Chapter 27: Greenland Guest

Together, they followed the memory forward, toward the tallest structure rising above the city, the great tower marking the seat of the Order of Selenea itself.

Halfway there, the street opened up into something neither of them expected. Evening had settled over the city by now, and the road leading to the tower had filled with people, vendors packed shoulder to shoulder, crowds thickening with every step closer to the base of the structure.

Miyu and Alayna moved through it quickly, clearly still shaken from what had just happened with the flowers. Even as townsfolk called out greetings and reached for her hands, Miyu barely slowed, murmuring apologies as she pushed through the crush of bodies. The street had grown too packed to do anything else.

The whole city seemed to have turned this into a festival. Houses lining the road glowed with strings of stonelight lanterns, their surfaces carved with ornamental patterns that caught the light.

It struck Lucian as a strange contrast, an Awakening ceremony was usually a quiet, solemn affair, nothing like this. But here, in Loupulan, it had clearly become something the entire population looked forward to all year.

And it wasn’t only the people of the Red Lands who’d turned out for it. Green Land nobility had made the journey too. A large procession trailed behind the main crowd, an ornate carriage flanked by an honor guard, unmistakably foreign, making its way toward the tower.

The soldiers escorting it wore armor built for war, not ceremony, heavier and more severe than anything the local guards carried. Whether that was simply the fashion of wherever they’d come from, Lucian couldn’t say, but the Red Land townsfolk clearly found it unsettling. Their stares weren’t just curious. They were afraid, and their fear seemed aimed squarely at whoever rode inside that carriage.

Lumina’s attention locked onto it instantly, her gaze sharpening in a way Lucian had rarely seen from her.

Lucian, meanwhile, had tilted his face upward, drawn by something else entirely. The building ahead of them radiated a kind of grandeur he could feel pressing against his skin, and beneath that, something stranger still, a faint current of energy seeping into his own body, as though the tower itself recognized him somehow.

From what little Lucian could gather, the tower’s most striking feature was the gold sheeting that wrapped its entire surface, glowing faintly even now, well into the night.

But its shape was what truly set it apart: built in the form of a massive figure eight, a structure so unusual that Lucian hadn’t quite believed Lumina when she’d first described it, nothing like it existed anywhere in Eosia that he knew of.

"Did Goddess Selena command her followers to build something like this?" Lucian asked, genuinely curious.

Lumina’s answer caught him off guard. "No. Goddess Selena never gave any revelation calling for a festival like this, or a building this strange. She’s known for being a simple, quiet deity. Reserved, almost withdrawn."

Simple. Reserved. Lucian turned those words over, comparing them against everything he’d just witnessed, the crowds, the lanterns, the golden tower. Whatever this Goddess’s original teachings had been, her followers had clearly drifted somewhere far from them.

He wondered, briefly, whether this kind of drift happened everywhere, given how far the woman standing beside him right now had strayed from her own Goddess’s teachings.

He glanced at Lumina, still turning that thought over, and she spoke again, unprompted.

According to her, plenty of strange structures dotted the Red Lands, but this tower in particular hadn’t been built by the people of Loupulan at all. It had already stood here, ancient, long before their ancestors had ever settled the region.

Already here before Loupulan existed? Then who built it, and why? Lucian wondered, though beneath that thought sat a growing suspicion: Lumina seemed to know this place far better than she was letting on.

"Have you actually been somewhere like this before, Lumina?"

"Of course not."

"I learned about this place from one of Isabella’s people."

That answer alone told Lucian something significant, that the network beneath the Order of Lumielle ran far deeper and more tangled than he’d ever assumed.

It wasn’t only people from the continent of Arta who belonged to the Order, other ethnicities, other races entirely, could apparently be counted among its ranks, a scale of influence he hadn’t fully grasped until now.

What is that supposed to mean. I’d bet everything she’s actually been here before. Is she really just following me, or is she using this whole thing to hunt down someone she’s after within the Order of Selenea?

By the time Lucian’s thoughts settled, they’d reached the tower’s main entrance, though there was no trace of Miyu or Alayna anywhere ahead of them, even though he’d assumed they were still just a few steps away.

Inside, Lucian sensed a staircase stretching upward, impossibly long, and something about it pulled his attention toward the far corner of the tower. He made his way toward it.

Each step, as far as he could tell, was coated in yellow, layered with what felt like genuine gold leaf beneath his fingers. Between the tower’s exterior and this, the sheer wealth on display made one thing obvious: the Order of Selenea wanted for nothing.

If this were real, would we actually be allowed to walk on something like this? Even setting that aside, the sheer number of steps stretching up and out of sight was staggering.

Lucian tried to calculate how long it would actually take to climb all the way to the ceremony grounds at the tower’s peak, on foot, one step at a time.

"Lucian, what are you doing? Hurry up, or we’ll miss all the interesting parts."

I miss that strange door already. Isn’t there one somewhere around here that could get us up there faster, like before?

Lucian thought, remembering the odd path that had once dumped him onto a staircase, straight into a Murk, and then straight into Lumina.

Just as he’d started climbing, Lumina yanked him back by the arm.

"What are you doing? If we take these stairs, it’ll take forever to reach the top."

"So what, we’re supposed to do what, exactly? Isn’t this the only way up?"

Lumina kept pulling him along regardless, until they came to a stop in front of what looked, at first glance, like a plain section of wall, save for a single black seam running down its center.

Lucian caught the faint sound of metal gears turning somewhere behind it.

The moment Lumina’s hand touched the wall, a hiss of white steam escaped from some hidden vent, and behind it, a set of doors slid open on either side, revealing a small chamber large enough to hold several people, its walls sheathed in gold and white, the floor beneath them made entirely of glass.

Lumina pulled him inside without waiting for a response.

What kind of room is this...

Being crammed into this small space with Lumina left Lucian deeply uneasy. She was nothing more than a lingering fragment of soul right now, sure, but that didn’t mean she’d suddenly lost the ability to do something ridiculous to him.

Her hand drifted toward the side of his neck without warning, and Lucian flinched away on pure reflex, certain she was about to try something.

But it wasn’t him she’d reached for at all. It was a mechanical lever mounted directly behind where he’d been standing.

"Find something to hold onto, Lucian. Actually, never mind, just hold onto me if you want." Lumina grabbed his arm without waiting for permission.

"Hold onto what, exactly?"

A tremor ran up through the floor beneath his feet, and a low, grinding rumble started somewhere below them, a sound that reminded him unsettlingly of his own pocket watch.

The noise built into a deep churn of bronze gears meshing against each other, somewhere deep within the tower’s stone walls, down at its foundation.

That’s a gear sound?

But it sounds almost exactly like my watch, like something being wound and released at the same time. Is that... a spring mechanism?

Somewhere below, a massive coiled spring of steel and mithril, wound impossibly tight, held stored potential energy drawn from the turning of a mana stone buried deep beneath the tower.

The instant Lumina pulled the control lever inside their cabin, an escapement lock released with a sharp, ringing clack.

The spring’s stored energy tore loose all at once, surging through a cascading series of gears, each one multiplying the force of the last.

That massive rotational torque fed into a conical pulley, a fusee, whose entire purpose was to keep the pull on the lifting chain steady and even, smoothing out what would otherwise be a violent jolt. The small chamber lurched, then began to rise.

Lucian was genuinely stunned. A room lifted entirely by mechanical force, with no one channeling mana to drive it at all.

Normally, machinery like this still needed someone skilled at controlling mana to keep it running, which was exactly why designs like this were usually considered too inefficient to bother with.

There has to be a control source driving this thing. But what?

Then it hit him: the pocket watch his mother had given him. Its inner workings carried a carved mana pathway inside a small mana stone, one that regulated the distribution powering its tiny mechanical gears.

He’d used that exact carving technique himself once, to build a Pocket Orb capable of storing a few seconds of sound and image.

Which means this lift probably runs on the same kind of carved stone pathway, just scaled up to output far more power. But why would it share the same design as the watch my mother gave me?

Is this moment actually connected to me somehow? Not just another one of Miyu’s memories after all?