gave way to the less welcoming corridors surrounding Van Dijk’s laboratory.

The smell reached him before the door did. Preservatives mixed with blood, alchemical fumes, and something burned. Another odor lingered beneath them, but Ludwig decided he could live without identifying it.

He pushed the door open.

"Please tell me nothing exploded."

"Nothing exploded," Kaiser assured him.

Van Dijk glanced up from a worktable. "That remains an accurate description of the afternoon so far."

Ludwig sighed and stepped inside.

The pig they had recovered beneath the Bastos fields occupied the main table, though it took him a moment to recognize what remained of it. Skin had been separated from muscle, organs rested in individual trays, and sections of bone had been arranged beside labeled samples.

A dozen jars covered the nearest workbench. One held a piece of liver, another contained discolored strips of flesh, and something green floated in a third.

"You butchered it," Ludwig said.

"We dissected it," Van Dijk corrected. "It was already dead, and examining the outside had told us everything it could."

"That doesn’t make the inside any more pleasant to look at."

Kaiser stood beneath one of the lamps with a small object pinched between two fingers. Ludwig initially mistook it for a glass bead. When the lich turned his hand, light passed through a cloudy surface and caught the sickly green-gold color shifting within.

It was a little larger than a marble.

"What is that?" Ludwig asked, approaching the lamp.

"Condensed Authority."

Kaiser held it higher and waited, apparently satisfied with the explanation.

Ludwig looked from the object to his face. Waited for him to say he was kidding and this was something else.

Kaiser didn’t.

"You had better be joking. Are you actually telling me that little thing is Authority?"

"That is precisely what I’m telling you. The name seemed sufficiently descriptive."

"The name tells me very little about how you ended up holding it." Ludwig extended his hand. "Let me see."

Van Dijk set down his notes. "Be careful with it, Ludwig."

Kaiser dropped the marble into his palm.

His stomach contracted immediately, producing a low sound that made him freeze. Hunger followed a moment later, faint but unmistakable.

The Living Vessel could experience hunger. It breathed, held warmth, and maintained a pulse. Food had richer taste, exhaustion could accumulate, and enough exertion could eventually make sleep appealing. Those sensations were usually distant compared to the demands of a genuinely living body.

He ate because he enjoyed it. He could ignore sleep for far longer than anyone reasonably should. Beneath the Living Vessel remained an undead being that needed neither.

Yet something in the marble had reached the part of him capable of wanting food.

Eat.

His fingers tightened around it. The sensation sharpened briefly, then failed to take hold as his undead nature asserted itself. His stomach settled, leaving him staring at the object with considerably less curiosity than before.

"That was unpleasant."

Kaiser leaned closer. "Tell me what you felt. Did it affect you immediately?"

"Hunger, though barely enough to matter. It disappeared almost as soon as I noticed it."

Van Dijk’s attention moved to Ludwig’s hand. "Your body reacted at all?"

"The Living Vessel did. The rest of me wasn’t interested."

Ludwig rolled the marble between his fingers. It gave him nothing further to object to.

"How strong would the effect be on an ordinary person?"

"They would probably be on the floor by now," Kaiser said cheerfully.

Ludwig stopped moving the marble.

Van Dijk spoke before he could ask. "That is an estimate based on indirect tests with samples. We haven’t exposed a person to it."

"Not yet," Kaiser added.

"Keep it that way," Ludwig said, turning toward him.

"I was acknowledging that the future contains possibilities. I did not announce an experiment."

Van Dijk pinched the bridge of his nose while Ludwig returned his attention to the object.

"How did you condense Authority into something like this?"

"I didn’t." Kaiser pointed toward the dissected carcass. "We found it inside the pig. That is why I wanted you to come down."

Ludwig glanced between the table and his palm.

"It was lodged deep in the abdominal cavity," Kaiser continued. "There were no blood vessels connecting it to the surrounding tissue and no specialized organ that might have produced it. Nothing suggested it was a natural growth."

"So somebody put it there."

"That appears to be the case," Van Dijk said. "Probably while the animal was still alive. The surrounding tissue had changed in response to its presence."

Ludwig handed the marble back to Kaiser, who immediately held it beneath the lamp again.

"And that turned the pig into what we found under Bastos."

"Everything we have examined supports that conclusion."

Ludwig studied the remains. Even before the dissection, the animal had looked starved beyond anything that should have been possible. It should have rotted away long ago, yet it had remained beneath his land, spreading hunger through the fields.

Van Dijk picked up a jar containing a strip of flesh.

"Separating the marble from the carcass stopped the carcass from radiating the effect. It did not reverse what had happened to the tissue."

"The fields recovered once we took the source away," Ludwig said. "The hunger stopped, and the crops collapsed."

"Yes, but the changes in the pig remain."

"It’s dead, Master. I wasn’t expecting it to recover."

"I’m speaking about its condition, not suggesting it should get up and walk." Van Dijk placed the jar beside the others. "Every tissue is depleted. The muscles have wasted away, there is no fat, and the organs are severely reduced. Even the marrow shows signs of abnormal consumption."

Ludwig looked toward the green-gold marble.

"The Authority did that to it."

"It changed the creature deeply enough that removing the source did not restore its previous state. Authority does not always behave like a temporary spell, Ludwig. Sufficient exposure can leave something permanently altered."

He thought of Wrath, Pride, and Sloth. The explanation fit too comfortably with what he had seen.

"What would happen if someone swallowed that?"

Kaiser lowered his hand. "Which of us are you volunteering? Until we have evidence, I cannot give you a useful answer." ℴ

"I was hoping you knew something beyond how to make the question worse."

"An unanswered question is the interesting part."

"Of course it is."

Ludwig leaned against the edge of a table, then checked what was on it before putting his full weight there.

"So we have evidence that someone can carry Gluttony’s Authority around, put it inside an animal, and bury it under my land. Are we still going to sit here instead of going after him?"

Van Dijk sighed. "We have already discussed why we cannot reach Tibari."

"And I continue to dislike the explanation. What happened to the gate?"

"It is gone. I have checked repeatedly."

"Gone because it moved, because it was destroyed, or because someone concealed it?"

"I cannot yet rule out any of those possibilities."

Ludwig glanced toward Kaiser. "You’ve been teaching him how to answer questions."

Kaiser looked pleased. Van Dijk ignored them both.

"Tibari is reached through gates. There is no road we can follow, no mountain pass we have overlooked, and no ship waiting to take us there. You cannot point to a place on an ordinary map and travel toward it."

"I understand that."

"You keep suggesting alternatives as though I have neglected to look outside. Until we find an accessible gate, we have no direct route."

Ludwig rubbed his forehead.

"A Shard of Darkness could help us find one." He sighed.

"What Shard?" Van Dijk asked.

"Something I occasionally get from Necros... Helps find things that try to not be found."

"You have one?"

That was the other problem.

"No..."

A Shard of Darkness could reveal the strange connections scattered across Ikos, but Ludwig no longer possessed one. The most reliable means he knew of obtaining another involved the Shrike, who had disappeared.

Finding the Shrike would be considerably easier with a Shard of Darkness.

"So I need a Shard to find the Shrike, and the Shrike to get a Shard," Ludwig said. "Then I could use the Shard to help locate a gate. That is an incredibly stupid situation."

"I did not arrange it for your inconvenience."

Kaiser turned the marble beneath the lamp. "You could wait until we learn more. You were recently beginning to appreciate having time to yourself."

"Then someone buried a pig full of Gluttony under my farmland. That spoiled the experience."

Kaiser conceded the point with a small nod, though his attention had already returned to the object between his fingers.